(electronic music)
- (Michael) What’s up, Wisecrack – Michael here. Today I come to you with a simple question:
- (Singer) Oh who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
- (Michael) That’s right: SpongeBob SquarePants. Perhaps no animated children’s show has
dominated culture quite like SpongeBob has. Running for 21 years straight, SpongeBob is
a juggernaut that has captured the hearts of children, teenagers, adults, and, of course,
yours truly. Which brings us to the real question at hand: Why? How is SpongeBob Squarepants
able to speak to the existential concerns of both recently-potty-trained toddlers AND
meme-obsessed 30-somethings? While we could bring up the show’s penchant for double
entendre:
- (SpongeBob) Patrick, your genius is showing! - (Patrick) Where?
- (Michael) And its ... expressive animation, we think the answer is rooted in something
more... sociological: the concept of childhood.
So join me for this Wisecrack Edition on SpongeBob SquarePants.
- (Michael) Now, for those of you who haven’t spring breaked in Bikini Bottom, here’s
the deal: A sentient sea sponge lives in an undersea pineapple, and spends his days getting
up to hijinks with his starfish pal, Patrick while holding down a job as a fry cook. Much
hilarity ensues.
- (SpongeBob) I demand entrance into your club on the grounds that I am NOT a weenie!
- (Fish) Hey Reg, how's it going? (Spongebob Screams)
- (Bouncer) You were saying?
- (Michael) To make sense of SpongeBob’s enduring legacy, we need to talk about childhood.
The concept of “childhood” as being a special time in our lives during which we
need to be nurtured, loved, and fed Bagel Bites while playing Mario Kart is a relatively
new phenomena, as we’ve noted in a previous video. That’s not to say that in the good
ol’ days, children weren’t loved, just that this love often came with a hard hat
and a canary. According to historian Philippe Ariès, our awareness of the “particular
nature of childhood” developed in the Western consciousness over various stages. Back in
medieval times, for example, children were viewed essentially as “adults in miniature”
who were able to hold gainful employment, join the convent, and even get engaged at
the tender age of seven! Fast forward a few hundred years to Puritan times, and children
were viewed more as the “property of God” who were very much at risk of being led astray
by the red guy downstairs. Consequently, you needed to scare the crap out of them to keep
them in line. By the late 19th century, Aries argues, along with the rise of psychology
and universal education, we start to see our modern view of childhood: one in which children
are to be guided past various developmental and educational milestones. And this is where
one Robert Squarepants comes in.
See, most of today’s children’s media is built upon these modern views of childhood.
These stories target highly specific age groups, using characters and storylines that map to
their demographic’s development and education. In other words, whether it’s Daniel Tiger’s
Neighborhood or everyone's favorite football head, storylines usually depict characters
dealing with the typical problems, problems which can be mapped along to the real life
development of the children watching.
- (Daniel Tiger) How do you feel when you can't see your friends?
- (Michael) You know, lessons about taking turns:
- (Monkey) Who wants to push me? - (Penguin) Oo! I will! And we can take turns!
- (Michael) Or dealing with bullies by going full Karate Kid.
(Lightning sound fx) (Kids scream)
- (Michael) But SpongeBob SquarePants rips up this playbook entirely. For one, the sponge
guy himself is rather ambiguously aged. While his driver’s license pegs him as initially
13 years old, he bears many marks of adulthood: he lives on his own, has a full-time job,
and takes care of his pet snail. Incidentally, by this metric I am 66.66% an adult. Moreover,
many of the show’s storylines aren’t exactly aimed at kids.
- (Squidward) Then who was flickering the lights?
(lights flicker) - (Group) Nosferatu!
- (Michael) Not exactly your typical kiddie fare. At the same time, SpongeBob is definitely
a kid at heart. He loves blowing bubbles, can’t pass his driving test,
- (SpongeBob) Floor it? - (Mrs. Puff) No, no, don't floor it!
- (SpongeBob) Ok, floor it! - (Mrs. Puff) No!
- (SpongeBob) Floor it, floor it, floor it!
- (Michael) And embodies kid-like naivety -
- (SpongeBob) One time I saw this magician, and he said this thing, and anyways - and
then he told us if you believe in yourself and with a tiny bit of magic, all your dreams
would come true.
- (Michael) This paradox is intentional: The creator, Stephen Hillenburg, pushed back when
Nickelodeon wanted to overly “kidify” SpongeBob by making him attend school. According
to Hillenburg, the network “actually wanted to make [the show ‘Hey] Arnold under the
sea’” – something the world surely does not need.
Interestingly, by making SpongeBob an explicitly unconventional blur between child and adult,
Hillenburg gets to explore various historical conceptions of childhood. For example, our
naive SpongeBob often embodies the Puritan model of a child that needs to be “scared
straight” from any mischief. In one episode, Mr. Krabs warns our wide eyed protagonist
about the danger of “the hooks”
- (Mr. Krabs) Aye, the hooks. They dangle down and draw you close with their pleasing
shapes and beguiling colors. And just when you think you’ve found the land of milk
and honey, they grab you by the britches and haul you way up high.
- (Michael) Wait, what is happening?
- (Mr. Krabs) And then they cook you, and then they eat you, or worse!
- (Michael) Yikes. This horrifying slash dramatic speech parallels many popular, old-school
Puritan teachings about kids falling into sin. Preacher Thomas Brooks, for example,
issued a similar warning to kids about a scary pit of sin, writing that, “He who will be
so bold as to attempt to dance upon the brink of the pit, may find by woeful experience,
that it is a righteous thing with God that he should fall into the pit.” Pit or hook,
both warnings bear nightmare-inducing implications for your average tyke.
But SpongeBob draws on more than just a Puritan conception of childhood. Arguably, anytime
SpongeBob dons his Krusty Krab uniform, he’s being seen as a little laborer – embodying
the medieval conception of childhood. SpongeBob is absorbed with his work and obsessed with
his perpetual status as employee of the month.
- (Squidward) Mr. Krabs gives you that award so you’ll work harder for no extra money.
- (SpongeBob) That is not true, Squidward. He gives me that award BECAUSE I work harder.
You could win it too if you tried harder.
- (Michael) Our intrepid fry cook, oblivious to his own exploitation, is willing to do
anything for his job, and is easily goaded into destroying his friendship in the Fry
Cook Games.
- (Mr. Krabs) Don't forget, he called ye yellow.
- (Michael) Like an aspiring medieval child-nun, SpongeBob’s job is all important.
The show, like most children’s television,
sometimes also embraces a more modern perspective on childhood, showing SpongeBob dealing with
developmental issues like learning to tie his shoes and realizing that stealing is bad.
- (SpongeBob) We have to confess. - (Patrick) Confess? Are you out of your mind?
Do you have any idea what they do to people like us? We’re not talking about some dumb
mail fraud scheme or hijacking here. We stole a balloon!! And they’re going to lock us
up forever.”
- (Michael) Indeed, the network seems to have eventually sort-of gotten its way, in that
SpongeBob, like your average kid, does occasionally go to school — albeit a boating school.
This setting allows SpongeBob to encounter issues more typical to children’s shows
– things like cheating.
- (Mrs. Puff) It's quite alright, you can cheat today.
- (SpongeBob) No!! I cheated! I cheated!! - (MRs. Puff) Cheat that way!
- (Michael) Now, big caveat: We’re not saying that by making SpongeBob’s age fluid, Hillenburg
intentionally meant to explore Aries’ historical model of childhood. Rather, it seems that
by letting SpongeBob move seamlessly between the domains of childhood and adulthood – along
with history’s various views surrounding these realms – Hillenburg allows the show
to speak to kids and adults at the same time. Kids get to watch SpongeBob gleefully break
the rules, while parents can crack a smile at the double meaning of the word hooky.
- (Patrick) We're gonna go play hooky!
- (Michael) In fact, some jokes address kids AND adults at the same time. Like when Patrick
teaches SpongeBob how to act like a “grown up” to impress his grandma.
- (Patrick) What are you going to tell Grandma? - (SpongeBob) I’m a grown up!
- (Patrick) No if's and's or but's about it! - (SpongeBob) A man’s gotta do what a man’s
gotta do! - (Patrick) And then you get behind her and
I'll push! - (SpongeBob) Patrick, we didn’t say that.
- (Patrick) Oh yeah, right…
- (Michael) Yeah, something tells me little kids aren’t registering the grand-matricide
joke here.
This ability to address multiple audiences at once didn’t start with SpongeBob. Rather,
it’s an aspect of children’s literature and media dating back to the 18th century.
According to scholar Kimberley Reynolds, when publishers began printing children’s books,
they realized they had to satisfy the demands of two markets: the kids that consume the
stories, and the parents that buy them. According to author Barbara Wall, having to satisfy
two distinct audiences in a single text often leads writers to variously employ three distinctive
narrative styles. First, there’s the double address, when the narrator talks over the
child, addressing the adult in the room. Think Patrick’s joke about killing grandma. Then,
there’s the single address, when the narrator talks solely to the child. Think of those
gross out close-ups that SpongeBob employs – things that get the kids laughing, but
aren’t exactly witty.
- (Squidward) Beautiful, huh? How beautiful do you think this is?!
- (Michael) Okay some of them are pretty good, which by Wall’s definition, would make them
examples of the third narrative style: dual address, or talking to both children and adults
simultaneously.
While other children’s properties may both separately and dually address kids and adults,
SpongeBob’s ability to seamlessly switch between all three narrative styles is what
makes it so special. But why IS SpongeBob so unique in this way? Why don’t we find
jokes about doing drugs or killing loved ones or watching porn in other children’s media?
- (SpongeBob) Gary!? I was just... looking for the sports channel Gary!
- (Michael) And why don’t we get as many feel good, silly moments that adults and kids
can both enjoy?
- (Patrick) Take it off! No one's looking.
- (Michael) Well, the answer might surprise you. It’s not that other children’s media
can’t do this, it’s just that a lot of it intentionally doesn’t. This is because
most of the children’s media landscape is dominated by one company and its single idea
of childhood.
Any way you slice it, Disney has had a monopoly on children’s media for the past century.
The company has almost single handedly lobbied to change copyright laws so that its iconic
franchises wouldn’t enter the public domain, and it’s gobbled up almost all of its closest
competition, buying the likes of Pixar, Lucas Films, Marvel, and Twenty First Century Fox.
Disney’s chokehold on modern culture is so strong – both for children and adults
– that eight of the top ten grossing films in 2019 were made by the Big Mouse. And the
creepy thing? For almost a hundred years, Disney has relentlessly pursued the same,
single vision of childhood: cuteness. You know, loveable, kind characters with big round
eyes. In other words, everything that SpongeBob is not.
- (Gary) *Burps*
- (Michael) In fact, Walt Disney was so aggressive in his pursuit of all things cute, that he
made numerous enemies out of both his own animators and critics. Scholar David Forgacs
details how Disney’s push to make the Seven Dwarves as cute as possible – contra the
source material – created massive opposition, even leading the animators to draw pornographic
depictions of the characters in protest. Depictions that, for scholarly purposes, we wish had
survived.
But as Chilean essayist and ex Disney Kid Ariel Dorfman explains, the Mouse’s soulless
desire to make all things cute wasn’t simply born out of an obsession with saucer eyes.
It was part of a larger cultural package Disney was selling to the world. Children, in Disney’s
construction, live in a state of pure, Eden-like innocence, which was reflected in the aesthetic
of the cartoons. This aesthetic, Dorfman contends, would be used to sugarcoat any ugly truth
Disney wanted to sell – from less bad things like the nuclear family, to very bad things,
like colonialism. Case in point is this infamous cartoon in which Donald Duck’s nephews visits
places like “Aztecland” and “Inca-Blinca” – racialized parodies of Central and South
America, only to find the natives there simple-minded “savages” who willingly give away their
treasures [FC].
But what does this all have to do with SpongeBob? Well, just as Disney has been promoting a
very specific brand of childhood, so too has Nickelodeon, and at least partially in reaction
to Disney’s reign of innocent doe eyes. But whereas Disney’s brand is based on perpetuating
a particular myth of what childhood is, Nickelodeon’s brand is based on giving children more agency.
According to Linda Simensky, a producer at Nickelodeon during its heyday, the network
was groundbreaking in that it rigorously focus-tested each show on children. If kids didn’t like
a show, it wouldn’t be picked up. In Simensky’s view, this all reinforced Nickelodeon’s
underlying philosophy that “kids lived in a grown-up world, and that it was tough to
be a kid when you had to follow all the grown-up rules.” Unlike Disney, Nickelodeon preached
a gospel of childhood that “believed kids should be free to play around, have fun, and
stand up for themselves.” Whereas Disney balked at anything that broke from its cute,
idealized form of childhood, Nickelodeon embraced everything from gross out humor, to avante
garde animation styles, to storylines far outside of your typical “childrens’”
narrative. In other words, a show like SpongeBob could only exist on a network like Nickelodeon.
It’s strange tiki inspired aesthetic resembles nothing of Disney’s highly regimented animation
style. Not to mention all those weird moments in SpongeBob that break the fourth wall with
live action components a la Patchy the Pirate. And let’s not forget about all the gross
out close ups, and adult topics in the show. I mean really, the series broached the topic
of gay marriage in 2002.
That’s not to make Nickelodeon out to be some kind of mom ‘n pop animation shop.
After all, it’s owned by Viacom, an empire in and of itself presumably just as eager
as Disney to make a buck. And that fact brings us to an aspect that Aries never really delved
into: the way our modern conception of childhood has been shaped by consumerism.
SpongeBob offers children something more robust than Disney’ bland vision of childhood.
So much of it is about transgression. SpongeBob isn’t a kid, but he’s not quite an adult.
He drifts between hyper competence:
- (SpongeBob) Well first I draw this head. Then I erase some of the more detailed features.
And one, two, three, a circle… thingy.
- (Michael) And hyper incompetence-
- (Mrs. Puff) Oh SpongeBob... why?
- (Michael) Toilet humor abounds, as well as a whole episode devoted to the concept
of curse words
- (SpongeBob) Krabs is a… (dolphin noises) - (Sanitation Worker) Do you kiss your mother
with that mouth?
- (Michael) In this way, Nickelodeon is offering kids greater agency by letting them test boundaries
through an underwater Sponge who’s kind of like them: not as much a pure child as
companies like Disney would have you believe, but not full adults either. And because we
live under capitalism, if kids feel “empowered” to buy a SpongeBob ice cream bar as a result,
more the better!
In the case of SpongeBob, this more empowering vision of childhood certainly has been successful.
What’s more, we’d contend that it’s the very reason your Twitter feed continues
to be dominated by SpongeBob memes, memes often made by the very adults who grew up
with Bikini Bottom in the first place. While the memes are diverse and fully glorious,
they tend overwhelmingly to take the form of “reaction” memes. This suggests a level
of identification between the person sharing the meme and the character - whether we’re
talking about going into “beast mode” or feeling confused when people “come for
us.” While SpongeBob’s meme-ability has a ton to do with the show’s inventive visual
storytelling, the lasting appeal of these images suggests something deeper: Perhaps
that SpongeBob endures for us precisely because of the fluidity of its characters, and the
freedom they gave us to just be kids ... without being “children.”
But what do you guys think? Is SpongeBob a revelatory depiction of childhood? Or is this
face just impossible NOT to meme? Let us know in the comments. Huge thanks to our incredible
patrons for your support. Hit that subscribe button, and as always, thanks for watching. Later!