TV - Sponge Bob Square Pants

☻☻☻☻☺

(four smiley faces out of five)

Sponge Bob Square Pants is a cartoon airing on the Nickelodeon networks that’s enjoyed by kids and parents aged four and up. (Wait; what?) Now, I’ve met a few people who don’t care for Sponge Bob, but most people with even the smallest speck of a sense of humor genuinely enjoy watching this cartoon with their kids.

Sponge Bob Square Pants centers on a little square yellow sponge (named Sponge Bob, obviously) who lives in Bikini Bottom (are you cracking a smirk yet?) with his pet snail that sounds like a cat and his dimwitted best friend Patrick the pink star fish. Sponge Bob works as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab for his notoriously cheap boss Mr. Krabs—whose daughter, oddly enough, is a whale—(and by the way, I LOVE this running gag in Sponge Bob because they NEVER explain why Pearl is a whale or who Pearl’s mother is or was). Sponge Bob works alongside Squidward, a grumpy, artistically frustrated squid who also happens to be Sponge Bob’s neighbor. But the main antagonist in Sponge Bob is Plankton, a really, really tiny, green, evil genius who owns a competing restaurant in Bikini Bottom—the Chumbucket—and is married to his computer wife, Karen.

(Can you even believe how *&$@ing crazy this cartoon sounds? Can I fit any more parentheses into this review?)

Some of the best episodes of Sponge Bob are as good as any of the best episodes of the old Looney Toons cartoons. The writing is witty and fresh and far superior to almost every other cartoon being made right now. The story lines are deliciously clever and sometimes border on the brink of insanity.

I’d give this cartoon five smiley faces out of five if the quality hadn’t started to fall off a bit a couple of years ago. But Nick has to keep churning out new episodes because Sponge Bob is so gosh-darned popular and makes more money than a chastity belt salesman at a Promise Keepers convention.

Of course, if you’re an extremely straight-laced person with a strict moral code, then there will definitely be material in Sponge Bob to offend you and you should avoid it at all costs. There is also a danger of your kid becoming seriously addicted to Sponge Bob, and eventually, you might start to get tired of it, as Nickelodeon keeps it in heavy rotation.

Overall, though, Sponge Bob gets a huge thumbs-up from everyone in our household and most of our friends with kids’ households.