Like many other kids raised on the cusp of Y2K, too young to understand 90s coming-of-age sitcoms and too old for Max and Ruby – I inadvertently absorbed many of my social cues and situational problem solving from the next most educational source, Spongebob Squarepants. A living, breathing invertebrate who lived in a pineapple under the sea – just like us – the young sponge was an deacon of hope for the socially awkward. A cheerful and sociable fellow, Bob was ever-present on one of two Nick channels (east and west coast respectively, I believe) after school. With his many friends around Bikini Bottom, he was always cracking jokes, getting into goofy gaffes, and helping out his seafaring comrades without complaint. However, with rainbows come rain and with a sponge comes the mess he was created to clean up. Here we dive into the realm of secondhand social anxieties Spongebob Squarepants triggered in tiny, unmedicated me.
The first episode of Spongebob I ever saw was, of course, “Mid Life Crustacean”. For those who have not memorized the entirety of the 14 season discography, I will provide a brief but jarring summary. In this episode, Spongebob, a grown adult, along with his best friend (also a grown adult) encourage Spongebob’s boss (an even older, presumably more mature, grown adult) to embark on a harmless “panty raid” only to learn their lesson when they find that the panty drawer they have raided is that of Mr. Krabs’ elderly mother. This is a perfectly natural episode arc for a Y-7 animated children’s show. The only time I have ever encountered the phrase “panty raid” over the past 20 years has been in discourse over the collective childhood damage after this episode’s release.
Shockingly, my parents had no issue with my sister and I continuing to watch the show after this.
The panty raid incident pairs well with a few other Krabs-centric episodes that targeted a very specific childhood fear of mine. Authority. Without recapping entire episodes for the remainder of this write-up, I’ll pare down the offenders to the most anxiety-inducing element of the episode ala Friends. In “The One where they get paint all over Mr. Krabs’ house” and “The One when it’s Pearl’s birthday and they max out Mr. Krabs’ credit card”, we see a clear pattern of disobedience and dishonesty. Sponge does a goof, sponge tries to hide goof, sponge develops elaborate plan to appease crab, crab gets angry. As a maliciously obedient child, this was absolutely absurd to me. Why would anyone ever lie? Why would anyone attempt to hide a lie? Was Spongebob unaware that lying would land him in Hell? Was Bikini Bottom lacking an evangelical institute to edify the sea dwellers of their mortal sins? These were the burning questions on my pliable young mind.
Additionally, did Krabs on occasion remind me of my mother? Perhaps.
Before we descend to Hell, we hit Rock Bottom. This is a place Spongebob is intimately familiar with, but only after learning to speak the dialect of the strange and unwelcoming people. As an adult, I watch this episode (yes, I do still watch Spongebob) and see a complex allegory of xenophobia and border tensions. Miscommunications abound in these dark 12 minutes, and we learn that neither Sponge nor the Rock Bottomites are the villain of the story.
Perhaps the true villain is the system that limits access to the outer-Metro regions of the Bottom, limiting employment opportunities, the local economy, and resources for the inhabitants and therefore alienating an entire community of hard-working fish folk!
Yes, so as a kid, “Rock Bottom” made me anxious because I was from a very small town and had never ridden nor even seen public transportation before and I was very scared of getting lost. Put me out in the wild, give me a stick to whack away the rattlers, and a bottle of water and I’d be set for hours. Leave me for 10 minutes in a grocery store alone and I was on the verge of a meltdown. Take a different route home from school than we usually drove? Absolutely not. My mental map could simply not take the devastation of deviation from the route. Lord forbid anyone ever try to put me on a bus! I could not believe that Spongebob not only got on the wrong bus, he ended up in the wrong neighborhood and had to talk to people he did not know and did not understand to get home. As a shy kid (who was also mute for a personality-defining amount of time), that was quite literally a nightmare.
This is fun and relatable! Next!
There is an episode where a bunch of nematodes eat Spongebob’s pineapple home and he has to move back in with his parents, leaving behind all his friends and neighbors. In a very moving scene, right before driving away for the last time, he cries a tear that drips from his schlongy nose and waters a single pineapple seed which immediately grows into a fully-furnished, turnkey pineapple fit for a bachelor. As an adult, being forced against my will to move back in with my parents does scare me still. (No offense, Mom and Dad but you also do not want me back. I am a nightmare and now I’m nearly 6 feet tall.) As a child, this plot scared me because I did live with my parents and we did move a lot. By the time I was 18 and graduating from high school, I had lived in 13 different houses in 6 different cities. I did not like moving. As you can guess from the above paragraphs, I was not great at reaching out and making friends. I wasn’t great at embracing change. I felt for Spongebob in this scene, moving was scary and it was messy and it was ok to cry. I cried a lot! I still cry a lot and unfortunately I do still move a lot. I still don’t like moving. I hope to change that – I just resigned a lease to stay in my apartment for the second year in a row. Nature is healing.
There are recurring bits throughout most seasons of the show where Spongebob continues to fail his driver’s test. Funny, yes. As someone who did bombastically fail her driver’s test the first time she took it, I also feel represented in media. Watching this as a kid though, I simply felt test anxiety and secondhand fear of failure for poor Sponge. I couldn’t understand why poor boy would not simply study or drive… better.
Doodlebob? Objectively scary. I don’t feel that I have to go into this any further.
It’s deeply engrained in the Squarepants lore that “Where’s Gary” is a masterpiece of an episode. The musical score, the emotional arc, and the relationship developments are all so beautiful and necessary to the maturation of our beloved show. We see tension between our main character and his (other half?), something that is otherwise never addressed directly but palpable across all episodes. Losing Gary broke the heart of our nation. We all felt Spongebob’s grief. Collectively, we mourned the end of a relationship. We feared for Gary’s wellbeing and we pitied Spongebob’s desperation to find the mollusk. I was 8 years old when this episode first-aired and I remember the ad campaign. For weeks prior to the big event, we knew that something unpleasant was going to happen to our favorite snail and we feared for the worst. Would this be when Spongebob Squarepants inevitably jumped the shark? There were already sharks in the show, it was bound to happen at some point. Plenty of popular shows in this era killed off popular characters for popularity, ratings, buzz – whatever it took to stay relevant in this competitive new online world. Would They Kill Gary? It was the question of the hour, and hours felt like forever when you’d only been conscious for a few years.
Gary going missing just made me stress about my pets also going missing. If the slowest moving possible critter could somehow run away and get lost, I didn’t even want to think about my horses, goats, chickens, cats, dogs, guinea pig… my fish!
It also tied in beautifully to my lifelong fear of abandonment. (For any future partners of mine, I am absolutely, totally over this one. Healed! Fine! Good.)
The last episode we’ll touch on here is “The One where Mr. Krabs milked the jellies for profit”. Quite simply, this episode was animated really spookily and Krabs was mean to the jellyfish and I felt bad for them. As a young little squirt this combination rallied for the birth of my fear of capitalism.
(Author’s note: I originally thought that it was Plankton who was harvesting the jellies in this episode but after further research I have humbly amended my initial statement and apologize for any Plankton slander I committed in my past. I will be better.)
If you have never seen Spongebob Squarepants, I highly recommend you start with these episodes!
- “Mid Life Crustacean” Season 3, Episode 15
- “Wet Painters” Season 3, Episode 10
- “Whale of a Birthday” Season 4, Episode 11
- “Rock Bottom” Season 1, Episode 17
- “Home Sweet Pineapple” Season 1, Episode 5
- “Frankendoodle” Season 2, Episode 14
- “Where’s Gary?/Have You Seen this Snail?” Season 4, Episode 3
- “Jellyfish Hunter” Season 2, Episode 19
If you have never been to therapy or are not financially able to invest in therapy at this point in your life – see list of Spongebob episodes above!
All jokes aside, I did truly love Spongebob growing up and do still watch occasional episodes and clips. It was honestly such a defining cartoon for our generation and one of the few shows that both my sister and I watched together and were able to bond over with her being 13 years older than me. It was a show that was appropriate for littles like me but still funny to teenagers and entertaining to adults (despite early season characters being fairly annoying). The Spongebob Movie was the first movie I ever saw in theaters. My sister and I saw it together the night that it came out, it was a school night and we drove an hour to see it in Ventura (the big city!) because our local theater was way too small to host a blockbuster like that. We had such a fun night and it was such a stupid movie and we watched it dozens of times as a family before I moved out. The only reason I have any clue about David Hasselhoff’s existence is thanks to the iconic boob rocket scene and I am forever grateful for that core childhood memory.
Thanks, Spongebob, for the trauma and the memories.
pro-whimsy agenda 