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 1999 Kids' Choice Awards on May 1, 1999, and officially premiered on July 17, 1999. It chronicles the adventures of the titular character 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Many of the series' ideas originated in The Intertidal Zone, an unpublished educational comic book Hillenburg created in the 1980s to teach his students about undersea life. Hillenburg joined Nickelodeon in 1992 as an artist on Rocko's Modern Life. After Rocko was cancelled in 1996, he began developing SpongeBob SquarePants into a television series, and in 1997, a seven-minute pilot was pitched to Nickelodeon. The network's executives wanted SpongeBob to be a child in school, but Hillenburg preferred SpongeBob to be an adult character. He was prepared to abandon the series, but compromised by creating a boating school so SpongeBob could attend school as an adult.
SpongeBob SquarePants received widespread critical acclaim in its early years, with praise given to its characters, surreal humor, writing, visuals, animation, and Hawaiian-influenced soundtrack, with the show's first three seasons often referred to as its "golden era". However, the series has also received criticism for a perceived decline in quality, particularly after Hillenburg departed from the series starting with its fourth season onward. Despite this, it is considered by many to be one of the greatest animated series of all time. The series was an immediate hit for Nickelodeon, beating Pokémon as the highest-rated and most viewed animated Saturday morning program from its premiere onward in 1999. From then onward, SpongeBob SquarePants continued to be Nickelodeon's highest-rated program, only being surpassed briefly in viewership several times throughout its run. SpongeBob SquarePants 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 with 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. The series' popularity has made it a multimedia franchise and Paramount Skydance's most profitable intellectual property. By 2019, it had generated over billion in merchandising revenue. Since its debut, the series has also had four theatrical feature films, two feature films for streaming, a Broadway musical, a comic book series, and numerous video games. The series eventually expanded into spin-off series, with the CGI-series Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years and traditionally animated series The Patrick Star Show both premiering in 2021, with the former ending in July 2024.
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, which carries over to his job as a fry cook at a fast food restaurant, the Krusty Krab. One of his goals is to obtain a boat-driving license from Mrs. Puff's Boating School, but he never succeeds. 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 with a pink shell and a blue body named Gary, who meows like a cat.Living two houses away from SpongeBob is his best friend Patrick Star, a dimwitted yet friendly pink starfish who resides under a rock. Patrick considers himself to be intelligent, with his ignorance of his stupidity being a key trait of his. Squidward Tentacles, SpongeBob's next-door 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 as a cashier and enjoys playing the clarinet and painting self-portraits. He is constantly annoyed by SpongeBob and Patrick's antics, who are unaware of Squidward's animosity towards them, though they get along well when the situation calls for it. Mr. Krabs, an extremely greedy red crab, is the owner of the Krusty Krab. Despite his greed, he often serves as a father figure to SpongeBob. He is a single parent with 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 and athletic squirrel from Texas, who speaks with a Southern accent and wears an air-filled diving suit to breathe underwater. She lives in a tree enclosed in a clear glass dome locked by an airtight, hand-turned seal and 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 constituting as cannibalism by the majority of the fish population. It is run by a small, green, one-eyed copepod named Plankton and his computer wife, Karen. Plankton, being a childhood friend and eventual rival of Mr. Krabs, constantly tries to steal the secret recipe for Mr. Krabs's popular Krabby Patty burgers, hoping to gain the upper hand and put the Krusty Krab out of business. Karen supplies him with schemes to obtain the formula, but their efforts always fail. When SpongeBob is not working at the Krusty Krab, he is often taking boating lessons from Mrs. Puff, a paranoid but patient pufferfish. SpongeBob is Mrs. Puff's most diligent student and knows every answer to the oral exams he takes, but he panics and crashes when he tries to drive a real boat, hence failing the course multiple times. When Mrs. Puff endures one of SpongeBob's crashes or is otherwise frightened, she puffs up into a ball.
The French Narrator, often nicknamed Frenchy, is an unseen figure who often introduces episodes and narrates the intertitles as if the series were a nature documentary about the ocean. His role and distinctive manner of speaking are references to the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Ever since season10, the narrator began to appear infrequently in live-action appearances, being portrayed as a diver in a heavy deep sea diving suit.
Recurring guest characters that appear throughout the series 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 of Goo Lagoon, 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 portrayed as the president of a fictional SpongeBob fan club, and his greatest aspiration is to meet SpongeBob himself. He gets himself into absurd escapades in a similar matter to the actual show, with Potty constantly making fun of Patchy's nonsensical aspirations and causing trouble for him while he tries to host the show.
Setting
The series takes place primarily in the benthic 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", amalgamations of cars and boats, as a mode of 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, to be used repeatedly, where most scenes would take place, like the Krusty Krab and SpongeBob's pineapple house. The idea was "to keep everything nautical", so the crew used objects like ropes, wooden planks, ships' wheels, netting, anchors, boilerplates, and rivets to create the show's setting. Transitions between scenes are marked by bubbles filling the screen, accompanied by the sound of rushing water. The series also features "sky flowers" as a main setting feature. According to background designer Kenny Pittenger, the flowers "function as clouds in a way, but since the show takes place underwater, they aren't really clouds. Because of the Tiki influence on the show, the background painters use a lot of pattern." The sky flowers were also meant to "evoke the look of a flower-print Hawaiian shirt"
In 2015, Tom Kenny confirmed the fictitious city is named after Bikini Atoll. He denied an Internet fan theory, however, that connected the series' characters to nuclear testing that occurred on the atoll. In 2024, Mr. Lawrence said the theory was "absolutely true."
Production
Development
Early inspirations
Series creator Stephen Hillenburg first 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 there, his love of the ocean began to influence his artistry. He created a precursor to SpongeBob SquarePants: a comic book titled The Intertidal Zone used by the institute to teach visiting students about the animal life of tide pools. The comic starred various anthropomorphic sea lifeforms, many of which would evolve into SpongeBob SquarePants characters. Hillenburg tried to get the comic professionally published, but none of the companies he sent it to were interested.
A large inspiration to Hillenburg 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 SquarePants, and also requested a song from the band, which they sent on Christmas Eve. This song was "Loop de Loop", which was used in the episode "Your Shoe's Untied".