Created by a marine biologist
Before he became an animator, Stephen Hillenburg taught marine biology at an ocean science centre in California, where he drew an educational comic book about sea creatures called The Intertidal Zone. One of its characters was a talking sea sponge. Years later, after studying animation, he turned that idea into a cartoon, and SpongeBob SquarePants first appeared in 1999. He had wanted to call the character SpongeBoy, but found the name was already being used for a brand of mop.
Hillenburg's science background runs through the show. Bikini Bottom, the town where SpongeBob lives, takes its name from Bikini Atoll, a real coral atoll in the Pacific. Many of the characters are real kinds of sea creature, even if they live in houses, cook burgers and drive boats.
A sea sponge that looks like a kitchen sponge
Real sea sponges are animals, among the simplest on Earth, with no brain, no heart and no stomach. They stay fixed to the sea floor and feed by pumping water through tiny holes in their bodies to filter out food. SpongeBob, square and yellow, looks more like a kitchen SPONGE, which was one of Hillenburg's jokes. Our sea animals page covers the real creatures of the reef.
His best friend, PATRICK, is a starfish. SQUIDWARD, despite his name, is an octopus, but the animators gave him six legs instead of eight because it made him simpler to draw. SANDY, a squirrel from Texas, lives in an air-filled dome and wears a diving helmet underwater, and GARY, SpongeBob's pet SNAIL, meows like a cat.
A fungus named after a sponge
Scientists love the show too. In 2011 researchers who found a new kind of mushroom in the forests of Borneo noticed that its spongy, orange cap looked like the cartoon character under a microscope, and named it Spongiforma squarepantsii. Real sea sponges also share one of SpongeBob's cartoon tricks: many can regrow into complete new sponges from small broken-off pieces.
SpongeBob has gone far beyond television. A stage musical based on the show opened on Broadway in New York in 2017 and was nominated for twelve Tony awards, the top prizes of American theatre, and there have been several films. Pictures of SpongeBob and his friends are among the most widely shared jokes on the internet.
A secret formula and a very small villain
SpongeBob works as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab, flipping Krabby PATTY burgers with his SPATULA for its money-loving owner, Mr KRABS, a crab, whose daughter PEARL is a whale. Across the road, PLANKTON, a tiny one-eyed copepod, runs a failing restaurant called the CHUM BUCKET and spends every episode trying to steal the secret Krabby Patty formula. His wife, KAREN, is a computer. Real copepods are among the tiny drifting creatures, called plankton, at the base of the ocean's food chain.
SpongeBob lives in a PINEAPPLE under the sea, loves catching JELLYFISH with a net, and blows BUBBLE shapes. The show's NAUTICAL flavour runs from the opening song, sung by a pirate, to its sea shanty-style music. Hillenburg died in 2018, but the show has continued, with films and spin-offs, and it is one of the most-watched cartoons in history. BARNACLE, OCEAN and CORAL complete the grid.