SpongeBob SquarePants

SpongeBob SquarePants 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 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Many of the series' ideas originated in The Intertidal Zone, an unpublished educational comic book Hillenburg created in 1989 to teach his students about undersea life.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 Mrs. Puff and her boating school so SpongeBob could attend school as an adult.

The series immediately became popular since its premiere in 1999, becoming the highest-rated and most viewed animated Saturday morning program that year, beating Pokémon. It has received worldwide critical acclaim for its humor, art style, characters, writing, and music, though it has also been criticized for its perceived decline in quality since its fourth season. As of 2025, the series is the fourth longest-running American animated series and the longest-running American children's animated series, surpassing Arthur in 2025. The series has run for a total of fourteen seasons, and in September 2023, was renewed for a fifteenth season, which premiered in July 2024.

The series' popularity made it a multimedia franchise, the highest rated Nickelodeon series, and the most profitable intellectual property for Paramount Consumer Products. By 2019, it had generated over $13 billion in merchandising revenue. Since its debut, it has inspired three theatrical feature films (starting with the first in 2004, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie), two feature films for streaming, a Broadway musical, a comic book series, and video games. Two spin-off series, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years and The Patrick Star Show, premiered in 2021.

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-breaking twenty-one Kids' Choice Awards. The series is also noted as a cultural touchstone of Millennials and Generation Z.

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 bitter 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, a greedy red crab, is the owner of the Krusty Krab. He 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 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 evil schemes to obtain the formula, but their efforts always fail and their restaurant rarely has any customers. 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 season 10, 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 appear throughout the series including: 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. There is also a large variety of characters who serve as the main background characters for the show and are featured in almost every episode. They are each referred as "Incidental" followed by their given model number. Their names, jobs, personalities, relationships, voices, ages, and sometimes gender are inconsistent and tend to differ from each episode. There are 222 of these characters.

Special (generally half-hour or hour-long) 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 into absurd escapades in a similar matter to the actual show, with Potty constantly making fun of Patchy's nonsensical aspirations and causes trouble for him while he tries to host the show.

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 plenty of rope, 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 features "sky flowers" as a main setting material. When series background designer Kenny Pittenger was asked what they were, he answered, "They 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." Pittenger said the sky flowers were meant to "evoke the look of a flower-print Hawaiian shirt".

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. 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.