By all accounts, Sunday night’s Super Bowl was trash. The game was boring as shit, the commercials were lame, and the halftime show was mostly an excuse for Adam Levine to show off a bunch of tattoos he almost definitely just picked off some shop’s wall at random. To add to it all, those millions of die-hard SpongeBob fans didn’t get to see “Sweet Victory” live on stage, though the NFL did try to throw a little nod their way during Travis Scott’s set—by, uh, fully ripping off some guy’s meme.
Or at least he says that’s what happened. The halftime show introduced Scott’s performance with a video mash-up of “Sweet Victory” and the intro to “Sicko Mode.” But as the Daily Dot points out, the NFL wasn’t exactly the first to do it: A guy named Anthony Trucco had already tweeted out an unmistakably similar video last fall, and he’s got some serious beef with the Super Bowl for allegedly biting his idea.
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For comparison, here’s Trucco’s original (and impeccable) tweet, which went viral back in September:
And here’s the SpongeBob-referencing section of the Super Bowl halftime show:
Now, sure, it doesn’t take some musical genius to dream up the idea of splicing the horns in “Sweet Victory” to look like they’re playing the synths from “Sicko Mode,” but come on. It’s not hard to imagine some halftime show producer seeing Trucco’s tweet and thinking, Oh, great, that’s an easy way to appease all those petition signers without making Maroon 5 actually sing “it’s sweet, sweet, sweet victory, yeah.” Let’s do that!
Trucco was, understandably, pretty bitter when he saw the halftime show and took to Twitter to call out the NFL and CBS for giving him “no credit. No payment. No nothing.” Of course, it’s just a mash-up video, and Trucco doesn’t own the rights to SpongeBob or to Travis Scott’s music, so he isn’t going to try to sue or anything. He just thinks it’s, you know, pretty lame that he didn’t at least get a nod for what he made.
“I am not seeking legal credit or reparations for the use of my creation,” Trucco told the Daily Dot in a statement. “It wouldn’t have taken a lot of work for one of the parties that I mentioned [in my tweet] to acknowledge the inspiration for the Super Bowl set. I want to make it very clear that I am in no way upset or angry at anyone… I hope that the NFL and associates will do the right thing and reach out.”
It doesn’t sound like anybody has responded to Trucco’s request yet, but if he doesn’t hear from the NFL in the next couple of days, he might want to consider starting himself a Change.org petition—the league seems to actually pay attention to those.
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