A Decade of SpongeBob

July 17^th will be the 10^th anniversary of the premiere of one of the truly great TV shows, SpongeBob SquarePants, the pilot was actually shown on May 1^st following the Kids Choice Awards. Featuring a trio of sea-dwelling characters the series has become enormously popular worldwide, TIME magazine named it one of the greatest shows of all time in 2007. The source of inspiration for SpongeBob, Squidward Tentacles and Partick Star have long intrigued me. There are obvious parallels to the Winnie the Pooh books of A.A. Milne; the inane Piglet and idiotic Patrick, the gloom-ridden, despairing pessimism of Eeyore and the caustic sarcasm of Squidward Tentacles, and, of course, the ineluctable do-goodery of Pooh and SpongeBob. Coincidentally, or maybe not, the Pooh books were originally a series of magazine articles for Punch, Vanity Fair with marvelous illustrations by J. H. Dowd, E. Shepard, Reginald Birch and other excellent artists, one might say the animation of it's time.

There are many similarities in the writing as well; the erudition, the pithy wit, the cloaked morality and the subtly interwoven homilies and platitudes that deliver common-sense in a sweetened form to the young viewers. SpongeBob inhabits an aquatic world where you can pour a glass of milk or light a campfire, a fantasy land, just like Pooh Corner, where the Laws of Physics are suspended to allow for the greater reality of a child's imagination. In Pooh, Rabbit was the purveyor of reasoned responsibility while Owl represented the Wisdom a child should just accept, he could spell Tuesday so that we would know it wasn't Wednesday, a logic sure to give pause to any adult. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that his audience should adopt the 'willing suspension of disbelief', and this is exactly how Bikini Bottom should be seen.

And what great teachers they are! Sheldon Plankton ( usually masquerading as P. Lankton, get it?) is the diminutive owner of the Chum Bucket, a constant competitor to Mr. Krab's Krusty Krab where SpongeBob and Squidward work. He is an arch-villain, a 2 inch Joker or Lex Luther, full of complex, and nefarious schemes to gain the mysterious Krabby Patty recipe. Of course, every fairy story has to have a villain, but here you have one who can be squashed underfoot - with amazing repetitiveness. Time and again SpongeBob defeats the schemes with bumbling innocence, no coincidence that the root of both ingenuity and ingenuous are the same, straightforward, simple, open and honorable action will always overcome. By comparison, Eeyore is able to grow a plant that Rabbit, the 'green-thumbed' gardener cannot, simply by showing it love.

No wonder SpongeBob has been so successful and justly so, the series has been born of the Arabian Nights, medieval Morality plays, Punch and Judy, the Pantomime, Tom and Jerry, Charles Dickens and Winnie the Pooh. It is the perfect baby-sitter and would be welcome fare by most adults as well, try it someday, I'm sure you will get a laugh and that's worth a lot these days.