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.
— Stephen Hillenburg
I don't want to be the Pied Piper of fast food.
To do a 75-minute movie about SpongeBob wanting to make some jellyfish jelly would be a mistake, I think.
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.
SpongeBob is a complete innocent - not an idiot. SpongeBob never fully realizes how stupid Patrick is. They're whipping themselves up into situations - that's always where the humor comes from.
In the '70s, as a kid, someone took me to a Tournee of Animation festival at the L.A. County Museum of Art.
When I pitched the show, I made this special seashell. You could pick it up and hear me singing, 'Spongeboy, Spongeboy!' I also made an aquarium with Patrick planted on the side, SpongeBob sitting on a barrel, and Squidward inside. I wore a Hawaiian shirt. I don't know what they thought of it.
One night, I was really beat; we worked really late and went to get food at some takeout place. And I leaned over against this gumball machine, just exhausted, and there was a SpongeBob looking back at me. And it's just, like, 'Oh, brother.'
I wanted people to hear directly from me that I have been diagnosed with ALS.
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 always pushed back on doing long-form. I imagined SpongeBob as being simple, and I wanted to concentrate on character humor.
SpongeBob is just made of cellulose, but he has parents who are natural sponges - he got the square gene.
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.
Anyone who knows me knows that I will continue to work on 'SpongeBob SquarePants' and my other passions for as long as I am able.
A sponge is a funny animal to center a show on. At first, I drew a few natural sponges - amorphous shapes, blobs - which was the correct thing to do biologically as a marine science teacher. Then I drew a square sponge, and it looked so funny.
I was planning on being a starving artist.
