The show debuted at the turning point between our analog past and our digital future, which gave it the potential to become something bigger, even as we aged out of the actual show.
Kids like me were devouring SpongeBob SquarePants at the same time we were entering new spaces, figuring out new ways to communicate with our friends. (Hillenburg previously worked on the also-relatable, also-absurd Rocko’s Modern Life, for example, but those characters never really made the same digital jump.) If it had aired even 10 years prior, it’s possible those characters would never have made their way online. More than that, though, SpongeBob Squarepants - the seasons Hillenburg oversaw, especially - works online because it arrived at precisely the right moment. (Think of defining personas like “Sad Girl.”) Patrick is the lovable idiot whose wholesome nature and inability to see his own flaws is easy to empathize with in today’s self-deprecating online culture, where our faults become blended into our online personas. Squidward is the creatively frustrated, misanthropic hipster whose attitude seems perfectly conditioned for today’s acutely aware, always-questioning online culture.
The characters were perfect avatars: SpongeBob works a minimum wage job, trying to do his best even when the odds are stacked against him, which is a core nature that embodies what it’s like to survive the constantly overwhelming waves of digital life. That communal relatability was part of the reason SpongeBob memes proliferated past the average meme’s surface-level reaction. Creator Stephen Hillenburg resigned from a showrunner capacity following the third season in 2004 and the subsequent dip in quality became apparent. It seems significant that so many of these memes are from the show’s first three seasons (notable exception: “Mocking SpongeBob” comes from the season-ten episode “Little Yellow Book”). As Laura Michele Jackson wrote at Vulture:Īs a show, SpongeBob didn’t exactly grow with its original viewership. Looking back, those earliest episodes were uniquely special, a confirmation that Hillenburg managed to pull off that eternally enviable feat in children’s programming: early SpongeBob was silly enough that children adored the animated slapstick comedy that flashed across the screen, and adults could relate to the more mundane plights of its characters. From Winded SpongeBob to Menacing Patrick to Surveillance Squidward, the most pervasive SpongeBob memes on the internet stem from those first three Hillenburg-helmed seasons. Almost two decades later, people who grew up watching SpongeBob are the same people who are making memes - which is why, of course, there have been so many SpongeBob memes over the years. It was also a time when that same generation was just starting to go online, eventually making the internet what it is today. I was seven when SpongeBob first aired, and I recall those early seasons vividly. We were young enough to be engrossed with the show’s silly, absurd characters, returning home after school to watch any episode of SpongeBob that played on Nickelodeon. They aired during a critical period for today’s 20-something adults. Those 60 episodes were the only ones personally overseen by creator Stephen Hillenburg, who died yesterday from ALS. Although SpongeBob SquarePants has been airing more or less consistently for nearly 20 years, the show’s first three seasons - which aired between 19 - were its most influential.