exterior shot of Patchy's house, but now at nighttime, the narrator assures the audience that whether or not the lost episode will remain lost, as long as there are stars in the sky, SpongeBob will live on in fans' hearts and minds. As the story ends with the stars forming a picture of SpongeBob, the narrator tells the viewers to get lost, thus ending the episode. Production "The Sponge Who Could Fly" was written by Paul Tibbitt, Kent Osborne and Merriwether Williams, with Andrew Overtoom and Tom Yasumi serving as animation directors. Tibbitt and Osborne also functioned as storyboard directors, and Carson Kugler, Caleb Meurer and William Reiss served as storyboard artists. Derek Drymon served as creative director. The episode originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on March 21, 2003, with a TV-Y parental rating. "The Sponge Who Could Fly" was one of the few episodes of the third season that aired during the production of the series' 2004 feature film. In 2002, series creator Stephen Hillenburg, with his crew, halted production of the show to work on the film, resulting in few airings of new episodes. Nickelodeon announced nine "as-yet-unaired" episodes would be shown. During the break in TV production, "The Sponge Who Could Fly" first aired during a two-hour "Sponge"-a-thon, while the other eight were broadcast subsequently. Mark O'Hare directed and animated the walk cycles in the beginning of the episode. The cycle originated when supervising producer at the time Derek Drymon called O'Hare. O'Hare said "Derek would call me out of the blue for freelance, and it was tough to know the context of stuff." He remembered the crew gave him a "bad" synthesizer song, and he was told to do "some kind of weird walk to it." He said "I animated this bizarre SpongeBob walk and turned it in, and that was that." Eventually, Drymon saw the cycle and referred to it as "The Lost Episode" walk. O'Hare had no idea what Drymon was talking about until he learned it was already used in an episode. O'Hare said "so I just figured that it ended up on the cutting room floor, like a lot of stuff you end up doing in animation. I had no idea that he was referring to the actual name of the show ['The Lost Episode']." The live action scenes were directed by Mark Osborne (brother of the episode's storyboard