SpongeBob SquarePants’ celebrates 10 years of nautical nonsense

It’s a recipe as tasty as the one for a Krabby Patty: Take one naive yellow sponge with a disposition so sunny that he makes Pollyanna seem like an old grouch and dress him in a pair of square pants. Season with some crazy characters, including a grumpy octopus named Squidward, the dumber-than-driftwood starfish Patrick, the penny-pinching crustacean Mr. Krabs and a meowing snail named Gary. Sweeten with a touch of innocence and toss in a dash of edgy humor for the grown-ups and, voila!, you’ve got “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

And with all those makings for a hit, “SpongeBob” has been wearing the pants for 10 years when it comes to animation domination. Now Bikini Bottom’s master fry cook and those Krabby Patties are about to get super-sized. To mark “SpongeBob’s” 10th anniversary, Nickelodeon and sister channel VH1 are throwing a massive celebration that would even put a smile on Squidward’s face.

Not that the show hadn’t made a few ripples before this. It’s been the No. 1 show with kids ages 2 to 11 for seven consecutive years and typically draws an average of 70 million viewers each month. Nickelodeon has soaked up a lot of cash with this sponge in the forms of everything from SpongeBob macaroni and cheese to SpongeBob underwear, and a 2004 feature film that raked in $118 million. It’s even got the president’s seal of approval. Last summer, when Barack Obama was on the campaign trail, he told TV Guide that his favorite TV character of all time is the lovable sponge “because ‘SpongeBob’ is the show I watch with my daughters.”

From the start, the show’s quirky blend of innocence and edginess was irresistible, though it took some time to grow on viewers. “In conventional wisdom in the world of cable cartoons, you do about 52 half-hours and that’s enough. By then, there’s enough of a backlog,” says Kenny. “By the time a kid sees every episode X amount of times, they will have moved onto something else and then the next generation will watch them. For the first year or two we were on, no one really paid much attention to us. Then about the third year, we suddenly started seeing the show hit the radar and grow and become a part of pop culture, and that was another of those high-five moments.”

“What makes the show funny is that SpongeBob is always doing the right thing while driving everyone else around him crazy.

What I’m most proud of is that kids still really like it and care about it,” Kenny says. “They eagerly await new episodes. People who were young children when it started 10 years ago are still watching it and digging it and think it’s funny. That’s the loving cup for me.”