Nation: ‘Sponge Bob’ creator dies at 57.
LOS ANGELES >> Stephen Hillenburg, who used his dual loves of drawing and marine biology to spawn the absurd undersea world of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” has died, Nickelodeon announced Tuesday.
Hillenburg died Monday of Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as ALS, the cable network said in a statement. He was 57.
He had announced he had the disease in March 2017. His death comes just weeks after the passing of another cartoon hero in Marvel creator Stan Lee.
Hillenburg conceived, wrote, produced and directed the animated series that began in 1999 and bloomed into hundreds of episodes, movies and a Broadway show.
The absurdly jolly SpongeBob and his yell-along theme song that opened “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?!” quickly appealed to college kids and parents as much as it did kids.
“The fact that it’s undersea and isolated from our world helps the characters maintain their own culture,” Hillenburg told The Associated Press in 2001. “The essence of the show is that SpongeBob is an innocent in a world of jaded characters. The rest is absurd packaging.”
Its vast cast of oceanic creatures included SpongeBob’s starfish sidekick Patrick, his tightwad boss Mr. Krabs, squirrel pal Sandy Cheeks and always-exasperated neighbor Squidward Tentacles.
Born at his father’s army post in Lawton, Oklahoma, Hillenburg graduated from Humboldt State University in California in 1984 with a degree in natural resource planning with an emphasis on marine resources, and went on to teach marine biology at the Orange County Marine Institute.
While there he drew a comic, “The Intertidal Zone,” that he used as a teaching tool. It featured anthropomorphic ocean creatures that were precursors to the characters on “SpongeBob.”
Hillenburg shifted to drawing and earned a master of fine arts degree in animation from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992.
That same year he created an animated short called “Wormholes” that won festival plaudits and helped land him a job on the Nickelodeon show “Rocko’s Modern Life,” where he worked from 1993 to 1996 before he began to build SpongeBob’s undersea world of Bikini Bottom, which showed off his knowledge of marine life and willingness to throw all the details out the window.
“We know that fish don’t walk,” he told the AP, “and that there is no organized community with roads, where cars are really boats. And if you know much about sponges, you know that living sponges aren’t square.”
The show was an immediate hit that has lost no momentum in the nearly 20 years since its creation and helped define the culture of Nickelodeon.
Its nearly 250 episodes have won four Emmy Awards and 15 Kids’ Choice Awards, and led to an endless line of merchandise to rival any other pop cultural phenomenon of the 2000s.
“When you set out to do a show about a sponge, you can’t anticipate this kind of craze,” Hillenburg told the AP in 2002.