San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
California Streamin’
One of the great growingup joys for Millennials (including yours truly) was channelflipping after school and stumbling into a “SpongeBob SquarePants” episode.
The joy was in its sudden but expected appearance. It was in the confidence that you could enter into any part of the 11minute episode and, no matter how far along it was, start to laugh uncontrollably.
Unbelievably, this year marks the 20th anniversary of SpongeBob SquarePants, which debuted May 1, 1999. The characters never change: Sponge is an overly sunshiny freak force of nature. Patrick is dumb with panache. Squidward just wants to resume his minimumwage duties. Gary is a snail who meows like a cat and talks like a posh Agatha Christie butler.
What changes and remains fresh are the gags that are elegantly crammed into each episode — whether it’s vaudeville shtick (“Patrick, don’t you have to be stupid somewhere else?” “Not until 4”) or the weird voices of the endlessly agile voice actors (Tom Kenny’s dolphin chirp for SpongeBob, as distinctive as Mel Blanc’s Porky Pig stutter).
“SpongeBob” is termite art at its finest. The best examples of termite art — as my favorite film critic, Manny Farber, once wrote — “appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly selfinvolved, doing goforbroke art and not caring what comes of it.” The Sponge easily fits the bill. The writers have only 11 minutes to pull off their absurd humor — a good, steady structure for termiteart ventures. Like 12bar blues, a SpongeBob episode never seems to change and it always refreshes itself; it seems to have endless possibilities.
Once, the Sponge’s steady home was on the Nickelodeon channel. Now, the first three seasons — the Golden Age of the Sponge — have a streaming home on Amazon Prime. It’s not the same, now that you have to seek it out, rather than have it come to you. What was so great about Sponge at 4 p.m. was knowing that, like Jon Stewart’s monologues (always better than late night) or the HaderWiigArmisen “SNL,” it was a reliably quality source of comedy that was always on, always sharp.
All the “SpongeBob” lines (written by people with names like Merriwether Williams, Dan Povenmire and Mr. Lawrence) naturally seeped into the brain, owing to their ridiculous linebyline memorability. I find myself quoting SpongeBob on a daily basis — not because it’s been elevated by our meme overlords, but because of the sheer genius of the zingers, how they range from the stupid to the sublime: “I wumbo, you wumbo, he/she/me... wumbo; Wumbology, the study of wumbo? It’s first grade, SpongeBob,” “When do we get the free food?” “So ... ya tried to kill me over a little New Age management, eh?” “The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma.” Much in the same way that the Pixar legacy counts on you remembering their stretch of masterworks in the aughts (from “Monsters, Inc.” to “Up,” with an “Inside Out” thrown in to remind you of their onceconsistent greatness), the later “SpongeBob” seasons rely on the younger generation’s overfamiliarity with the characters’ traits, which cuts out all of the termite hilarity we late Millennials/early GenZ’ers were weaned on. It’s less a matter of nostalgia (which is useless) and more a matter of using a hipster’s wit to give something to kids that shows them the masochistic heights that elegant humor can reach. In that respect, the Sponge is to me what Looney Tunes was to the Boomers (and also to me).
You can start at whatever point you want with “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Just don’t venture past the third season and the movie, whose creative energies were stoked by the late Stephen Hillenburg (who tragically died in November after a struggle with ALS). Here are some of my favorites: “Pizza Delivery,” “SB 129,” “Squidville,” “Christmas Who?”, “Band Geeks,” “Graveyard Shift,” “The Snowball Effect,” “Krusty Krab Training Video” and “The Camping Episode.”
Oh, and all of the other episodes these 11minute stretches are paired with, and any other episode you ask me about tomorrow.
I find myself quoting SpongeBob on a daily basis — not because it’s been elevated by our meme overlords, but because of the sheer genius of the zingers, how they range from the stupid to the sublime.