Spongebob Many Years Later
Alma Wass
If you answered correctly with "SpongeBob SquarePants!" you've likely heard of the square, sponge cartoon who made his TV debut 25 years ago on May 1, 1999 (before the official series launch in July 1999).
SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg attended Humboldt University majoring in marine science with a minor in art. After graduating in 1984, Hillenburg eventually began working at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, Calif. While working as a marine science educator there, Hillenburg illustrated the flora and fauna of tidal pools in the form of an educational comic book called The Intertidal Zone. And the narrator of the comic book may look familiar: a sea sponge with sunglasses and a round face named "Bob the Sponge."
In 1989, Hillenburg enrolled in the California Institute of Art's Experimental Animation program. After completing the program, he gained more animation experience. Eventually, he was hired as a director on the Nickelodeon cartoon Rocko's Modern Life, which aired from 1993 to 1996. While working on the show, he was encouraged to turn The Intertidal Zone into an animated format, something he could pitch to Nickelodeon.
He described the moment of inspiration: "It wasn't until I drew a square sponge, like a sink sponge, that it really seemed to fit that character that I was looking for, that innocent, squeaky-clean I guess you could say, the square peg in the round hole."
SpongeBob SquarePants first aired as a preview after Nickelodeon's Kids' Choice Awards on May 1, 1999. The first segment of this preview, titled "Help Wanted," is only eight minutes long, yet it introduces a robust coterie of residents in the fictional, underwater town of Bikini Bottom.
From SpongeBob's best friend, a starfish named Patrick (voiced by Bill Fagerbakke); to Mr. Krabs, a greedy, red crab voiced by veteran character actor Clancy Brown; to a grumpy octopus named Squidward (voiced by Roger Bumpass); to two characters voiced by Tom Kenny: Gary, a meowing pet sea snail, and of course, the optimistic and overzealous kitchen sponge and titular character, SpongeBob SquarePants.
Tom Kenny, who worked with Hillenburg on Rocko's Modern Life, took a unique approach to developing the voice for SpongeBob. Speaking with Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2004 about the process, Kenny said:
"When it came time to come up with a voice, it was just a matter of finding a voice that was childlike and maybe childish, but not a child, non-age specific, enthusiastic and just kind of weird. And we finally settled on this elfish helium voice that SpongeBob wound up being."
The first episode preview contained two more segments: "Reef Blowers" and "Tea At The Treedome"; the latter of which introduced a scientific squirrel who lives in a biodome named Sandy Cheeks, voiced by Carolyn Lawrence.
SpongeBob SquarePants only grew in popularity. By 2002, the show had almost 56 million total viewers, with almost a third aged 18 to 49, the St. Petersburg Times reported that year. In 2004, its first theatrical release, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, grossed $141 million worldwide.
The Emmy award-winning series is in the midst of its 14th season. And the franchise has expanded to include another theatrical release in 2020, two spinoff television series, more than two dozen video games and even theme park rides.
A musical based on the underwater sponge and his friends took to Broadway in 2017 and had over 300 performances before closing in 2018. The New York Times reported the franchise had generated $13 billionin retail merchandise sales by 2017.
In 2017, Hillenburg announced that he had been diagnosed with ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease. He died a year later. As a tribute to Hillenburg, more than one million fans signed a petition for the show's characters to perform at the 2019 Super Bowl halftime show.
"Steve Hillenburg definitely is the big kahuna and, a lot of times, just has every vocal nuance and eye blink and twitch mapped out to the nanosecond in his mind," he said. "And then other times, he'll just take you off the leash and go, 'You know, I don't know where this is going. Just take it where it feels funny.' So you never know whether you're going to be doing math or jazz. It's kind of cool."
SpongeBob SquarePants is an American animated television series created by marine science educator and animator Stephen Hillenburg that first aired on Nickelodeon as a sneak peek after the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards on May 1, 1999, and officially premiered on July 17, 1999. It chronicles the adventures of the title character and his aquatic friends in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom. The series received worldwide critical acclaim, and had gained popularity by its second season. As of 2019, the series is the fifth-longest-running American animated series. Its popularity made it a multimedia franchise, the highest rated Nickelodeon series, and the most profitable intellectual property for Paramount Consumer Products. By 2019, it had generated over $13 billion in merchandising revenue.[4]
Many of the series' ideas originated in The Intertidal Zone, an unpublished educational comic book Hillenburg created in 1989 to teach his students about undersea life.[5] Hillenburg joined Nickelodeon in 1992 as an artist on Rocko's Modern Life.[6] After Rocko was cancelled in 1996, he began developing SpongeBob SquarePants into a television series that same year, and in 1997, a seven-minute pilot was pitched to Nickelodeon. The network's executives wanted SpongeBob to be a child in school, but Hillenburg preferred SpongeBob to be an adult character.[7] He was prepared to abandon the series, but compromised by creating a boating school so SpongeBob could attend school as an adult.[8]
SpongeBob SquarePants has won a variety of awards including six Annie Awards, eight Golden Reel Awards, four Emmy Awards, two BAFTA Children's Awards, and a record-breaking twenty-one Kids' Choice Awards. A Broadway musical based on the series opened in 2017 to critical acclaim.[11] The series is also noted as a cultural touchstone of Generation Z.[12][13]
The series revolves around the title character and an ensemble cast of his aquatic friends. SpongeBob SquarePants is an energetic and optimistic yellow sea sponge who lives in a submerged pineapple. SpongeBob has a childlike enthusiasm for life, which carries over to his job as a fry cook at a fast food restaurant called the Krusty Krab. One of his life's greatest goals is to obtain a boat-driving license from Mrs. Puff's Boating School, but he never succeeds. His favorite pastimes include "jellyfishing", which involves catching jellyfish with a net in a manner similar to butterfly catching, and blowing soap bubbles into elaborate shapes. He has a pet sea snail with a pink shell and a blue body named Gary, who meows like a cat.
Living two houses away from SpongeBob is his best friend Patrick Star, a dimwitted yet friendly pink starfish who resides under a rock. Despite his mental setbacks, Patrick sees himself as intelligent.[14] Squidward, SpongeBob's next-door neighbor and co-worker at the Krusty Krab, is an arrogant, ill-tempered octopus who lives in an Easter Island moai. He enjoys playing the clarinet and painting self-portraits but hates his job as a cashier. He dislikes living between SpongeBob and Patrick because of their childish nature. The owner of the Krusty Krab is a miserly, greedy red crab named Mr. Krabs who talks like a sailor and runs his restaurant as if it were a pirate ship. He is a single parent with a teenage daughter, a grey sperm whale named Pearl, to whom he wants to bequeath his riches. Pearl does not want to continue the family business and would rather spend her time listening to music or working at the local shopping mall.[15] Another of SpongeBob's friends is Sandy Cheeks, a thrill-seeking and athletic squirrel from Texas, who wears an air-filled diving suit to breathe underwater.[16] She lives in a tree enclosed in a clear glass dome locked by an airtight, hand-turned seal and is an expert in karate.
Located across the street from the Krusty Krab is an unsuccessful rival restaurant called the Chum Bucket.[17] It is run by a small, green, one-eyed copepod[18] named Plankton and his computer wife, Karen.[19] Plankton constantly tries to steal the secret recipe for Mr. Krabs's popular Krabby Patty burgers, hoping to gain the upper hand and put the Krusty Krab out of business.[20] Karen supplies him with evil schemes to obtain the formula, but their efforts always fail and their restaurant rarely has any customers.[21] When SpongeBob is not working at the Krusty Krab, he is often taking boating lessons from Mrs. Puff, a paranoid but patient pufferfish. SpongeBob is Mrs. Puff's most diligent student and knows every answer to the oral exams he takes, but he panics and crashes when he tries to drive a real boat.[22] When Mrs. Puff endures one of SpongeBob's crashes or is otherwise frightened, she puffs up into a ball.[23]
An unseen figure called the French Narrator often introduces episodes and narrates the intertitles as if the series were a nature documentary about the ocean. His role and distinctive manner of speaking are references to the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.[24]
Recurring guest characters appear throughout the series including: the retired superheroes Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, who are idolized by SpongeBob and Patrick; a pirate specter known as the Flying Dutchman; the muscular lifeguard of Goo Lagoon, Larry the Lobster; and the merman god of the sea, King Neptune. There is also a large variety of characters who are known as the incidentals who serve as the main background characters for the show and are featured in almost every episode. They are each referred as "Incidental" followed by their given model number. Their names, jobs, personalities, relationships, voices, ages, and sometimes gender are inconsistent and tend to differ from each episode. There are 222 of these characters.[citation needed]
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