Words matter. These are the best Stephen Hillenburg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
SpongeBob represents idiocy. He is dumb. Patrick is dumb. Mr. Krabs is greedy. Squidward is a snob and vain.
I always pushed back on doing long-form. I imagined SpongeBob as being simple, and I wanted to concentrate on character humor.
When you set out to do a show about a sponge, you can’t anticipate this kind of craze. We just try to make ourselves laugh, then ask ourselves if it’s appropriate for children.
You have to imagine you write a show about a sponge and you think that maybe a few people will think it is funny, some college students, but it takes off. It is truly shocking – to the point where it is bizarre.
A natural sponge is not as funny. A square sponge also fit that squeaky-clean idea I was going for.
We wanted the humor to come from the characters and their world – you go down there to escape the world up here for a while. So when the crew would write jokes that would refer to American TV or culture, I’d just eliminate them because it just seemed odd that SpongeBob would know about it.
To be honest, there is a special gift for doing voice-overs, and the people who did the voices in the ‘SpongeBob’ cast are excellent at cartoon voice-overs, and they bring something extra to the reads.
The essence of the show is that SpongeBob is an innocent in a world of jaded characters. The rest is absurd packaging.
I don’t want to be the Pied Piper of fast food.
SpongeBob is an innocent, and people respond to an innocent. I don’t think it matters if you’re young or old.
I see SpongeBob on ice-cream trucks a lot, and I’ve got bootleg SpongeBob merchandise from Mexico.
I wanted to do a show about a character that was an innocent, and so I focused on a sea sponge because it’s a funny animal, a strange one.
In the show, the whole point of the fast food – the fact that SpongeBob loves being part of the fast-food chain and that being a manager is his ultimate dream – it’s ironic. It’s something that most people don’t think is a great thing to try to achieve.
We’re always aiming for storytelling that feels a bit surreal.
I think the source of SpongeBob’s humour is classic, and that’s always appealing.
Twentysomethings thank me for their childhood… SpongeBob lives at the bottom of the sea, but he brings a lot of great stuff to the surface.
I just kind of figured that the marine biology would be a career, and the art would be something I did for my own self-expression.
I studied marine biology, even taught marine science before I got into animation, so I had an interest in that field and those animals.
I studied natural resources planning and thought I could get a job at some marine park. But I was great at art and so-so at marine biology. It’s funny how the two eventually came together.
‘The Simpsons’ is a tough act to follow, so I thought it was best not to do what they do.
For some reason, not many women go into cartooning.
I pitched the idea that SpongeBob and Patrick learn a swearword. Everyone said no. I couldn’t even use a bleep. So I used a dolphin sound instead.
To do a 75-minute movie about SpongeBob wanting to make some jellyfish jelly would be a mistake, I think.
For me personally, snorkeling in a cove in Hawaii, floating along, and looking at all the animals and the colors – I mean, that’s pretty peaceful.
I wanted to create a small town underwater where the characters were more like us than like fish. They have fire. They take walks. They drive. They have pets and holidays.
It’s not like the computer magically does it for you. Animation just takes forever.
I think it’s amusing to watch a naive, well-meaning character kind of undo more cynical characters – kind of like watching Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin.
The morality we all grew up with and are accustomed to is what feels right.
Most sponges in the ocean are sedentary: They attach themselves to a rock and sit and filter-feed the rest of their lives and reproduce, and that’s about it. Not that they are not interesting, but they are not that kinetic. They are not mobile. They don’t cook Krabbie Patties!
I was into Jacques Cousteau as a kid and started scuba-diving around 14, which blew my mind. It was all colour, another world.
