SpongeBob SquarePants and the Maturation of Cable Children’s Programming

This paper was originally written for the “Cultural History of US Television: Theory & Method” course within the Film and Media Studies graduate program at Arizona State University, completed June 25, 2020.

The outgrowth of cable television infrastructure and channels through the 1970s and 1980s brought a diversity of content that the “Big Three” television networks had not been able to match. “Broadcasting” became “narrowcasting,” where the concept of Least Offensive Programming (LOP) receded to cater and market to specific demographics. Since the cable industry was not entirely reliant on advertising money (although of course it was still heavily incentivized to continue the model set up by the networks), it found a new middle ground between least offensive and somewhat offensive. “Cable has brought change,” writes Thomas Streeter (236). “[But] cable has not revolutionized the basic corporate structure of television. It has been integrated within it.”

In this semi-new landscape, children’s programming moved from the simplicity of Howdy Doody (1947–1960) to the widespread popularity of groovy Hanna-Barbera shows, like the Scooby-Doo franchise, in the 1970s to the action-packed conflict of 1980s cartoons like G.I. Joe (1983–86), The Transformers (1984–87), and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983–85). By the 1990s, the first-run syndication practice of the ’80s cartoons shifted to 24/7 animation and “kids only” channels, represented by Cartoon Network (launched in 1992) and Nickelodeon (which had launched in 1979 but was on its way to being a cultural powerhouse with its series of “Nicktoons” throughout the ‘90s). By the end of the ’90s, in the midst of the growing popularity of children’s cable channels, marketing to the youngest generation became more savvy, and in the process, represented cable’s ubiquity by the turn of the century. While broadcast TV had always been used as a marketing tool, the potential for relative nuance in cable programming opened new doors for subliminal messaging. Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-present) especially represented this development.

SpongeBob SquarePants carried the self-aware and ironic humor of previous Nickelodeon shows like The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991–95) and Rocko’s Modern Life (1993–96) while eliminating those programs’ most controversial elements, fostering childlike anarchy that could also appeal to adults. SpongeBob, therefore, was the locus point of “radical” children’s programming, as compared to the decades before its debut, and a safer, yet still subversive, trend that allowed spin-off merchandise and marketing of the show to hit a zeitgeist unlike any previous cable animated show was able to reach.

SpongeBob SquarePants paradoxically rejects the typical messaging of children’s programming, which in the past had placed a premium on “growing up” to be a contributing member of society, and reaffirms the strength of capitalist consumer practices. Nickelodeon recently and seemingly confirmed the theory that SpongeBob is gay through a tweet promoting Pride Month and the LGBTQ community (France), which calls back to early controversy surrounding the show. As an androgynous, asexual character (as the show’s creator Stephen Hillenburg described him) with Peter Pan-like tendencies, “SpongeBob has been frequently identified as a gay character by both conservative organizations and gay fans and has consquently provoked homophobic organizations in the United States” (Banet-Weiser 1). Nevertheless, these extremist responses have not diminished SpongeBob Squarepants’ mass-market appeal, and these social considerations are not the focus of this paper. However, the continuing conversations about SpongeBob’s cultural relevance indicates just how strongly the character has penetrated the mainstream.

The very first episode of SpongeBob, “Help Wanted” (1999), foreshadowed the complexity to come for the show. In it, SpongeBob pursues his dream job as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab, the town of Bikini Bottom’s foremost fast food joint. His obsession with the position is juxtaposed with SpongeBob’s apparent youthfulness; there isn’t any explanation of how old this apparently childlike character is, or how he had previously maintained the home he lives in alone. “It’s a cartoon,” some might say in response to these logical questions. But SpongeBob’s power lay in its ability to foster an adult audience joining their children on the couch, influencing multiple generations in regards to the place of children in society. And the ambiguity of the nature of SpongeBob’s living situation opens up a number of interpretations.

To continue the case for “Help Wanted:” SpongeBob’s ultimate goal is participating in the local economy, even at his own expense at the hands of hostile coworker (and neighbor) Squidward and uber-capitalist boss Mr. Krabs. In fact, a recurring theme throughout the show is SpongeBob’s naive acceptance of the otherwise abusive greed of the Krusty Krab’s owner. This is established right away in “Help Wanted,” in which Mr. Krabs and Squidward send SpongeBob on an apparently futile mission to retrieve a spectacular spatula. When he returns with the device and saves the restaurant from a horde of hungry anchovies, SpongeBob gets the job. His above-and-beyond work ethic offers a ridiculous reflection of the business practices of real-world fast food restaurants (why would anyone be so invested in working at what is essentially an underwater McDonald’s?) while also placing a premium on (apparently) young people’s capitalist contributions. “SpongeBob SquarePants is just this disarming, celebratory character who is also serious and ironic,” Sarah Banet-Weiser writes (203). “The ideological address of the program is ambiguous; it at times seems sharply critical, but it never feels ‘anti-establishment.’” SpongeBob SquarePants’ seemingly more radical elements (its over-the-top animation, its sense of adult humor) are dressing to conventional messages and established mainstream ideals.

A third season episode more thoroughly and playfully satirizes consumer culture. “The Idiot Box” (2002) shows SpongeBob and his best friend Patrick purchasing a massive TV, only to throw it away and use its box to pretend in and play with “imaginaaaation” (as SpongeBob constantly says it). The next-door Scrooge, Squidward, cannot fathom how they enjoy their time without the consumerist joys of television. Combined with SpongeBob and Patrick’s surreal ability to produce realistic sound effects from their adventures in the plain box, this inconsistency with “normal” behavior frustrates Squidward. He cannot enjoy the TV once he has it, and even obsesses over unlocking the “secret” of the box to experience its fantastical powers firsthand. When he is apparently able to figure out the secret to pretending and yielding realistic sound effects, it is revealed that the box is actually just being picked up by a garbage truck.

This sudden inconsistency with SpongeBob and Patrick’s ability to enjoy their pretend time can reveal a number of readings. First, this episode comments on the ability to have fun without watching TV. Ironically, of course, all of this is being played out while being transmitted to one’s television, and so the episode simultaneously encourages technology-less play and continued patronage of the American consumer model. Squidward, apparently, is not able to succeed in creating his own entertainment without the TV, and he is essentially the main character of this episode of SpongeBob. However, more so than “Help Wanted,” “The Idiot Box” ups the ante for SpongeBob SquarePants’ anarchic fantasy, obscuring a straightforward response in reaction to SpongeBob and Patrick’s inexplicable “imaginaaaation.”

And yet, the creators of SpongeBob have an incentive to keep its viewers glued to the TV screen. “In the year 2002, Nickelodeon profited from over $500 million of merchandise themed with characters from the wildly popular animated program SpongeBob SquarePants” (Banet-Weiser 178). Shows are not just the programming between commercials anymore; they are the commercials themselves, and children’s TV is especially susceptible to this distinction. “Another new marketing trend is the use of integrated marketing strategies, particularly with branded characters driving interest across media platforms” (Calvert 210). “Integrated marketing will use, for example, SpongeBob the television character, who becomes a movie character who markets Burger King products with SpongeBob premiums as rewards for product purchases” (211).

In the contradiction presented by “The Idiot Box,” there is a clear connection to Banet-Weiser’s description of a “serious and ironic character.” Adult viewers can watch SpongeBob and feel like they are getting a leg up on those stupid suits that want to make us all consumerist slaves like Squidward, then turn around and get their kids a SpongeBob backpack or toy or any other kind of commercial product. Because, as Sandra L. Calvert points out, “younger children often do not understand the persuasive intent of advertisements, and even older children probably have difficulty understanding the intent of newer marketing techniques that blur the line between commercial and program content” (205). These children know they want SpongeBob merchandise, though, and the content of the show has charmed their parents as well. “…[as of 2013] of the series’ 56.1 million monthly viewers. 13.3 million of those viewers were nine to fourteen year-olds, and 18.6 million of those landed in the age category ranging from eighteen to forty-nine” (Tarr & Brown 21).

Much of children’s marketing involves food products, and SpongeBob’s job at a fast food restaurant and numerous food-centered storylines promote those metafictional efforts. “Many products marketed to children are not healthful and promote obesity,” Calvert claims. And although Nickelodeon in the mid-2000s expressed an announcement that its characters would be tied to healthier foods (such as bags of SpongeBob-branded spinach), “several new food products accompanied the November 2004 release of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, including Kellogg’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Cereal, Keebler The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie E.L. Fudge Cookies, Kellogg’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie Rice Krispie Treats, and Kellogg’s SpongeBob SquarePants Pop Tarts” (Linn & Golin 18).

Another season three episode focuses the message on a typical capitalist dream based in food. In “Chocolate with Nuts” (2002), SpongeBob and Patrick are going door-to-door, attempting to sell chocolate, to achieve “fancy living.” Their desire for monetary riches, spurred by Squidward’s luxurious lifestyle magazine, is stalled by hostile neighbors and a recurring scummy salesman who swindles SpongeBob and Patrick out of their own money. The show takes aim at typical capitalism with the salesman character, who repeatedly foists unnecessary products on the naive SpongeBob and Patrick. However, the pair are ultimately rewarded by the swift purchase of all of their chocolate by a fish driven mad by his lust for chocolate; they achieve their fancy living through the consumerist desires of an everyday citizen.

SpongeBob SquarePants, however, details stronger anti-capitalist messages in the eyes of Christoph Spehr. “…the shortest possible explanation of the capitalist-worker relation is offered when Mr. Krabs poses his most pressing concern: ‘SpongeBob, why don’t you work harder?’” (55). The joke within the show, of course, is that SpongeBob is already working very hard, satirizing the irresponsibility of capitalist overlords and their lack of compassion for their workers. Spehr cites the aforementioned “Help Wanted” episode in reference to the technological marvel that SpongeBob discovers to solve the anchovy crisis, which never reappears in the show again. “Capital can be quite reluctant to push for progress,” he writes (56). This serves the sitcom, episodic, “everything returns to normal for the next episode” cartoon logic of SpongeBob SquarePants. The brilliance of the show is in its ability to open up an analysis like Spehr’s while also inviting more critical observations from the likes of Susan Linn and Josh Golin.

These contradictions are also pointed out by Britni A. Tarr and Timothy J. Brown. “While SpongeBob SquarePants on the surface might appear to project a counter-cultural, rejection of tradition and authority figures, on the contrary, the text projects many elements that support the American cultural ideal of the American Dream,” they write (20). This fusion of ideologies, while not unknown to the world of television and children’s programming ahead of the “kids’ channels” of 1990s cable, was refined for SpongeBob SquarePants. “Help Wanted” established a naive character with some savvy in subverting authority figures, playing the field in reinforcing a young character with aspirations for capitalist participation while simultaneously poking fun at the gatekeeping establishment. “The Idiot Box”’s thesis is essentially “you don’t need TV to have fun!” while broadcasting such a message to one’s television. Squidward’s imagination ended up being not enough to manifest the worlds SpongeBob and Patrick were able to create. Since Squidward is the audience stand-in for the episode, SpongeBob and Patrick are cemented as otherworldly, surreal figures while Squidward would presumably need to return to his home and TV to get his entertainment experience. And “Chocolate with Nuts,” in spite of its complications, rewards enterprising capitalists…even if they do get swindled along the way.

SpongeBob SquarePants is an incredibly well-crafted animated show, and its appeal to both children and adults alike is not to be understated. It falls into a category of children’s shows which viewers like to refer to as having “darker” jokes or “adult” references that may go over the heads of the target demographic. Its animation is pleasing, its characters simple, and its writing generally and genuinely funny. But as a cog in the wheel of the ViacomCBS-owned Nickelodeon, SpongeBob is not immune to the market considerations of cable TV. Indeed, to reiterate Streeter’s point, cable has not thrown off the shackles of network television; in fact, whole groups of cable channels are owned by those old networks, which are in turn owned by even bigger conglomerates.

After audiences’ apparent revulsion to the business practices that defined network TV, and growing digital video recording (DVR) possibilities, these conglomerates found integrated marketing much more salient in targeted programming. As a relatively vulnerable class, and in the midst of “somewhat offensive” programming that could appeal to adults coming to cable, children were poised to be taken in by a show like SpongeBob SquarePants. It struck the balance of self-aware commercialization with artistic merit, and SpongeBob’s success can be attributed to the “narrowcasting” of cable television, the predecessor to curated internet media sources and streaming algorithms.

Works Cited

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship. Duke University Press, 2007.

Calvert, Sandra L. “Children as Consumers: Advertising and Marketing.” The Future of Children, vol. 18, no. 1, 2008.

France, Lisa Respers. “SpongeBob Squarepants gay? Nickelodeon just reinforced that theory.” CNN, 15 June 2020.

Linn, Susan and Josh Golin. “Beyond Commercials: How Food Marketers Target Children.” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, vol. 39, no. 13, 2006.

Spehr, Christoph. “Spongebob, Why Don’t You Work Harder?” Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, OR Books, 2016, pp. 54–58.

Streeter, Thomas. “Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: The Discourse of Cable Television.” The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict,” edited by Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin, Routledge, 1997, pp. 221–242).

Tarr, Britni A. and Timothy J. Brown. “Of Theory and Praxis: Spongebob Squarepants and Contemporary Constructions of the American Dream.” American International Journal of Contemporary Research, vol. 3, no. 11, Nov. 2013.