Kids Choice Awards Incident

The Kids Choice Awards Incident was an incident that occurred during Nickelodeon’s 2024 Kids Choice Awards where a teenager disrupted the ceremony by claiming that the award show was rigged. It happened during Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke’s acceptance speech for SpongeBob SquarePants’ twenty-first win for Best Cartoon.

Incident
When SpongeBob SquarePants had its sixteenth win in a row (twenty-first overall) for Best Cartoon, the show’s voice actors, Tom Kenny (the title character) and Bill Fagerbakke (Patrick Star) took the stage for their acceptance speech, when a teenage boy ran on to the stage and started ranting and cussing live about the awards show being rigged. Two security guards came in and dragged him off the stage, Kenny and Fagerbakke left the stage in shock and embarrassment without finishing their speech, and the ceremony went off the air for a few minutes. When the ceremony came back, the host apologised for the incident.

Aftermath
The day after the awards, the incident made headlines. Many compared it to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards Kanye West-Taylor Swift incident. According to one newscast, the incident shocked some viewers and annoyed others, while some were not surprised; Nickelodeon was accused of rigging the awards years before the incident, and when the incident happened, many learned that the accusations may have been true and some threatened to boycott the network unless president Brian Robbins (who was not directly responsible for the practice) was fired from the network. Robbins was not dismissed, but the network was put under investigation.

Audience attendees of the KCA over the years have claimed that people knew it was rigged and that Nickelodeon tried to cover it all up. “The audience has been booing the winners at the Kids’ Choice Awards for years,” an attendee exclaimed, “Obviously, you would not hear it if you were watching the awards on TV, because they would cut off the audience’s noise and pump in recorded crowd noise.”

A former Nickelodeon employee later gave evidence that the network was, in fact, rigging the awards, only giving the award to the executives’ choice rather than the actual audience’s choice. In light of the evidence, Nickelodeon was ordered to pay $20 million in damages.

As for the perpetrator, he would be called a hero for exposing the rigging allegations despite being banned from future KCA events.