Spongebob is Dead

The title of this post might imply some metaphorical comparison of world events with Spongebob. Well, that’s not the case. It actually is about Spongebob and the steep decline of a show that at one point was a cultural phenomenon and loved by kids and adults alike. I started watching Spongebob with my kids not long after it debuted in the late 1990’s. Alongside the other sleepy and syrupy shows I had to watch back then (Teletubbies!), this one had wit and humor easily accessible to adults. I actually found a lot of the humor to be sharp and crisp in those early episodes.

It’s sad to see how bad the show has become.

After a few years, they put new episodes on pause while they worked on a feature film, and the reports I read at the time was that the movie was going to be the end of the series. Not long after the movie, however, new episodes started coming out again. They weren’t bad, but they did seem different somehow.

I even felt that Spongebob’s voice, proviced by Tom Kenny, seemed different in the movie, and never sounded the same after that. At first I even thought it was a Tom Kenny impersonator. Perhaps the change was due to an aging voice actor trying to hit those high notes again. But that wasn’t the only thing that seemed different. The first shows after the movie were OK, having some residual influence from Stephen Hillenburg, but they weren’t as good as the pre-movie episodes. And they seemed to get worse and worse every year.

Fast forward to late 2010. I’m watching a newer episode called “That Sinking Feeling” with my daughter. It’s just boring, and the writers seem to rely on Spongebob running around screaming – with no real reason or wittiness behind it. The plot was almost non-existent, and the final straw that forced me to sit and write this article was the music. The old episodes had this campy, quasi-Hawaiian feel to the background music, which seemed appropriate to an underwater setting, and set it apart from other animated shows. While there are a few moments in the new episodes that bring back some of those old music clips, much of the new episodes contain horribly outdated orchestral cartoon music that reminds me of second-rate 1980’s cartoons like Tiny Toon Adventures. The new music sounds even worse alongside the old clips because they don’t sound anything alike. I couldn’t find a “Music by” credit anywhere for the newer episodes, but they really need to get rid of the person writing this drivel along with whoever hired him. In fact, they should go back and re-write any of the music this person contributed. Word cannot express how much this terrible music degrades an already flailing series.

In retrospect, the movie really did mark the end of classic Spongebob. New writers were brought it, and they don’t hold a candle to the minds behind the first crew. And the new music is just awful, outdated, and unoriginal.

The new crew behind the series is simply riding on the coattails of the brilliance put into the first several years of Spongebob. Young kids will watch it, but the parents have long abandoned the series. It no longer stands above the fray, and is just another over-animated stimulation-fest running on fumes.