Why Do Kids And Adults Love Spongebob Squarepants?
And what does Nickelodeon not understand about it?
As someone born in the early 2000s with cable television and access to Nickelodeon, my development was a four step process: learn to breath, learn to eat, learn to stare at the TV, and discover Spongebob Squarepants.
Regardless of how old I or my friends got, this show never quite left our collective memory. Why? Because we never stopped watching it. A show simply meant to keep us entertained until we were old enough to learn about 9/11 ended up as something we were still watching, quoting, and referencing long after we were supposed to have outgrown it.
Why is this? Is it because I’m part of a generation that refuses to grow up and watch quality adult programming like Drunk History, King Star King, Mr. Pickles, Legend Of Chamberlain Heights, Tosh.0?
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. In truth, Spongebob relates to people of all ages, and that’s a main reason for the show’s success.
Think of the personality of Spongebob, the character: he’s naive, optimistic, and easily entertained. One of the most popular episodes of the entire series, “Band Geeks,” ends with Spongebob turning a random group of friends and acquaintances into an amazing band, long after the man who recruited them gave up. He does this through pure optimism and his desire to see others succeed.
These are all the personality traits of young children, who make up the target audience of the show. Spongebob Squarepants tells those children that they are right to see the world through this lens, that they should keep that childhood innocence for as long as possible.
For that matter, the show very much has the pacing of something a child would write. It’s hyperactive, fast paced, doesn’t always make sense, and commonly goes to places that are downright absurd. When you ask someone about some of the most memorable episodes of Spongebob, they will almost certainly point you towards the moments that didn’t make any sense.
Ridiculous moments
“FrankenDoodle” is a good example. That’s the episode where Spongebob finds a pencil that causes whatever he draws to come to life. One of these things is a clone of himself named DoodleBob, a concept that would’ve been absolutely horrifying if they’d altered the tone slightly.
This concept leads to some of the most creative visuals of the entire show. By drawing a circle in the sand they create a hole in the ground, which makes total sense. When they forget to erase a single arm from Doodlebob, that’s enough to allow Doodlebob to redraw himself, no further explanation needed. Animation is most known for its ability to do things that simply wouldn’t make sense in the real world, and the best episodes of Spongebob take advantage of that.
“I Had An Accident” is another example of this. While most of the episode is fairly normal, it ends with a live-action gorilla stuffing Patrick and Sandy into a live action sack (and hitting them with a live-action chair) only for the gorilla to ride off into the sunset on a live action zebra. While that might not make any sense, that’s the point. That’s why it’s so memorable. If the episode had ended with a normal climax, nobody would remember it.
Another famous climax, this time from the episode “Graveyard Shift,” is when the ending reveals the lights were being flickered by Nosferatu — the main villain of a 1922 Dracula knockoff of the same name. A reference most kids did not get, nor did most adults for that matter. It was included purely because of the absurdity — which makes it much more memorable than anything else they could have put in.
In fact, the writers were originally going to have the lights be flickered by a worm named ‘Floorboard Harry,’ but they decided to take a shot with something that only they understood.
And from “The Camping Episode,” who can forget the sea bear? Ignore the absurd things that can trigger it, ignore the fact that only sketchy tabloids acknowledge the existence of this creature (one is literally called Fake Science Monthly); instead focus on the fact that another creature exists that is triggered by the sound of this attack: a sea rhinoceros. This has the feeling of a kid going ‘I win times infinity plus one,’ as now not only does a sea bear exist, but so does a creature that’s only here because of the sea bear, and that’s what makes the ending so hilarious.
Spongebob permanently altered our sense of humor
This kind of quick, odd, nonsensical humor is what millennials and Generation Z have become known for. Visit the meme subs on Reddit and you can see exactly this style of comedy. Even in the memes that don’t take anything specifically from Spongebob, the Spongebob sense of humor is still present.
One of the most popular Twitter accounts among this generation is Wint, with 1.5 million followers. This man has become so popular that when he released a book that was nothing more than a compilation of all of his tweets, it hit number five on the New York Times bestseller list. This man specializes in the same absurdest humor that got Spongebob popular all those years back: absurd and fast paced.
This is also why only the first couple of seasons of the show have gotten the meme treatment. One complaint about many of the episodes between the first and second movie is that they are boring, with plots that simply cannot fill up eleven minutes. This is why, in an attempt to get the old audience back, Nickelodeon made the modern seasons much closer to Ren And Stimpy than anything out of the past decade of the show. Episodes now have hippies in Mr. Krab’s soup or Spongebob hallucinating a giant hamster. Again, stuff it feels like a child would come up with when left alone with their imagination — which Spongebob also spent a whole episode talking about the benefits of.
Childhood without the limits, adulthood without the responsibility
However, Spongebob’s life is more that of a stereotypical teenager than a child. He works at a fast food restaurant, is trying to get his drivers license, and manages to have a fair amount of disposable income. Spongebob also seems to be well into his adult life, and I don’t just mean in age because nobody actually knows how old Spongebob is.
In a way, Spongebob is the good of adulthood without the bad. He has a job he likes, lives on his own, takes care of himself, and is able to go anywhere he wants without being told he’s too young. He also never has to worry about bills, paying a mortgage, or anything else that would make adulthood look unappealing to a young person.
When Nickelodeon first accepted the show, they wanted Spongebob to go to high school and live as a teenager. However, Steve Hillenburg refused to implement that, saying it would basically be Hey Arnold underwater. In hindsight this was a great idea because, say what you want about Hey Arnold, it was a show only children could really relate to. The characters were put under the limits of being children, while Spongebob is not.
Spongebob Squarepants is, in many ways, written like a child imagining being an adult — albeit, a child that’s more aware of the world around him than most. It reminds me of that Rugrats episode where the main characters imagine what they think the day in the life of an adult is like. The kids think of things like intentionally speeding to get a ticket to see a movie. Many adults love that episode for the same reason they love Spongebob, although Spongebob’s view of adulthood is much closer to reality — because while the episode was not entirely accurate, there are pieces of truth that makes it good escapism.
The spin-off
In 2021, Nickelodeon is going to air a spin-off called Camp Coral. As of right now, we know the show is going to be entirely CGI animation, and is going to have a young Spongebob going to summer camp. Ignoring the fact that such a program already exists — it’s called Camp Lazlo — this completely misses the point of Spongebob as a character.
The reason I and so many others relate to Spongebob is because he manages to act as a child in the body of an adult. In fact, one episode even has Spongebob going to summer camp, proving that aging the character down is entirely pointless.
Spongebob is basically already a child. There is no sense of adult responsibility, no hint of any adult sexuality. The only time, throughout the entire series, where Spongebob shows any sexual attraction is in the episode “To Love A Patty,” which is one of the most hated episodes of the entire show — and even then he falls in love with a sandwich, which at least falls into the existing absurdity the show is known for.
To put it simply, anyone who would get enjoyment out of such a spin-off already loves Spongebob, and they love him specifically because he can already go to summer camp if he wants.
Honestly, it feels like Nickelodeon has forgotten what made Spongebob so special in the first place. And that is really worrying to anyone who, like me, really does care about that yellow sponge.
