Although SpongeBob SquarePants has been airing more or less consistently for nearly 20 years, the show’s first three seasons â€" which aired between 1999 and 2004 â€" were it is most influential. Those 60 episodes were the only ones personally overseen by creator Stephen Hillenburg, who died yesterday from ALS. They aired during a critical period for today’s 20-something adults. We were young enough to be engrossed with the show’s silly, absurd characters, returning home after school to watch an episode of SpongeBob that played on Nickelodeon. I was seven when SpongeBob first aired, and I recall those early seasons vividly.
It was also a time when that same generation was just starting to go online, eventually making the internet what it is today. Almost two decades later, people who grew up watching SpongeBob are the same people who are making memes â€" which is why, of course, there have been so many SpongeBob memes over the years. 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.
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. As Laura Michele Jackson wrote at Vulture:
That communal relatability was part of the reason SpongeBob memes proliferated past the average meme’s surface-level reaction. 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. Squidward is the creatively frustrated, misanthropic hipster whose attitude seems perfectly conditioned for today’s acutely aware, always-questioning online culture. 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. (Think of defining personas like “Sad Girl.â€)
More than that, though, SpongeBob Squarepants â€" the seasons Hillenburg oversaw, especially â€" works online because it arrived at precisely the right moment. If it had aired even 10 years prior, it’s possible those characters would never have made their way online. (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.)
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. 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. Our language evolved, and, as we grew with the internet, those early SpongeBob jokes and narratives came with us.
It’s no secret that nostalgic content runs rampant on the internet, but SpongeBob is also one of the rare shows that evolved past nostalgia-reliant memes. It has more in common with The Simpsons than Rick and Morty; whereas the latter is still a meme factory, its community is still insular, almost like a fraternity. Those memes are shorthand for fans rather than a language unto itself. Rick and Morty is still just niche enough that someone who’s never seen an episode may ask why fans care about a character named Pickle Rick. Moreover, its creators are aware the internet exists.
SpongeBob, on the other hand, was injected into a mainstream audience that couldn’t yet foresee the internet’s role in our social and pop cultural lives. People’s grandparents remember SpongeBob Squarepants; they’ve recognized the mascots at theme parks; they’ve attended the show on Broadway. The Simpsons, people didn’t need to watch it to understand its characters and enter into a conversation about the show â€" or use the show’s pieces to have a different conversation altogether. Today, SpongeBob is a universal standard online, a digital Tower of Babel. Hillenburg’s stories gave us an actual language on the internet, not just a series of memes that people spread across Twitter.
In many ways, that kind of universal language feels like a relic of pop cultures past, reminiscent of the monoculture that spawned SpongeBob precursors like The Simpsons. Now, there’s always too much happening on the internet. We’re constantly overstimulated, and online languages are becoming even more fractured by the day, divided along the same lines as our pop culture consumption.
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