SpongeBob reflects the duality of its creator
Dark but humorous, childlike yet adult, show is a worldwide sensation
What makes a cartoon a legend? Stephen Hillenburg created one, and nearly 20 years after greeting the public, Sponge
Bob SquarePants is still going strong, from here to Brazil, from Italy to India to Israel, from Poland to Pakistan, just about everywhere. Indeed, the new SpongeBob Christmas special, SpaceBob MerryPants, premiered the night before Hillenburg died on Monday, at 57, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The show has produced the socks and sneakers, the lunch boxes and backpacks, the mugs and notebooks, the plush and plastic figures that are the lot of any successful kids’ show. But SpongeBob grew beyond the usual.
Only last week, wearing a Santa hat, SpongeBob made his latest appearance as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In September, the Tony-nominated SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical ended a nine-month run on Broadway, with songs written by Yolanda Adams, the Flaming Lips, Cyndi Lauper, Panic! At the Disco, They Might Be Giants, Sara Bareilles and David Bowie (who also provided the voice of Lord Royal Highness, the emperor of Atlantis, in the 2007 special Atlantis SquarePantis). A national tour of the musical begins next year. There is a SpongeBob roller coaster. A Malaysian fungus, Spongiforma squarepantsii, has been named for him. And for $2,416 a night (excluding holiday pricing) you can stay in a pineapple, something like the one Sponge- Bob lives in, at the Nickelodeon Hotels & Resorts, Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic.
Born in Oklahoma, Hillenburg grew up a Californian, raised in Anaheim, snorkeling and diving in the Pacific Ocean. SpongeBob is the product, almost too perfectly, of his twin interests in art and marine biology, his minor and major at Humboldt State University. (Like SpongeBob, he also worked as a fry cook.) The series’ near roots are in an informational comic about tide pools, The Intertidal Zone, that Hillenburg produced while teaching public education classes after college at the Orange County Marine Institute (renamed the Ocean Institute) in Dana Point. (Early hero Jacques Cousteau is paid homage in the series’ French narrator.)
He planned to return to school to study art, but animation caught his fancy and he enrolled in CalArts, where he studied under Disney and UPA animator Jules Engel, the experimental animation program’s founder, to whom the first SpongeBob movie is dedicated. Hillenburg’s career in animation was long, but not broad. He worked on just a few series, Rocko’s Modern Life, for which he was hired on the strength of his CalArts thesis film, Wormholes; Rugrats; and SpongeBob, which he created after Rocko ended, taking with him some of that show’s talent.
What makes the series special? What has kept it alive in a field choked with competition?
Like all the best cartoons, it is made for children and not made for children. It is at once smart-alecky and sincere. That SpongeBob is ruled by his emotions doesn’t make him a figure of fun; it’s in the resulting chaos that the comedy lives. Like Peewee Herman (Hillenburg acknowledged the debt), he’s a boy, and he’s a man. He lives on his own and holds a job and wears a tie — but his square pants are also short pants, and his practical experience of the world, limited. Indeed, he was originally going to be called SpongeBoy, until it turned out the name was trademarked for a mop.
There is the fresh look of the show — the Polynesian patterns and aloha shirt palette. The mainstream has had an onagain, off-again romance with tiki culture over the years, but it had not made its way, in any sustained way, into a cartoon series. And there are sudden visual shifts, with inserted painterly or photographic effects — sometimes even a bit of live action dropped in. Characters can turn grotesque — with bloodshot eyes and elaborate skin folds that recall the work of comics artist Basil Wolverton, or Rat Fink creator Ed Roth — before snapping back again. At its best, it’s just a step away from getting deep, or dark.
It’s a small town comedy, like The Andy Griffith Show, “fantastic but believable,” in its creator’s words. With a firm sense of place, its compact cast of characters remain true to their essences, interacting in ways that range from friendship to grudging tolerance: Squidward the octopus (Rodger Bumpass), a dyspeptic aesthete who functions as a Mr. Wilson to SpongeBob’s inadvertently menacing Dennis but also works with him at the Krusty Krab, run by the penny-pinching but mostly sympathetic Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown); Patrick the starfish (Bill Fagerbakke), SpongeBob’s amiably dim friend and neighbour; Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence), a squirrel in diving gear who has decided to live at the bottom of the sea, and does science and karate. Many recurring characters fill out the world of Bikini Bottom — a kid’s rude joke of a name.