A legacy of positivity
‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ creator Stephen Hillenburg dies at age 57
Stephen Hillenburg, a former marine biology teacher who created a children’s show that ballooned into an unlikely cultural phenomenon, SpongeBob
SquarePants, died on Monday at his home in Southern California. He was 57.
Hillenburg announced last year that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative condition known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Nickelodeon, the channel that has been the show’s home since its premiere in May 1999, announced his death.
“Steve imbued
SpongeBob SquarePants
with a unique sense of humour and innocence that has brought joy to generations of kids and families everywhere,” the network said in its statement. “His utterly original characters and the world of Bikini Bottom will long stand as a reminder of the value of optimism, friendship and the limitless power of imagination.”
Bikini Bottom is the underwater home of the show’s title character, a good-natured yellow kitchen sponge, or sea creature, or both, who works as a fry cook, has a pet snail and lives in a pineapple.
With its frenetic 11-minute episodes (two per show), SpongeBob proved irresistible to the 12-and-under crowd, and eventually to many much older fans as well.
“Those 11-minute episodes of Hawaiian-slacker whimsy,” critic David Edelstein wrote in The
New York Times in 2004, “set against flower-cloud backdrops inspired by Polynesian fabrics and punctuated by ukulele music and SpongeBob’s dolphin-on-a-sugarhigh chortle, have made Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob
SquarePants a phenomenon not only with little kids, but also with big kids, college students, stoners, gays — pretty much everyone who walks on land or shells out, so to speak, for the tie-in merchandise.”
The show spawned two movies, in 2004 and 2015, and, last year, a Broadway musical, which was nominated for 12 Tony Awards. (It won one, for scenic design.) It closed in September after 327 performances.
CULTURAL ICON
Stephen McDannell Hillenburg was born on August 21, 1961, at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, where his father, Kelly, was based. His mother, Nancy (Dufour) Hillenburg, taught visually impaired students.
Hillenburg graduated from Humboldt State University in California in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in natural resource planning and interpretation, with an emphasis on marine resources. He then taught marine biology at the Orange County Marine Institute (now the Ocean Institute) in Dana Point, California.
He had always been interested in drawing as well, and he pursued studies in experimental animation at the California Institute of the Arts, receiving a master of fine arts degree there in 1992.
From 1993 to 1996 he was a writer and director on the Nickelodeon series Rocko’s Modern Life, where he worked with a number of people who would help him develop
SpongeBob, including Tom Kenny, who provides the voice of the title character. In a 2001 interview with The Washington Post, Hillenburg described how the world’s most famous yellow sponge came to be.
“A sponge is a funny animal to centre a show on,” he said. “At first I drew a few natural sponges — amorphous shapes, blobs — which was the correct thing to do biologically as a marine science teacher. Then I drew a square sponge, and it looked so funny... He seemed to fit the character type I was looking for — a somewhat nerdy, squeaky-clean oddball.”
Over the years the show, which recently passed the 250-episode mark, has attracted a dizzying list of top stars as guest voices — David Bowie, Tina Fey, Mark Hamill, Lewis Black, Betty White and more. More stars turned up in the SpongeBob movies, including Jeffrey Tambor and Antonio Banderas.
Hillenburg was at first reluctant to adapt the
SpongeBob world for the big screen, but the idea of sending his yellow protagonist out of Bikini Bottom on a grand adventure eventually won him over. The result, in 2004, was The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.
The movie made an estimated $140 million (Dh514.1 million) worldwide. The second film, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water earned an estimated $325 million worldwide.