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Q: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? A: We all have for the last 25 years! That’s 25 years of supremely silly subaquatic surrealism that we, as a crew, and you, as our amazing audience, have been submerged in together. Twenty-five glorious years since Nickelodeon first introduced the world to Stephen Hillenburg’s quirky cast of characters that he discovered in a town deep on the ocean floor called Bikini Bottom. More specifically, one humble little goofball we all know (and love), Mr. SpongeBob SquarePants.
We’ve been so lucky to be part of a crew that has grown and morphed over the years in surprising ways. There are talented folks who have been with us since the very beginning and new members who grew up loving the show that they are now helping create. This is the secret formula to the show’s success. We get to work with an amazing group of artists who act together to produce an internal continuity of creativity, a style of humor that’s unique to this carefully curated group’s sensibilities. Together, in a place where every department has always been focused on making their contribution to each episode as funny and strange as it can be.
It all starts in the writing room, where we try to keep the stories super weird and the comedy both verbally sharp and visually cartoony. We all grew up loving cartoony cartoons, and that’s the kind of show we strive to create. These stories are then passed to the Rough Storyboard artists, who are like each new episode’s first directors. They choose the funniest posing for acting and create the clearest setups to sell every story beat and gag. Now it’s time for our actors to make the characters come alive in the recording booth. What was already funny with text and illustrations on a page becomes exponentially more so with the performances of our amazing cast under Tom Kenny’s voice direction. After that, we take all this material into the animatic editing phase, where we try to cram as much (and there’s always too much) of these wonderful moments into an eleven-minute runtime. Next up in the pipeline are the Supervising Directors and their teams of the best illustrators, who, along with the color, background, and prop departments, hone all this rough material into the final package that is then shipped to our partners at Rough Draft Korea. After they complete their months-long frame-at-a-time animation magic, we get the finished scenes back, and the whole process of post begins. After the scenes are edited together, sound effects and music are composed and mixed to help add the last important layers of comedic spice. And we get to repeat this whole process fifty-two times per season!
It’s such a rewarding feeling to watch each episode come together with the help of so many talented individuals. It’s just as amazing to see how much of an impact SpongeBob has had on our audiences, both young and old, as well as on culture at large. The popularity of the flagship show, SpongeBob SquarePants, has allowed us to expand this universe of characters into multiple spinoffs (Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years and The Patrick Star Show), theatrical movies (The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, two sequels, and a third in production), streaming movies (Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie and Plankton: The Movie), games (too many to list), and even a Broadway musical that is now being staged by theater departments in schools across the country. All the various spinoffs that we develop with the same core group of writers and artists adhere to the style of comedy that Steve developed from the very beginning. In every project we start, we strive to create a piece of entertainment that both children and adults can enjoy. And for us, it’s such an enjoyable and rewarding process because we simply write stories and gags that we’re entertained by. We’re the first test audience for everything we make. And in our cartoon laboratory, we constantly work hard to surprise each other with new stories and gags. That moment of sparking creativity where a new idea catches us off guard and produces an involuntary laugh is what we’re all addicted to and try to repeat as often as possible.
We’re so grateful to you all for being on the same kooky wavelength as this funny little group of artists who live and work in the conceptual world of Bikini Bottom. You know we’ll be working our Bubble Basses off to continue making stuff that keeps everyone’s spirits in stitches of uncontrollable laughter. You know… that weird sound that SpongeBob is constantly making… I can hear it now! (finger wobbling an Adam’s apple) YaaHahahahahahahahaha!!!
-Marc Ceccarelli and Vincent Waller, Executive Producers
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