Could they trace episodes for a HD and possible 16:9 effect?

[SpongeyMind123]

i mean, they did it with the new spongebob intro, that worked pretty well they could just crop live action scenes or use the cgi island used in some post sequel episodes, its nice because it gives a fresh feeling, like how south park remastered all their episodes, same with happy tree friends and etc.
New intro compared to the old one

 

[Invincibubble]

I don't think it's that easy. SpongeBob is still a hand-drawn series, and for them to truly remaster the older episodes, they'd have to manually redraw and color the frames and recreate all the backgrounds, which is a very time-consuming process. As for the intro, this was redone to compliment the show's switch to widescreen HD since Season 9, as it is used in every episode.

If you're looking for high quality episodes however, Nickelodeon did recently upscale the first 8 seasons in 1080p HD, and can be found on streaming services such as Prime Video, iTunes and Google Play. Clips from these remasters can also be found on the official SpongeBob YouTube channel.

 

[Mikurotoro92]

Nickelodeon won't do it

They haven't even remastered Rugrats!

 

[EmployeeAMillion]

Like everyone else has said, this would be a hard thing to do, but for more reasons than redrawing frames. They’d have to dig through the archives and find all the old assets they used to make the old episodes, in order to make it authentic. In the slim chance they do this, I guess they would remaster a couple Season 8 episodes, since that was the last to have 4:3 SD episodes, as a sort of test run to see if the general public can tell the difference. I find it hard to imagine they’d go all the way back to the beginning and work their way up, even Nickelodeon’s technical department knows robbing Season 1 of its traditional look would be cynical.

 

[Original Raw and Uncut]

Like everyone else has said, this would be a hard thing to do, but for more reasons than redrawing frames. They’d have to dig through the archives and find all the old assets they used to make the old episodes, in order to make it authentic. In the slim chance they do this, I guess they would remaster a couple Season 8 episodes, since that was the last to have 4:3 SD episodes, as a sort of test run to see if the general public can tell the difference. I find it hard to imagine they’d go all the way back to the beginning and work their way up, even Nickelodeon’s technical department knows robbing Season 1 of its traditional look would be cynical.

I wonder how easy it was to make the transition from 4:3 to HD. I've noticed that a lot of early season 9 episodes have bad overscan problems, especially Kenny the Cat

 

[Mikurotoro92]

Yeah, I HIGHLY doubt Nick still has the original cels and assets

 

[Patchy'sBack191]

I dont think nick would do it and that will take time to find cels that was in season 1 even tho i think they should have a vault but cels dont last forever