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Year: 2010
Genre: Kids, Cartoon, TV series
Country: United States
Language: English
Starring: Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence, Clancy Brown
Director: Paul Tibbitt
DVD distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment
In his time on the air, Spongebob Squarepants has become more than just a festively flamboyant cartoon sea sponge. He is a cultural icon, as famous as Tom Cruise and as bonkers as Charlie Sheen. I was watching Bill O’Reilly interviewing Ernest Borgnine on The O’Reilly Factor the other night. O’Reilly likes to interview people who can tell him the old days were better and that old-time actors were tougher and that America peaked in 1957. Mostly ’cause he’s an idiot. But he has to make his interview relevant to the present day in some way. So how to make Borgnine relevant? Spongebob! After all, he voices Mermaid Man on the show, so he MUST still be cool with kids.
Bill O’Reilly’s cultural cluelessness aside, Spongebob does, in a sense, represent the peak of children’s TV shows, at least to this point. There is something amazing about a kids’ cartoon show when I am totally willing to go to the grocery store wearing my Spongebob pyjamas. No other kids cartoon that I can remember has that kind of counter-intuitive appeal. I would never go shopping in my Transformers T-shirt or my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bathrobe. And no matter how many cheesy board games or lunchboxes or snow-globes pop up bearing Spongebob’s smiling face, he implausibly remains awesome.
Now, Paramount Home Entertainment is coming out with yet another Spongebob DVD, in a long and redundant series of Spongebob DVDs, to give the masses the Spongebob fix they just can’t get from television. Unless they have a PVR. Or Nickelodeon. Or YTV. This one is called The Great Patty Caper, which is also the first episode on the disc. It’s a pretty cool episode, involving a stolen key, the krabby patty formula, and a suspenseful train ride straight out of so many murder mystery movies.
After that episode, there are several more that involve Plankton trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula. As he always does. Really, this could be Plankton’s DVD as much as it is Spongebob’s – they have about the same amount of screen time. With the exception of a weird episode where Spongebob becomes a model, and one where Mr. Krabs’ Daugther Pearl (who is, for some reason, a whale) goes through a growth spurt and must be fed, Plankton is in all the others scheming after the formula.
Which could make this show formulaic…haha. Get it? And of course, after so many years, Spongebob can’t help but be a little formulaic. But it somehow doesn’t matter. Spongebob somehow remains cool. He’s on TV, and on DVD, and on the news and in opinion shows and on my pyjamas. And he will remain there, I imagine, for the forseeable future.