SpongeBob SquarePants

I am a big SpongeBob SquarePants fan. In the beginning, one of my children would have the TV tuned in to the Nickelodeon Channel and there, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see this gross looking cartoon of a walking, talking, dressed yellow kitchen sponge and his pals on the sea bottom. Peripheral glances don’t always reveal to one the true picture, though, and one day I actually sat down with my kids and watched an episode. It didn’t take me very long to see that this cartoon series was special! By that time, three seasons of the series had already come out, and I spent a bit of time trying to catch up with the rest of the “Spongeheads” out there! It’s hard to decide which parts of the show I like most. The setting is a town called “Bikini Bottom” (ha-ha). There’s the home neighborhood, where gregarious, irritating, squeaky-voiced SpongeBob and dumb, big pink starfish Patrick (who sounds a lot like Ed Norton of the Honeymooners) live on each side of the ultimate comic fall guy: Squidward, a vain, cynical, and selfish octopus/squid who cannot stand his next door neighbors’ loud and innocent exuberance. Another setting is the Krusty Krab restaurant, owned by skinflint Mr. Krab and staffed by Squidward at the register and SpongeBob at the grill. Then there’s the beach (with lifeguards), where fish have to be careful not to get in the water (?) too deep and surfing contests are commonplace (yes, at the bottom of the ocean). And I can’t leave out Jellyfish Fields, where SpongeBob and Patrick take out their little nets to try to catch horrible, stinging jellyfish (who horribly sting them). SpongeBob is also a perennial boating student who never can pass his boating exam and keeps attending Mrs. Puff’s (a puffer fish) boating school, to her unrelenting anxiety. Other characters like Sandy Cheeks (ha-ha), a squirrel (who lives in a clear, solid domed bubble), arch-villain Plankton (who is always trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula), and SpongeBob’s pet snail Gary (who meows like a cat) round out the main lineup.

The characters in this series are very well defined by their personalities. In an earlier entry, I wrote about the four personality types and how people’s personalities could be classified in different ways. One way is to take a good series like SpongeBob SquarePants and classify people by which character their personality most resembles.

Aside from the astute characterizations, SpongeBob SquarePants is a great example of farce in comedy. And if anything, then I am a sucker for that genre (Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, Monty Python, Airplane!, I Love Lucy, you get the picture). It doesn’t look like they’re going to stop making new SpongeBob episodes anytime soon, and it doesn’t look like I’ll stop watching them either!