Spongebob Squarepants: a "kiddie" review and one for the adults
Spongebob Squarepants
Review 1 (the kiddie review)
Spongebob Squarepants is an animated 30 minute television show that appears on the Nickeleon Network. The star of the show is Spongebob Squarepants and he resides in a pineapple with a pet snail named Gary, located under the sea in a town called Bikini Bottom. Spongebob has many adventures with his friends Patrick Star, Mr. Krabs and Sandy Cheeks. His neighbor and co-worker Squidward likes to play the flute and often helps Spongebob in times of emotional stress and indecision by directing Spongebob toward responsible goals and pursuits. Spongebob is employed as head fry cook at the restaurant, The Crusty Crab, where he fries crabby patties which are very popular in Bikini Bottom. In his spare time Spongebob enjoys singing, dancing, jellyfish hunting and the continual pursuit to get his boating driver’s license under the patient instruction of Miss Puff.
Childern’s viewer level suitability: children, ages 5-9
Supervision content advisory:
Spongebob Squarepants contains some rough language, e.g. “stupid”, “dummy” and “twit”. Violence level is minimal, reserved to slapstick and occasional explosions in which no one is permanently injured.
Rating as a Childrens animated show: 9 out 10 Crabby Patties
Review 2 (for adult viewers)
Spongebob Squarepants is an animated 30 minute television show that appears on the Nickeleon Network. The star of the show is Spongebob Squarepants, a hyperactive, hypersensitive sponge with a falsetto voice and irritating laugh. Squarepants is a resident of Bikini Bottom, one of the many undersea municipalities claimed under the monarchy of the tyrannical and half-mad King Neptune. Squarepants makes his home in a pineapple with his frustrated and sometimes neglected snail, Gary.
Squarepants is employed as a fry cook at The Crusty Crab, owned and operated by the tightfisted Eugene Krabs. The only other employee at this fast-food restaurant is Squarepants’ next-door neighbor, Squidward. Squarepants is an excellent employee who loves making the specialty of the house, the Crabby Patty. Squarepants is thrilled to be a part of the work team at The Crusty Crab, so much so that he sometimes volunteers to work overtime for free. While Krabs is content to have such an industrious and cheaply paid employee, Squarepants’ exuberant behavior and almost freakish way of attracting havoc often makes for disruptions at the restaurant. Despite these things, Squarepants is happy in his career, and has earned the status of Employee of the Month almost every month of the many years he has been employed.
In his off-time Squarepants enjoys such hobbies as jellyfish netting, singing, dancing and spending time down at the local beach (as implausible as it is that a beach would exist under water, it does in Bikini Bottom). Acquaintances of the sponge know him as an optimistic individual, though quite pesky, who keeps his pineapple home very clean. While Squarepants has a wardrobe full of tidy squarish trousers and shirts, he often shows up wearing only his underpants, a habit that has in time, stopped surprising his acquaintances.
Squarepants’ enthusiastic, eager-to-please personality invites a lot of emotional tribulations for the sponge, and even more so for the long-suffering residents of Bikini Bottom. Squarepants is also dedicated to earning his boat drivers license. In this quest he has spent many, many years at Mrs. Puff’s Boating School and has yet to qualify for the road. Of all the people in Squarepants’ life, Mrs. Puff has suffered the worst for his agitating presence. Included among her emotional scars are imprisonment and temporary insanity, not to mention countless phsyical accidents incurred during boat driving exercises when Squarepants was behind the student steering wheel.
Squarepants’ best friend is Patrick Star, a starfish, who lives two homes down from the sponge. Star is your basic village idiot, who has a knack for drooling and often forgets the next word out of his mouth. He is prone to wearing beach trunks when he does dress, but is often found wearing nothing at all. While others would think twice about forging a friendship with someone like Star, beside him Squarepants looks and sounds like a genius.
Despite the pairs’ obvious co-dependent relationship, they do sometimes have their outs. One such event occurred when, as a couple, they adopted a baby clam. In this decision the two resided together at Squarepants’ house. Squarepants took his new responsibilities seriously in seeing to the baby’s needs. Additionally, he spent the rest of his time cooking, cleaning, rolling the hair that suddenly sprouted on his head and pressing the housedresses he had taken to wearing. On the contrary, Star would declare he was leaving in the morning to go to work and not return until the wee hours of morning. After Squarepants repeatedly asked for help to care for their baby Star promised he would be home early to give his wife, er friend, a night off. Star failed to arrive at the expected hour and proved to be abusive when he did finally show up. This led to a brawl between Squarepants and Star, one that didn’t stop until, to their horror, they saw baby clam about to fall out a window.
Other main characters
Squidward Tentacles
Tentacles is Squarepants’ next-door-neighbor and the only other employee at The Crusty Crab. Effeminate and vain, Tentacles has classical tastes and enjoys playing a musical instrument that appears to be a clarinet and at other times a flute or trumpet. More intellectual than Squarepants, Tentacles is constantly frustrated with his permanently kinetic neighbor. Even after working hours Squarepants is prone to breaking into his home uninvited and dropping whatever juvenile problem he has at the moment into Tentacles’ lap. These problems vary, from incidents like Squarepants believing the town has been infested with space aliens to Squarepants’ impatience on waiting for a toy he sent off for after devouring a hundred boxes of cereal for the box tops. While the Squarepants lives under the delusion he is Tenacles’ good buddy, Tentacles recognizes the fact that the entire neighborhood would be better off if the sponge was institutionalized for proper mental health treatment.
Despite his effeminate ways, Tentacles is not completely indifferent to the opposite sex. This was proved when Patrick Star applied for a waitress job, dressed like a girl and wearing a wig.
Eugene Krabs
Owner and operator of The Crusty Crab. Stingy by nature, Krabs has a healthy kind streak under his crusty exterior, and more so than anyone else, shows patience for Squarepants’ never-ending problems. This works to Krab’s benefit, of course, since it goes against his work ethic to pay employees at least minimum wage, a fact Squarepants accepts even as the persnickety Tentacles won’t.
Krabs has a daughter, Pearl, who sometimes appears at the restaurant. A shallow teenager with demanding needs, she is the only one Krabs will even consider “wasting” his precious money on. Pearl also happens to be a sperm whale. One might assume she was adopted if it weren’t for Krabs’ having declared more than once that she is his “flesh and blood”. Although never speculated on by other characters, viewers are left wondering how many bottles of rum Krabs had to consume before a conception like that could take place.
Although Krabs’ matrimonial status is still not specified, there remains a fire down in the proverbial stove. This was proved when he gave the cross-dressing Patrick Star a waitress job at the restaurant.
Sandy Cheeks
Cheeks is a genius squirrel from Texas who discovered the engineering needed to create and sustain an underwater habitat (called the Tree Dome) so she can reside in Bikini Bottom. When outside of the Tree Dome Sandy wears custom-made diving gear so she can interact with the town residents. A good “friend” to Squarepants, the pair often practice karate chops with one another. Inside the Tree Dome –which is transparent- Cheeks walks around in only a bikini. Although she pretends to be aggravated by Spongebobs’ habit of walking in unexpectedly, she is keenly aware that he can see her through the Tree Dome wall and she still won’t throw on a shirt or robe.
Aside from being the town tease, Cheeks’ brilliance has helped Squarepants on several occasions, like when he needed help in recovering the population of Bikini Bottom from the clutches of space aliens. Of course, these space aliens wouldn’t have presented a problem at all had Squarepants not stolen Cheeks’ rocket to begin with.
(Sheldon J.) Plankton
Owner of the Chum Bucket, another local fast-food joint. As Krabs’ crafty and amoral business rival, Plankton has devoted more time to trying to steal the formula for the popular Crabby Patty than in building a financially successful enterprise. Plankton is a diminutive individual with one large eye. His devious actions have led to a series of physical abuses, including being poked, prodded, pulled, squeezed, stampeded over sealed up in a variety of small, enclosed containers. Plankton is married to his computer wife, Karen. If they have children these are not discussed on the show.
Gary
Squarepants’ pet snail. Resigned to life spent with an idiot, Gary has no choice but to put up with his owner’s insidious chatter and hyena-like laughter. Gary lives each day as hopefully his last. Nevertheless, in time of dire need Gary often comes to Squarepants’ rescue, usually without thanks or even acknowledgement. Gary doesn’t speak except for making cat-like meows, unless he’s agitated and then he growls. It is a testament to Gary's loyalty to Squarepants that the snail refrains from acting on impulse, for any other intelligent animal with less patience would have gone to the humane society and filed charges long before.
Viewer adult entertainment rating: 9 out of 10 Swats Across the Sandy Cheeks
Adult viewer content advisory:
Spongebob Squarepants contains humorous examples of emotional mayhem with underlying adult themes not perceivable by the average child under the age of thirteen.
**Special recommendations about this cartoon for individuals with sensitive hearing and/or nerves**: be warned of repeated hyena-like laughter from the main character. Endurance levels to main character are enhanced by the consumption of mild amounts of intoxicating beverages and are recommended for full viewing pleasure of episodes. This recommendation is annulled if young children are present. If young children are present the sensitive viewer is suggested to leave the room until conclusion of programming. If leaving the room presents a problem, it is further recommended that the volume of the television set be muted, and furthermore the supervising adult should encourage the child(ren) to make up their own dialog in order to avoid, or at least limit, potential frustration for the supervising adult.