Touch said:

CRUSTY CRAB PIZZA IS THE PIZZA FOR YOU AND MEEEEEEHEEEEEEEEEEE E E

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The Sarcastic Dude said:

CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!!! CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!

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Drymon: While we were trying to write the road trip storyboard, Steve came up with the idea of a starfish character. The original character was angry and had a huge chip on his shoulder because he was pink. He was the owner of a roadside bar that the guys went to on their trip and was a bully, but that didn’t last long.

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Lender: There was a sequence in “Neptune’s Spatula” [season 1] where SpongeBob is competing against King Neptune to see who can make the best Krabby Patty—all my gags were about SpongeBob doing things carefully and precisely, and when we were punching up the show before the pitch, Steve sat down on the floor and drew the bit where SpongeBob draws ketchup faces on the pickles, tucks them in under a blanket of cheese, and reads them a bedtime story. I saw that and knew why he was the boss.
He wasn’t possessed by the spirit, and he wasn’t some out-of-control goofball genius. He was incredibly patient. He listened. He thought things over. He drew slowly. He knew the gags were worthless unless they were hung on a story that meant something starring characters you cared about. But sometimes you’d catch him off guard with a gag and he’d chuckle, and you could see a little of that SpongeBob nervous energy under the surface.

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Williams: I like smaller stories, for two reasons. One, Steve really did want to keep the stories small. In certain ways, I didn’t really understand how to write small stories until I got to SpongeBob. We would write drafts, and Steve would say, “Smaller, smaller.” So I learned how to write these really tiny stories. The smaller they are, the more character moments you can have. The more time you can spend with their emotions. I think that is probably the most important thing in an outline: understanding what the character’s feeling and why. If the story doesn’t push the character to new places emotionally—and for a cartoon, to extreme places—I’m less interested. I think that’s where you get the greatest acting for the characters and the greatest gags, too. They all come from an emotional base.

I really think it’s tapping into how kids felt, and feel, really exploring it for 11 minutes, not just giving it a moment. I think a lot of cartoons gloss over that—it’s just action, action, action. And it doesn’t mean it can’t be visual. For instance, Paul Tibbitt came up with a gag that I thought was genius: SpongeBob is crying, which…in some ways, we always tried to get him to cry [laughter]. Every episode, we’d say, “How do we get SpongeBob to cry?” which is so different from any other show I’ve worked on, where it’s “our character has to be cool; he can’t cry!” I don’t remember what episode it was, but SpongeBob’s eyes were like a sprinkler, going tch tch tch [“Grandma’s Kisses,” season 2]. There were like seven sprinkler gags that Paul Tibbitt came up with, and they were all based on the fact that SpongeBob is crying and crying and crying. So it was taking the emotion and putting a silly gag on top of it. It totally works. That’s where I think this cartoon shines: when they took the little moments and milked them.

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Lender: Steve gave you the opportunities to do things that would really be memorable, if you could sell him on it. I campaigned for the Nosferatu gag at the end of “Graveyard Shift” [season 2], and he let me run with it. I drove all over town looking for books with scannable pictures of Count Orlok; I searched what little there was of the Web back then. I all but looked over Nick Jennings’ shoulder while he Photoshopped the smile on him to make sure it matched my board drawing. It was my baby, and I held its hand until we shipped it overseas. Hours and hours of my life over four seconds of screen time because it made me laugh.

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Drymon: Coming up with episode ideas was always tough. During the first season, we used up most of the story ideas that were in the bible, and so going into second season we had to figure out a way to generate new ones. One time we thought it would be a good idea to take the writers to the beach for inspiration, but when we got down there it was overcast and cold, so we had to stay in the car. We didn’t come up with too many ideas that day. Our story editor from the first season, Pete Burns, had left, and we brought on Merriwether Williams. I remember Steve told her it was her responsibility to get us to come up with new ideas, which is a tall order. She gave me a book called Zen and the Art of Writing, written by Ray Bradbury and was a collection of essays about the writing process. One of the ways he would inspire stories was to write nouns that interested him on a note card and hang them in his office. He felt just having the word in his eyesight would get his mind working. [Merriwether] took this idea and made it into a writing exercise. We would all write 10 nouns on small pieces of paper and put them in a hat. The hat would be passed around and you’d have a minute to scribble down an idea based on the noun you drew. It would almost always start a discussion, and we wound up getting a lot of episodes out of it. She really came up with a great addition to the process.

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Greenblatt: When we were storyboarding “Band Geeks,” we knew that we had to have a big number at the end where everyone rallies together for Squidward. The story outline called for making it a really great marching band sequence, and it usually helps to have the music ahead of time to board to, so we started searching around. Luckily, Nickelodeon happened to have a large library of royalty-free music we were allowed to use. We sat there listening to marching tune after marching tune and they all sort of sound the same. And the more we heard, it didn’t seem terribly funny that the finale was just them playing marching band music well. But nestled in among the traditional marching band tunes was this over-the-top, ’80s-style rock song called “Sweet Victory.” It was different than what we were looking for, but it was so amazing that we knew we had to use it. So we boarded the sequence to the music, and it felt like such a better ending than any song we could have written on our own. We even got to give it an ’80s jump freeze-frame ending. I think my favorite part was Aaron Springer’s drawings of Patrick on the electric drums. That and SpongeBob saying, “It’s the thrill of one more kill.”

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Lender: A lot of people suggested that SpongeBob was gay or gay-themed, but it’s not. SpongeBob’s just a kid—sex doesn’t exist for him. It’s completely outside his understanding and doesn’t motivate him in any way. So in “The Fry Cook Games” [season 2], when Pat and Sponge get buff, take off their shirts and wrestle—and strain against each other—it’s because their dumb kid-argument has finally erupted into physical conflict, not because they’re gay. And when they strip down to their underwear, it’s because underwear is just funny, not because they’re gay. And when they walk off into the sunset, mostly naked, hand in hand, it’s because they’re friends forever and love each other like friends should, not because they’re gay. That said, it’s pretty much the gayest episode ever.

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TheGreatDirector said:

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Touch said:

CRUSTY CRAB PIZZA IS THE PIZZA FOR YOU AND MEEEEEEHEEEEEEEEEEE E E

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The Sarcastic Dude said:

CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!!! CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!

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Perfect Cha0s said:

That picture is from the episode where he has to write about what not to do at a stop sign, OP.

For shame.

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Loudninja said:

EVIL

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WillyFive said:

Hillenburg's Spongebob run is one of the greatest comedy shows of all time. Hope he comes back one day to the show.

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