SpongeBob SquarePants

SpongeBob SquarePants, also known simply as SpongeBob, is an American animated comedy television series created by marine science educator and animator Stephen Hillenburg for Nickelodeon. It first aired as a sneak peek after the Kids' Choice Awards on May 1, 1999, and officially premiered on July 17, 1999. It chronicles the adventures of the character SpongeBob SquarePants and his aquatic friends in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom.

Many of the series' ideas originated in The Intertidal Zone, an unpublished educational comic book Hillenburg created in the 1980s to teach his students about undersea life. In 1992, Hillenburg was hired as a director on the series Rocko's Modern Life. After Rocko was cancelled in 1996, he began developing SpongeBob SquarePants into a television series. He pitched the idea to Nickelodeon in 1997, and the network immediately funded the show.

SpongeBob was an immediate hit and received widespread critical acclaim in its early years, with praise given to its characters, surreal humor, writing, visuals, animation, and Hawaiian-influenced soundtrack. After three seasons, Hillenburg made The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), then departed the series, although he later returned. The show received criticism for a perceived decline in quality following Hillenburg's initial departure.

SpongeBob has won a variety of awards, including six Annie Awards, eight Golden Reel Awards, four Emmy Awards, two BAFTA Children's Awards, and a record twenty-two Kids' Choice Awards. The show has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Millennials and Generation Z, becoming ubiquitous within Internet culture and spawning numerous online memes.

The series has run for fifteen seasons, with its sixteenth premiering on June 27, 2025. SpongeBob is the fourth longest-running American animated series in history, and the longest-running American children's animated series as of 2025. Its popularity has made it a multimedia franchise and Nickelodeon's most profitable program, generating over US$13 billion in merchandising revenue by 2019. The franchise now includes four theatrical feature films, two streaming feature films, a Broadway musical, a comic book series, numerous video games and two spin-off series: Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years (2021–2024) and The Patrick Star Show (2021–present).

Premise

Characters

The series follows SpongeBob SquarePants—an energetic and optimistic sea sponge who lives in a submerged pineapple—and his aquatic friends. SpongeBob has a childlike enthusiasm for life and works as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab, a fast food restaurant. His favorite pastimes include "jellyfishing", which involves catching jellyfish with a net in a manner similar to butterfly catching, and blowing soap bubbles into elaborate shapes. He has a pet sea snail named Gary, who meows like a cat.

SpongeBob's best friend is Patrick Star, a dimwitted yet friendly pink starfish who resides under a rock. Patrick is unaware of his stupidity and considers himself intelligent. Squidward Tentacles, SpongeBob's neighbor and co-worker at the Krusty Krab, is a grumpy and cynical octopus who lives in an Easter Island moai. He despises his job and is constantly annoyed by the antics of SpongeBob and Patrick. Mr. Krabs, a greedy red crab, is the owner of the Krusty Krab and often serves as a father figure to SpongeBob. He has a teenage daughter, a grey sperm whale named Pearl, who has no interest in taking over the family business. Another of SpongeBob's friends is Sandy Cheeks, a thrill-seeking squirrel from Texas, who wears a diving suit to breathe underwater. She is an expert in karate.

Located across the street from the Krusty Krab is an unsuccessful rival restaurant called the Chum Bucket. It rarely has any customers due to its sale of chum-based food, which is considered cannibalism by most of the fish population. It is run by a small, green, one-eyed copepod named Plankton and his computer wife, Karen. Plankton constantly tries to steal the secret recipe for Mr. Krabs's Krabby Patty burgers, hoping to put the Krusty Krab out of business. When SpongeBob is not working at the Krusty Krab, he can often be found taking boating lessons from Mrs. Puff, a paranoid but patient pufferfish. SpongeBob wants to obtain a boat-driving license, but he often panics and crashes, causing him to fail the course multiple times.

The French Narrator, or "Frenchy", is an unseen narrator who often introduces episodes and narrates intertitles as if the series were a documentary about the ocean. His role and manner of speaking are references to the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Beginning in season 10, the narrator has appeared infrequently in live-action as a diver in a heavy deep sea diving suit.

Recurring guest characters include the retired superheroes Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, who are idolized by SpongeBob and Patrick; a pirate specter known as the Flying Dutchman; the muscular lifeguard Larry the Lobster; and the merman god of the sea, King Neptune.

Special episodes of the show are hosted by a live-action pirate named Patchy and his pet parrot Potty, whose segments are presented in a dual narrative with the animated stories. Patchy is depicted as the president of a fictional SpongeBob fan club, and his greatest aspiration is to meet SpongeBob himself.

Setting

The series takes place primarily in the fictional underwater city of Bikini Bottom located in the Pacific Ocean beneath the real-life coral reef known as Bikini Atoll. Its citizens are mostly multicolored fish who live in buildings made from ship funnels, and use "boatmobiles" for transportation. Recurring locations within Bikini Bottom include the neighboring houses of SpongeBob, Patrick, and Squidward; two competing restaurants, the Krusty Krab and the Chum Bucket; Mrs. Puff's Boating School, which includes a driving course and a sunken lighthouse; the Treedome, an oxygenated glass enclosure where Sandy lives; Shady Shoals Rest Home; a seagrass meadow called Jellyfish Fields; and Goo Lagoon, a subaqueous brine pool that is a popular beach hangout.

When the SpongeBob crew began production of the series' pilot episode, they were tasked with designing stock locations where many scenes would take place. The idea was "to keep everything nautical", so the crew included objects like ropes, wooden planks, ships' wheels, netting, anchors, boilerplates, and rivets. Transitions between scenes are marked by bubbles filling the screen, accompanied by the sound of rushing water. The settings also feature "sky flowers", which have a similar function to clouds, according to background designer Kenny Pittenger. The sky flowers are also meant to "evoke the look of a flower-print Hawaiian shirt".

In 2015, Tom Kenny, who voices SpongeBob, denied a fan theory claiming that the series' characters are mutants who were exposed to nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll. In 2024, Plankton voice actor Mr. Lawrence said the theory is true, and that the real-life nuclear testing influenced other aspects of the show as well.

Production

Development

Early inspirations

Series creator Stephen Hillenburg became fascinated with the ocean as a child and began developing his artistic abilities at a young age. Although these interests would not overlap for some time—the idea of drawing fish seemed boring to him—Hillenburg pursued both during college, majoring in marine biology and minoring in art at Humboldt State University. After graduating in 1984, he joined the Ocean Institute, an organization in Dana Point, California, dedicated to educating the public about marine science and maritime history.

While Hillenburg was working at the Ocean Institute, his love of the ocean began to influence his art. He created a comic book precursor to SpongeBob titled The Intertidal Zone, which was used by the institute to teach visitors about the animal life of tide pools. The comic featured various anthropomorphic lifeforms, many of which would evolve into SpongeBob characters. Hillenburg tried to get the comic published, but none of the companies he sent it to were interested.

One of Hillenburg's major inspirations was Ween's 1997 album The Mollusk, which had a nautical and underwater theme. Hillenburg contacted the band shortly after the album's release, explaining the baseline ideas for SpongeBob. He also commissioned a song, "Loop de Loop", which was used in the SpongeBob episode "Your Shoe's Untied".

Concept

While working as a staff artist at the Ocean Institute, Hillenburg intended to return to college for a master's degree in art. However, after attending an animation festival, he decided to instead study experimental animation at California Institute of the Arts. His thesis film, Wormholes, is about the theory of relativity. It was screened at festivals, and at one of these, Hillenburg met Joe Murray, who was in the process of developing the popular Nickelodeon animated series Rocko's Modern Life. Murray was impressed by the style of Hillenburg's film and offered him a job as a director for the first season, which began airing in 1993. Hillenburg worked on the series throughout its entire four-season run, and during the fourth season he took on the roles of producer and creative director.