Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

May 1, 2024 3:55 PM

You could call them “sky flowers,” but that doesn’t really make sense either—after all, the faded blue behind each squiggle is water, not sky, and the squiggles themselves don’t represent solid objects in any tangible, meaningful way. But they look right. The reds and greens and yellows add life and color in a way that a flat blue might not. Those odd shapes, suspended motionless with no clear reason or value, establish a tone. There are a lot of things that don’t make sense on SpongeBob SquarePants. But there’s a clear and coherent vision that runs through the entire show, from the design of SpongeBob’s kitchen-sponge body down to the squeaky-balloon sound of his footsteps. It’s a perspective, and a warm, specific, crazy little world. Of course it has sky flowers in it. What else would be up there?

Today marks 25 years since the original broadcast of "Help Wanted" -- the pilot episode of marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg's educational comic that became a delightful romp of "relentless optimism and fundamental sweetness", a hothouse flower of inventive and absurdist imagination, a cultural touchstone for multiple generations, and one of the most iconic and beloved animated franchises of the 21st century. Are you ready, kids?

📖 Background 📖

Stephen Hillenburg, In His Own Words - "Compiled from various interviews, documentaries and other appearances, here is Stephen Hillenburg, talking about SpongeBob, his career, and more."

Hillenburg's original educational comic, The Intertidal Zone, on the Internet Archive

Hillenburg's death at age 57 from ALS led to an outpouring of grief and remembrance

The original 1997 "story bible"

SpongeBob Season 1 DVD Behind the Scenes

The Oral History of SpongeBob SquarePants

MeFi on the show's 10th anniversary

✏️ Animation ✏️

Spongebob Squarepants: The Art of the Gross-Up, a technique originally pioneered by Ren and Stimpy - see also: spongebobfreezeframes.tumblr.com

Lovingly-curated Imgur galleries of all the matte-painting freeze-frame moments (notes):

Season 1: part one - part two - part three

Season 2: part one - part two - part three - part four

Season 3: part one - part two - part three - part four

(PS: Why so much focus on the first three seasons? Because Hillenburg left the show after the release of the first movie at the end of season 3, causing a noticeable decline in tone and quality.)

🎙️ Voice Acting 🎙️

The incredible voice cast has done plenty of table reads of key episodes (Help Wanted, Band Geeks, Shanghaied), not to mention dubbed classic cinema (previously), but most impressive are their fully-produced live-action skits: The Trusty Slab - More scenes

Tom Kenny & Bill Fagerbakke Answer the Web's Most Searched Questions

News you can use: How to do the SpongeBob laugh

(Note that Kenny also doubled as series "host" Patchy the Pirate)

✍️ Essays + Articles ✍️

On The Postmodern Ethos Of “Spongebob Squarepants”

Like all postmodern “texts”, Spongebob Squarepants doesn’t deny the absurdity of existence. The show is filled with absurd and surreal moments, far too many to describe here. And as a postmodern show, Spongebob has its nihilistic moments as well. One in particular that stands out is from season three’s episode “Doing Time”, when Spongebob and Patrick attempt to break Mrs. Puff out of jail. After she refuses to leave, Spongebob wonders to Patrick if maybe she’d forgotten what it’s like to “live in the outside world”. The scene then cuts to a montage of typical postmodern malaise — a man (fish, rather) going to work, sitting in rush hour traffic, then gazing dejectedly out of his window as a woman asks if he’s coming to bed. Depressing, hopeless, and completely nihilistic, this moment reminds viewers of their own mortality and the dangers of routine… or, if you’re just a kid, you’ll realize that being an adult can suck.

SpongeBob Made the World a Better, More Optimistic Place

On Monday, SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg died after a recent diagnosis with ALS. Nickelodeon confirmed the news on Twitter Tuesday afternoon. What followed was an outpouring of grief for the man behind one of the most recognizable and beloved cartoon characters of all time. [...] Through his show, Hilleburg was an evangelist of sorts for the unstoppable power of positive thinking, which he usually dramatized with absurd scenarios. Think of the time SpongeBob sculpts a perfect marble sculpture with a crack of the chisel, or when he wins a fast foodery face-off against the Flying Dutchman—the undead daddy of burger grilling—with the special ingredient of love. SpongeBob tackles everything in life—work, driving school, friendship, pain, lifeguarding, climate change—with a level of zealous breeziness usually reserved zen monks and six-year-old kids.

🧽 Memes 🧽

Vox: How SpongeBob memes came to rule internet culture

It’s hard to overstate just how popular SpongeBob SquarePants memes are. On Reddit, r/BikiniBottomTwitter — which exists mainly so that people can screencap the memes from Twitter and share them on Reddit — has more than 1.7 million subscribers, making it one of the site’s most popular meme subreddits. (By comparison, the more general r/Spongebob subreddit only has 74,000 subscribers.) And SpongeBob memes don’t just appear and then die; as Digg’s editors noted in the site’s 2018 SpongeBob retrospective, the biggest SpongeBob memes “are all pretty much meme superhits. There are no deep cuts here.”

What exactly is it about SpongeBob memes that make them so enduring and enjoyable?

SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg gave the internet language

Revisit: A Chronology of SpongeBob Memes

Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke on Spongebob Meme Culture

What's your favorite SpongeBob quote?

Each Radiohead album described with SpongeBob -- just the first of a whole genre of video memes

🎵 Music 🎵

Songs:

Season 1: Opening Theme - Livin’ In The Sunlight, Lovin’ In The Moon Light - Ripped Pants - Jelly Fish Jam [CW: flashing lights] - The F.U.N. Song - Doing the Sponge - I Wanna Go Home

Season 2: Loop de Loop - This Grill is Not a Home - Sweet Victory - Hey All You People - Hey Mean Mr. Bossman [Happy May Day, btw]

Season 3: Striped Sweater - Electric Zoo - Underwater Sun - When Worlds Collide - You're Old - The Campfire Song Song

Plus a complete playlist of season 1's eclectic production music, including twangy ukelele, ragtime, traditional Hawaiian , whimsical Rakenhornpipe, and of course sea shanties like "What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor"

🔎 Recaps + Retrospectives 🔎

TVTropes' sprawling article on the series and recap of nearly the entire run

Episode retrospectives:

Help Wanted (S1E1): Reimagined as a collaborative ReAnimation and as a black-and-white classic cartoon
Pizza Delivery (S1E5): This Is What A Perfect Episode Of Spongebob Looks Like - A whole playlist of live-action remakes
SB-129 (S1E14): How Spongebob Explored Existential Nihilism ("SB-129")
Rock Bottom (S1E17): "Rock Bottom" reimagined as a Gothic claymation - Podcast discussion
Hooky (S1E20): The Powerful Message In This Episode of Spongebob: Don't Get "Hooked" On Drugs
Squirrel Jokes (S2E11): The Smartest Episode of Spongebob Squarepants (an Analysis)
Shanghaied (S2E13): Live-action remake
Band Geeks (S2E15): Band Geeks Is The Best Spongebob Episode - Band Geeks ReAnimated - the disappointing Super Bowl LIII cameo (and the improved LVIII version)
Procrastination (S2E17): This SpongeBob Episode Will Make You Stop Procrastinating
Sailor Mouth (S2E18): SpongeBob SwearPants: A Look At Moralization Of Swearing - Why "Sailor Mouth" Was So Controversial
Squidville (S2E26): Spongebob's Darkest Episode
Wet Painters (S3E10): Bubbles of Thought - Full storyboard recap
Krusty Krab Training Video (S3E10): The Brilliance of Krusty Krab Training Video - Live-action remake
Chocolate With Nuts (S3E12): Live-action (puppet!) remake
Graveyard Shift (S3E24): How ‘Nosferatu’ turned up in SpongeBob SquarePants - Why a Painting of SpongeBob SquarePants Just Sold for $6 Million

The official YouTube playlist of 50 episode capsule summaries in 5 minutes

📽️ Clips 📽️

A grab-bag of memorable moments (via):

I DON'T NEED IT - How to blow a bubble - FIRMLY GRASP IT - 1% Evil, 99% Hot Gas - The gang's all here - We serve food here, sir - Krusty Krab Pizza - The pioneers used to ride these babies for miles - He's just standing there... MENACINGLY - Are there any other Squidwards I should know about? -Too hot... Too wet... Toulouse Lautrec - Everything is chrome in the future! - Photosynthesis -"MY LEG" - Advanced darkness - Steppin' on the beach - You used me... for LAND DEVELOPMENT - Stop starin' at me with them big ol' eyes - Have you finished those errands? - The story of the Ugly Barnacle - "No, this is Patrick" - Leif Ericsson Day - The boy cries him a sweater of tears, and you kill him - Ravioli Ravioli, give me the formuoli - Freeform jazz - That's OK, take your time - WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE - What I learned in boating school is... - Going on dry land - How does he dooo that? - DoodleBob - The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma - Is mayonnaise an instrument? - Flag twirlers - BIG... MEATY... CLAWS - That's his... eager face - Sweet Victory - Nosferatu! - 𝕿𝖍𝖊 - Sentence enhancers - Bold and Brash - MY NAME'S... NOT... RIIICK! - One Eternity Later... - Push it somewhere else - I'll remember you all in therapy - The Magic Conch - You like Krabby Patties, don't you, Squidward? - We've been smeckledorfed! - IMAGINATION 🌈 - Wumbo - Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen - Striped Sweater - The French Narrator's time cards - Welcome to the Salty Spittoon, how tough are ya? - Weenie Hut, Jr.'s - The world's smallest violin - A clever visual metaphor used to personify the abstract concept of thought - Robots have taken over the world! - Spongebob and Patrick as parents - We're not cavemen -- we have technology! - HOOPLA! - Maximum Overdrive - It's time for the moment you've been waiting for - CHOCOLATE - Is your mother home? - Flatter the customer! - Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy - What do you normally do when I'm gone? - That's a 4/4 string ostinato in D minor! Every sailor knows that means death! - Are you feeling it now, Mr. Krabs? -

📺 Episodes 📺

And lastly, the first three classic seasons online (click to expand)

S1E1: Help Wanted / Reef Blower / Tea at the Treedome
S1E2: Bubblestand / Ripped Pants
S1E3: Jellyfishing / Plankton!
S1E4: Naughty Nautical Neighbors / Boating School
S1E5: Pizza Delivery / Home Sweet Pineapple
S1E6: Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy / Pickles
S1E7: Hall Monitor / Jellyfish Jam
S1E8: Sandys Rocket / Squeaky Boots
S1E9: Nature Pants / Opposite Day
S1E10: Culture Shock / F.U.N.
S1E11: MuscleBob BuffPants / Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost
S1E12: The Chaperone / Employee of the Month
S1E13: Scaredy Pants / I Was a Teenage Gary
S1E14: SB-129 / Karate Choppers
S1E15: Sleepy Time / Suds
S1E16: Valentines Day / The Paper
S1E17: Arrgh! / Rock Bottom
S1E18: Texas / Walking Small
S1E19: Fools in April / Neptunes Spatula
S1E20: Hooky / Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy II

S2E1: Your Shoes Untied / Squids Day Off
S2E2: Something Smells / Bossy Boots
S2E3: Big Pink Loser / Bubble Buddy
S2E4: Dying for Pie / Imitation Krabs
S2E5: Wormy / Patty Hype
S2E6: Grandmas Kisses / Squidville
S2E7: Prehibernation Week / Life of Crime
S2E8: Christmas Who?
S2E9: Survival of the Idiots / Dumped
S2E10: No Free Rides / Im Your Biggest Fanatic
S2E11: Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III / Squirrel Jokes
S2E12: Pressure / The Smoking Peanut
S2E13: Shanghaied / Gary Takes a Bath
S2E14: Welcome to the Chum Bucket / Frankendoodle
S2E15: The Secret Box / Band Geeks
S2E16: Graveyard Shift / Krusty Love
S2E17: Procrastination / Im with Stupid
S2E18: Sailor Mouth / Artist Unknown
S2E19: Jellyfish Hunter / The Fry Cook Games
S2E20: Sandy, SpongeBob, and the Worm / Squid on Strike

S3E1: The Algaes Always Greener / SpongeGuard on Duty
S3E2: Club SpongeBob / My Pretty Seahorse
S3E3: The Bully / Just One Bite
S3E4: Nasty Patty / Idiot Box
S3E5: Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy IV / Doing Time
S3E6: Snowball Effect / One Krabs Trash
S3E7: As Seen on TV / Can You Spare a Dime?
S3E8: No Weenies Allowed / Squilliam Returns
S3E9: Krab Borg / Rock-a-Bye Bivalve
S3E10: Wet Painters / Krusty Krab Training Video
S3E11: Party Pooper Pants
S3E12: Chocolate with Nuts / Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy V
S3E13: New Student Starfish / Clams
S3E14: Ugh
S3E15: The Great Snail Race / Mid-Life Crustacean
S3E16: Born Again Krabs / I Had an Accident
S3E17: Krabby Land / The Camping Episode
S3E18: Missing Identity / Planktons Army
S3E19: The Sponge Who Could Fly (The Lost Episode)
S3E20: SpongeBob Meets the Strangler / Pranks a Lot

♫♪

posted by Rhaomi (22 comments total)

¿Estan listos chicos?

Alles klar, kinder?
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 3:57 PM on May 1

Rhaomi! This is an AMAZING post, and you are an amazing person for having crafted this with so much care and joy.

I have no idea how it is possible that I have NEVER seen an episode of Spongebob Squarepants; it seems like it'd be right up my alley. I mean, everything in your entire pull quote from "SpongeBob Made the World a Better, More Optimistic Place" just is me all over.

So thanks to your utterly fabulous set of links at the end, I'm gonna go watch me some Spongebob.

Thank you so much for seeking out all these wonderful clips and links and putting this all together so beautifully. I appreciate it, and I appreciate you.

Yay Spongebob!
posted by kristi at 4:12 PM on May 1 [5 favorites]

Rhaomi, I don’t have weeks and weeks to go through this beautiful encyclopedia of SpongeBob goodness. I’m just going to say that SpongeBob remains to this day one of my favouritest things ever. If only the world was more like SpongeBob…..sigh…..
posted by ashbury at 4:26 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]

My daughter went through a Spongebob phase. We watched all the episodes from the first seven seasons multiple times. The ones that she got me to tell her as a story many, many times (and which I therefore memorized some approximation of the main beats and dialog from):

Shell of a Man

Walking Small

Squeaky Boots

Sleepy Time

Krusty Love

Born Again Krabs

And one of the few classics from later in the series, season 7's:

Single Cell Anniversary

And when an old friend from the old town heard about how much my daughter loved Plankton, she used her fancy new quilting machine to make a big old Plankton quilt for my daughter. By the time it was done, my daughter's obsession had already started to fade, but, still, it went to college.
posted by clawsoon at 4:34 PM on May 1 [4 favorites]

I also have never yet seen a SpongeBob episode but Glorb’s track The Bottom 2 absolutely made me go Wikipedia diving for all the references. It’s not not been my personal earworm for the past week.
posted by migurski at 4:35 PM on May 1

To the moments I'll add one of my daughter's favourites: We're not talking about this, or this! We're talking about THIS!
posted by clawsoon at 4:52 PM on May 1 [3 favorites]

Are we having some kind of “Best Post” contest? Because if we are, you just won.
posted by marxchivist at 5:28 PM on May 1 [5 favorites]

Everything I know about Spongebob comes from its frequent usage in what the kids call memes.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:29 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]

I have never been interested in watching Spongebob, and would prefer not to be in the same room with people enjoying it, as I find the soundtrack extremely annoying.

I flagged this post.
It is fantastic.

I still don't like Spongebob, but Rhaomi put together a post that is so in-depth and copious that even *I* was persuaded to click a couple links, and I will forward this to people I know who will be ecstatic.

You Spongebobba-holics here will be having fun tonight!
posted by BlueHorse at 6:21 PM on May 1 [2 favorites]

as I find the soundtrack extremely annoying.

Please accept my apologies in advance for disagreeing with you.

What?! Wha? Huh? No way!

Linked above but worth linking here so that you can't miss it, the Campfire Song, one minute of so many little funny bits, it's so so good. There's so many little songs that are pure gems. Oh yeahhhh!
posted by ashbury at 6:47 PM on May 1 [3 favorites]

I watched the first episode of SpongeBob SquarePants with Mr. eirias when Little e was actually little, and I was prepared to hate it… but then I totally got hooked by “Tea at the Treedome,” which had a wholesome message that I had never ever heard in a kids TV show.
posted by eirias at 6:50 PM on May 1

The Lost Episode Walk Cycle I mean, like, why? Even more, why not?

And if that's not enough for you then how about 10 hours of it?
posted by ashbury at 6:54 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]

Wow, Rhaomi, this is one of the most impressive posts I've seen in, like, ever. Thanks, and well-done!

My oldest kid is 27, so we got into SpongeBob right away, and it seemed like it was constantly playing for the next 15 years. It was really nice to have something the kids liked that didn't annoy the shit out of the adults in the room (go to hell, Barney). Bookmarked this thread to delve a little more over the weekend to see what I may have missed in the past few years, once my kids (now all Actual Adults!) quit watching cartoons with Mama.
posted by cinnamonduff at 8:16 PM on May 1

*flagged as fantastic*
posted by Space Kitty at 12:04 AM on May 2

This may be the single greatest post I’ve ever seen in metafilter.

*Puts in earphones*
*click*
See y’all in a week or so…
posted by TwoWordReview at 1:26 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]

Sooo much goodness here, I have a sweet spot for the voice actors' skits myself.
posted by Harald74 at 1:27 AM on May 2

Mod note: The best time to wear a striped sweater is when this post has been added to the sidebar, the Best Of blog and really, pretty much anytime!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:42 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]

I never watched the show, so I just realized relatively recently that the ubiquitous youtube essay interstitial cards ("A Few Moments Later") are from Spongebob.

Irish comedian Michael Fry has a lovely sketch: Grandad Spongebob reminisces about his life under the sea.
posted by radiogreentea at 8:51 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]

I've never been a giant Spongebob fan, but my kids are, such that my youngest knew it was Spongebob's birthday and wore all Spongebob clothes to school. My favorite episode is where they make fancy bubbles, and we all still do the bubble dance regularly.

They have a lot of Spongebob songs on Amazon Music, including several listed above like Underwater Sun which sounds like it would fit in with The Cramps and The Goofy Goober Song , where the "Yeahhhhh" comes after 6 'goofys' so it's like on beats 5&6 or something musically kind of odd.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:21 AM on May 2

radiogreentea: Irish comedian Michael Fry has a lovely sketch: Grandad Spongebob reminisces about his life under the sea

That was way more heartwarming than it had any right to be.

For a harder cry - the first piece of fiction of any sort that got my daughter ugly crying - there's Have You Seen This Snail? from season 4, featuring the song "Gary Come Home".
posted by clawsoon at 11:51 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]

I remember when aLtErNaTiNg cAsE used to mean Torgo speak.
posted by mike3k at 4:38 PM on May 2

Well, this is timely! YouTuber noodle (previ-ously) is out with a new, characteristically well-produced video exploring the connections between Hillenburg, SpongeBob, and 90s alt-rock band Ween, who it turns out wrote the Loop de Loop song and supplied the music for the movie's closing credits... from the album that arguably helped inspire Hillenburg in creating the show in the first place.
posted by Rhaomi at 5:04 PM on May 2 [1 favorite]