|
 
Stephen
Hillenburg
Creator and executive producer of
SpongeBob SquarePants
Date of birth: Aug. 21, 1961
Profession: Television producers; Television
scriptwriters; Theatrical producers; Authors; Dramatists
Biography from Current
Biography (2003)
Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights
reserved.
Among the many celebrities recruited to
ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange
following the market's dramatic plunge after the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center were politicians, professional athletes, models,
actors, and, on November 23, 2001, a three-dimensional
model of the immensely popular title character of
Nickelodeon's animated television series SpongeBob
SquarePants. SpongeBob, a sweet, childlike, fantastical
sea creature cum human who resembles an ambulatory,
anthropomorphic kitchen sponge, is the creation of
Stephen Hillenburg. Hillenburg is also the executive
producer of the series, which is currently the top-rated
TV show among children ages two to 11 and enjoys
considerable popularity among adults as well. "When
you set out to do a show about a sponge, you don't
expect the kind of appeal that he's had,"
Hillenburg told L. A. Johnson for Scripps Howard News
Service, as reported on the Detroit News Web site
(August 8, 2002). The show's other characters, too,
Hillenburg said, are likable. "Even the villainous
Plankton, he's still flawed and you still root for him
in a way, and the style of humor is simple and it's
about human behavior, and everybody can identify with
that." With SpongeBob SquarePants, Hillenburg
combined his training, experiences, and talents in
marine biology and animation. "For all those years
it seemed like I was doing these two totally separate
things," he told Steve Thomas and Debbie L. Sklar
for the on-line magazine OC Metro (May 2, 2002). "I
wondered what it all meant. I didn't see a synthesis. It
was great when it all came together in SpongeBob. I felt
relieved that I hadn't wasted a lot of time doing
something that I then abandoned to do something else. It
has been pretty rewarding." The cartoon is also a
marketing juggernaut, with images of SpongeBob and the
other characters appearing on items ranging from thong
underwear to boxes of macaroni and cheese; sales of
merchandise related to the show reached $750 million in
2002. That year SpongeBob SquarePants was ranked number
nine in TV Guide's list of the 50 Greatest Cartoon
Characters of All Time.
Stephen Hillenburg was born on August
21, 1961 in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. His father was a
draftsman and designer for aerospace companies; his
mother taught visually handicapped students. His younger
brother, following in their father's footsteps, became a
draftsman and designer. The family moved to Orange
County, California, in the mid-1960s. Stephen Hillenburg
has traced his love of sea life to his childhood, when
he saw several films made by the famous French
oceanographer Jacques Yves Cousteau. At age 15 he
snorkeled for the first time, in Laguna Beach,
California; that experience spurred his decision to
study marine life in college. He graduated from Savanna
High School, in Anaheim, California, and then enrolled
at Humboldt State University, in Arcata, California,
where in 1984 he earned a degree in natural-resource
planning and interpretation, with an emphasis in marine
resources. For three years after he graduated from
college, he taught marine biology at the Orange County
Marine Institute (now known as the Orange County Ocean
Institute), in Dana Point, California. Having enjoyed
drawing and painting for a long time, he next enrolled
in a master's-degree program in experimental animation
at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia.
"Initially I think I assumed that if I went to
school for art I would never have any way of making a
living, so I thought it might be smarter to keep art my
passion and hobby and study something else," he
told Current Biography. "But by the time I got to
the end of my undergrad work, I realized I should be in
art." As a graduate student, he made several
independent animated films, including The Green Beret,
about a Girl Scout whose hands are so large and strong
that when she knocks on doors in attempts to sell
cookies, the houses collapse; another movie, Wormholes
(made with funding from the Princess Grace Foundation),
was about the theory of relativity. After he earned a
master of fine arts degree, in 1992, he worked on
Nickelodeon's cartoon series Rocko's Modern Life, whose
title character was a wallaby. During the last of his
three years with the show, he was promoted to creative
director, in which capacity he helped to oversee pre-
and post-production operations. He also wrote for the
series and served as its executive story editor.
"After watching Joe [Murray, the
creator of Rocko's Modern Life] tear his hair out a lot,
dealing with all the problems that came up, I thought I
would never want to produce a show of my own,"
Hillenburg told Steve Thomas and Debbie L. Sklar.
Nevertheless, while working with Murray, he began to
think about creating his own animated series. "I
wanted to do a show about a character that was an
innocent," Hillenburg recalled to Kathryn Shattuck
for the New York Times (July 29 2001). In considering
possibilities, he remembered how awed his young students
at the Ocean Institute had seemed when they learned
about creatures that live in tide pools (accumulations
of seawater of varying depths that fill depressions or
crevices in rocky areas on beaches), among them species
of sponges, starfish, octopi, and crabs. When he pitched
the idea for the cartoon to Nickelodeon, he brought
along an aquarium, sculpted figures, artwork, and a
theme song, for which Hillenburg played the ukulele and
repeatedly sang the word "SpongeBoy." (That
name was later changed to SpongeBob because of trademark
issues.) He chose a sea sponge as the lead character,
Hillenburg told Shattuck, "because it's a funny
animal, a strange one," and he wanted the character
to be "a funny, nerdy, squeaky-clean square."
He soon realized that depicting the tide-pool-animal
characters in his cast with scientific accuracy would
not achieve the effects he wanted. "At first I drew
a few natural sponges--amorphous shapes, blobs--which
was the correct thing to do biologically as a marine
science teacher," he told Bridget Byrne for the
Washington Post (October 15, 2001). "Then I drew a
square sponge and it looked so funny. I think as far as
cartoon language goes he was easier to recognize. He
seemed to fit the character type I was looking
for." He also told Byrne that viewers are drawn to
sponges because "sponges are odd and we think of
them as odd. I think the connection to SpongeBob is that
sponges are the most elastic, changing, plastic
creatures . . . and I wanted him to be able to do things
that were really magical. So [SpongeBob] has these
really creative moments when he can re-form himself. But
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 . . .
mobile. They don't cook Krabbie Patties!" (SpongeBob
flips Krabbie Patties at the Krusty Krab, the fast-food
eatery where he works.)
SpongeBob SquarePants premiered in July
1999. At first the show aired on Saturday mornings; two
years later Nickelodeon began broadcasting it at 8:00
p.m. Eastern Time Monday through Friday in addition,
thus attracting not only juvenile viewers but adults as
well. Since October 2001 SpongeBob SquarePants has
reigned as the top-rated program among children aged two
to 11 (with two million viewers in this group tuning in
every night), and typically has 61.5 million viewers per
month (including repeat viewers), a third of them adults
between 18 and 49. Celebrities who have admitted to
being fans of SpongeBob include the actresses Jennifer
Love Hewitt and Sigourney Weaver, the actors Rob Lowe
and Bruce Willis, the comedians Ellen DeGeneres and
Jerry Lewis, and the singers Tony Bennett and Lance Bass
(of the group 'N Sync). In August 2002 the Parents
Television Council ranked SpongeBob third on its list of
best prime-time cable shows, noting that its appeal
spanned generations. (According to its Web site, the
council is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization that
communicates "America's demand for positive,
family-oriented television programming to the
entertainment industry.")
The squarish, bright yellow head of
Hillenburg's titular protagonist looks much like a
kitchen sponge. His eyes are protruding lidless balls,
each of which sprouts three bold lashes; two large buck
teeth and a pink tongue are visible when he talks. He
has stick-skinny arms and legs and wears a short-sleeved
white shirt, a red necktie, brown shorts, athletic
socks, and shiny black shoes. SpongeBob lives with his
pet snail, Gary (who meows like a cat); their home is a
pineapple husk in an underwater town called Bikini
Bottom, located, presumably, beneath the Bikini Atoll,
in the central Pacific Ocean. The guileless SpongeBob
works at his dream job, that of fry cook at the Krusty
Krab. (Hillenburg himself at one time held the same
title at a fast-food seafood restaurant.) The sponge's
best friends include Patrick Star, a dim-witted,
fun-loving, overweight pink starfish, and Sandy Cheeks,
a squirrel who lives in an oxygen-filled plastic dome
complete with trees and other reminders of her native
Texas. SpongeBob's next-door neighbor (and co-worker) is
Squidward Tentacles, a sour-tempered, intellectually
snobbish octopus, who looks down on SpongeBob's antics.
(When asked why the octopus has six tentacles instead of
eight, Hillenburg told Current Biography,
"Technically I just thought he'd be a little too
cumbersome as a character to have too many legs visible.
Maybe that's why he's so angry!") The dramatis
personae also includes the greedy crab Mr. Krabs, owner
of the Krusty Krab; the long-suffering Mrs. Puff (a
pufferfish), who teaches a boating course that SpongeBob
has taken many times because he repeatedly fails his
driving test; and Plankton, the series' villain, who
constantly schemes to steal a Krabby Patty so that he
can figure out the secret recipe and then serve
identical patties at his restaurant, the unpopular Chum
Bucket. Although Hillenburg has linked each of the
characters with an actual species, their resemblance to
real sponges, crabs, plankton, or other animals is
negligible. As Hillenburg told Kerrie Murphy for the
Australian (September 5, 2002), he does not aim to teach
science, "but when there's some sort of logic that
we can draw from the actual science to help us, we
do." A striking characteristic of the residents of
Bikini Bottom is their tolerance of one another's
differences.
Hillenburg includes no references to
drug use, sex, or other adult topics in SpongeBob
installments. "Our characters act silly, even
totally ridiculous at times, and most of our jokes don't
come out of pop cultural references," he told
Shattuck. "It seems like we're aiming at a child
audience, everyone can laugh at the basic human traits
that are funny. It's playful, the humor is playful, the
world is playful." Hillenburg does not "dumb
down" the scripts, however. "Kids aren't
stupid, and I think that there are some things written
in [other TV] shows that [are] insulting to their
intelligence," he told Claire Mangan for Teenwire
(February 22, 2002, on-line). He told Byrne, "We
want the show to be really funny. But I think in the end
the message is: Treat people the way you expect to be
treated. And another connection to any sort of message
is that a lot of the stories come out of the personal
experience I and the other writers had as kids--the
harsh lessons in life which are usually very funny in
retrospect, like maybe what happens when you learn your
first curse word and you don't know what it means."
The show's success has surprised many,
and there has been much speculation as to the reasons
for its popularity, since SpongeBob's innocence and
fun-loving spirit are out of step with the cynical,
world-weary tone of many of the other animated programs
that attract adults. Robert Thompson, a professor of
communications and director of the Center for the Study
of Popular Television at Syracuse University, told Tom
Zeller for the New York Times (July 21, 2002), as posted
on the SpongeBob Wet site, "There is something kind
of unique about [SpongeBob]. It seems to be a refreshing
breath from the pre-irony era. There's no sense of the
elbow-in-rib, tongue-in-cheek aesthetic that so
permeates the rest of American culture--including kids'
shows like the Rugrats. I think what's subversive about
it is it's so incredibly naive--deliberately. Because
there's nothing in it that's trying to be hip or cool or
anything else, hipness can be grafted onto it."
James Poniewozik described SpongeBob in Time (December
17, 2001) as "the anti-Bart Simpson,
temperamentally and physically: his head is as
squared-off and neat as Bart's is unruly, and he has a
personality to match--conscientious, optimistic and
blind to the faults in the world and those around
him." Writing for Variety (July 14, 1999), Laura
Fries described the show as "a thoughtful and
inventive cartoon about a hopelessly optimistic and
resilient sea sponge. . . . Devoid of the double
entendres rife in today's animated TV shows, this is
purely kid's stuff. . . . However, that's not to say
that SpongeBob is simplistic or even juvenile. It's
charming and whimsical, but clever enough to appeal to
teens and college-aged kids as well." According to
Joyce Millman in the New York Times (July 8, 2001),
SpongeBob "is clever without being impenetrable to
young viewers and goofy without boring grown-ups to
tears. It's the most charming toon on television, and
one of the weirdest. And it's also good, clean fun,
which makes sense because it is, after all, about a
sponge. . . . His relentless good cheer would be
irritating if he weren't so darned lovable and his world
so excellently strange. . . . Like Pee-Wee's Playhouse
[a live-action TV show that aired from 1986 to 1991],
SpongeBob joyfully dances on the fine line between
childhood and adulthood, guilelessness and camp, the
warped and the sweet."
Hillenburg, with the help of a casting
director, chooses the actors and actresses who lend
their voices to SpongeBob's cast. "I had a crude
version of each character in my head," he told
Current Biography. "SpongeBob I always thought
would . . . have a squeaky little voice, and Squidward
is a little like Bert from [Sesame Street]. . . . For
Plankton, I always thought I wanted someone who could do
a good Gregory Peck." Hillenburg has largely
resisted using the voices of well-known actors and
actresses, as is done on The Simpsons, Matt Groening's
popular prime-time animated series. "The Simpsons
is a tough act to follow, so I thought it was best not
to do what they do," he told Liane Bonin for
Entertainment Weekly (October 23, 2002). Hillenburg's
few exceptions have included the voices of Ernest
Borgnine and Tim Conway for Mermaid Man and Barnacle
Boy, respectively, and Marion Ross as the voice of
Grandma in the episode "Grandma's Kisses." By
his own account, the immense popularity of SpongeBob has
surprised Hillenburg greatly. "I think we all
thought the show would be good, but I didn't ever assume
it would catch on in a mass audience sort of way,"
he told Shattuck. When he saw a gigantic image of
SpongeBob painted on the outside of a building near
Universal Studios, "it kind of blew me over,"
he told Current Biography. "Just seeing all the
products out there and complete strangers wearing a
drawing of a character that you created . . . it's both
wonderful and strange." SpongeBob has become a
marketing phenomenon; his name and image are associated
with such products as candy, clothing, cereal,
skateboards, air fresheners, beach towels, bedding,
backpacks, toys, aquarium paraphernalia, stuffed
animals, key chains, lunch boxes, bobblehead dolls, and
inflatable chairs, among other items. SpongeBob toys
have also been prizes in Burger King kids' meals. The
SpongeBob ice-cream bar was the first Good Humor product
to outsell the company's Snoopy ice cream, and SpongeBob
was the first animated character to appear in the
"Got milk?" ads. Nautical Nonsense (March
2002), the first SpongeBob video/DVD, is Nickelodeon's
fastest-selling title ever--sales surpassed 150,000
within one week of its release--and SpongeBob video
games were among the top five most-popular PlayStation
games sold in 2002. In addition, SpongeBob products are
the top-selling "character" items in Target
stores, which are among the many establishments
currently marketing SpongeBob items. According to some
reports, SpongeBob was the second-most-popular Halloween
costume in 2002. The character is also featured on the
Web page of the New York City Department of
Environmental Protection, as part of its "Save
Water--Don't Drip New York Dry" campaign.
In October 2002 reports in the Wall
Street Journal and on the BBC Web page that SpongeBob
SquarePants and related merchandise were popular among
gay men led to media speculation about SpongeBob's
sexuality and possible hidden messages in the show.
Hillenburg declared that while he did not intend to
portray SpongeBob or Patrick as homosexuals, he
understood why the show struck a chord in the gay
community. "I do think that the attitude of the
show is about tolerance," he told Sally Beatty for
the Wall Street Journal (October 8, 2002).
"Everybody is different, and the show embraces
that. The character SpongeBob is an oddball. He's kind
of weird, but he's kind of special. . . . I always think
of them [the characters] as being somewhat
asexual." Asked about the notion that SpongeBob is
homosexual, Cathy Renna, the news media director of the
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD),
responded, according to Gary Susman in Entertainment
Weekly (October 23, 2002, on-line), "He's a sponge;
how can he be gay? I think our community has a finely
tuned sense of what is fun and campy, and the show is
definitely fun and campy." In the opinion of
Raymond Riddering, assistant manager of Don't Panic, a
store in a heavily gay San Francisco neighborhood, as
Susman reported, "[SpongeBob items] are pretty good
sellers especially with young gay kids, and guys in
their 30s think it's hilarious. I don't think anyone has
bought it because they think he's gay. He doesn't have
anything on him that screams gay. But the gay population
likes him."
Since Nickelodeon owns the licensing
rights to SpongeBob SquarePants and its characters,
Hillenburg has no control over which products or ad
campaigns bear the images of Bikini Bottom residents.
For the same reason, Nickelodeon rather than Hillenburg
has reaped the lion's share of the profits from
SpongeBob licensing. Hillenburg is paid a producer's fee
for each episode, which consists of two 11-minute
stories. "It is a pretty standard deal," he
told Steve Thomas and Debbie L. Sklar. "No one is
going to invest in producing a show if they don't own
it. The best thing about the deal we have here is the
creative freedom. They gave us a hands-off deal and let
us create the show we wanted to create. That is as
important to me as the money--the chance to create
something I really like and do a good job at it.
Nickelodeon is not a low-budget kind of place. They gave
us a budget comparable to [that of] a prime time TV
show. That was also very important to me."
Hillenburg is currently working on a
SpongeBob SquarePants feature film, scheduled for
release in December 2004. "I'm definitely excited,
but it's daunting finding a story that's worthy of an
hour and a half of a viewer's attention," he told
Bonin in the fall of 2002. "We want to learn more
about the characters and their world, so that's what I'm
contemplating now." Nickelodeon has said that
production of the show will stop while the movie is
being made; consequently, the last new episodes will air
in 2003. It is uncertain whether additional episodes
will be produced after the film reaches theaters.
"We're working on episodes 40 through 60 right now,
and I always looked at that as a typical run for an
animated show," Hillenburg told Bonin. "Ren
and Stimpy lasted about that long, for example. And I
thought now was a good time to step aside and look at a
different project. I personally think it's good not to
go to the point where people don't want to see your show
anymore." Theoretically, Nickelodeon could produce
new episodes without him, but Hillenburg doubts that it
will. One reason is that Nickelodeon fared poorly with
episodes of Ren and Stimpy produced after that show's
creator was fired. In addition, as Hillenburg told Don
Kaplan for the New York Post (April 16, 2002), "I
think [Nickelodeon executives] respect that my
contribution is important. I think they would want to
maintain the original concept and quality."
Hillenburg told Thomas and Sklar that he was uncertain
about his post-SpongeBob plans. "I am like a mule
with blinders on," he said. "I can't juggle a
bunch of projects at once. I have my nose down into
finishing the final episodes of the series and I am
thinking about what big story I want to tell in a movie,
and I can't see beyond that."
In 2001 Heal the Bay, a Southern
California environmental public-interest group, honored
Hillenburg with its Walk the Talk award, for raising
awareness of marine life among the public. In the same
year the National Cartoonists Society nominated him for
an award for TV animation. In 2002 SpongeBob SquarePants
earned the Television Critics Association award for best
children's program, and Hillenburg received the Statue
Award in film from the Princess Grace Foundation.
Hillenburg lives in Southern California with his wife, a
chef who teaches at a cooking school, and their
four-year-old son. His hobbies include surfing,
snorkeling, scuba diving, and making music with friends.
-- K.E.D.
Suggested
Reading: CBS News (on-line) Oct. 18, 2002, with photo;
Detroit News (on-line) Aug. 8, 2002; New York Times XIII
p59 July 29 2001, with photo; OC Metro (on-line) May 2,
2002; Orange County Register Lifestyle Feb. 13, 2002;
Teenwire (on-line) Feb. 22, 2002; Washington Post C p14
Oct. 15, 2001
 |
