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deadcactuswalking · 2 years

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SPONGE DEFENSE: Episode 1

Over the years, the list of episodes of SpongeBob SquarePantsthat people hate has increased significantly, and thankfully, my friend FireLiz has provided a list of said episodes. These “ScumBobs”, these maligned 11-minutes, these odious episodes, are all set out in rough chronological order and I’m going to watch them all and give my thoughts in these three-piece meals of rambling cartoon thought every so often. We’ll do it in chronological order with sporadic updates and I pray that it doesn’t get too bad. SpongeBob reviewers on the Internet are always applying moral standards to SpongeBob that I don’t really understand – the show so willingly bends and rejects these ideas, why do you care for characters that are little more than analogies for vague archetypes? And especially why do you care for characters that are cartoon marine animals? In this column-type thing, I plan to look at SpongeBob in a different critical outlook, and we start with the most prized seasons of the show – the classic era, the Golden Age. Seasons one to three had some stinkers, and we’ve got one from each season to demonstrate as such. Are you ready, kids? Welcome to the first episode of Sponge Defense!

This episode is a tad longer than one would usually be – mostly thanks to the amount of explanation and exposition I’m having to do by covering three full seasons at once in a summary via the means of one episode and especially with the linking of these three episodes together by the same theme, so I can assure you that by the time all of the three episodes covered in a post are from season six or something, it’ll go by a bit quicker.

We tend to see the first few seasons of SpongeBob with rose-tinted glasses, with a sense of nostalgia in which we are able to ignore the mistakes and ignore what we now see as flaws in the series opening up. It’s like we seam the cracks closed with our memories, whatever that bullshit pretentious metaphor means. There’s not exactly no reason why fans of the series see these three as the best. Stephen Hillenburg was at the helm of season one’s imaginative charm and absurd creativity, season two’s quick wit and intrigue and season three’s willingness to experiment into new formats. These first three seasons weren’t just good but they were different, a unique blend of all of what had been mastered by Nickelodeon up to this point: the childlike naivety of Rugrats, real-life satire of Rocko’s Modern Life and batshit absurdity of Ren and Stimpy. Speaking of batshit absurdity…

#1. “I Was a Teenage Gary”

Season one is probably my favourite season of SpongeBob purely because of that early-instalment weirdness that I find fascinating to watch nowadays. It’s fluid and zany but also feels like it’s the crew just sticking different plot ideas and characterisations to the side of Patrick’s rock and seeing what doesn’t fly out when Patrick wakes up from his slumber. They established recurring characters in “Tea at the Treedome” and “Scaredy Pants”, but they also sent Squidward to a chromatic future in “SB-129” and nearly write a character it had only just introduced into the series out of the show in “Texas”. In season one of SpongeBob, Hillenburg and crew were already bending the very few proponents of the show they very briefly and vaguely introduced.The point is: the writers were still fumbling around and the characters as we know and love them now weren’t really in existence. This is why “I Was a Teenage Gary” – a morphing of these characters into entirely new, grotesque shapes – will be off-putting to us now, already familiar with these characters, their personalities and how we’d define each one. We’ll soon realise as we get later on into this series how truly little the writers care about the characteristics and conventions of, say, Squidward Tentacles, past shallow concepts that produce some kind of archetypical foundation that the writers can build up on. If said foundation is used as a base to make all of the characters snails, so be it – as long as it’s funny, they’ll draw it and send it to Nick. In that sense, I’d argue this is the inherent failure of the audience in any sense of the word: to care, to equate these creatures with anything more than their archetypes.

With that said, I’m not above anyone else and naturally I fall victim to those flaws as well, as an audience member. I found SpongeBob hugging Gary and saying he loves him really sweet and cute, but at the same time, I find Squidward’s dismissal of Gary to the point where he sees him as disgusting and can’t remember his name just as funny. The little time skip where Squidward says he can finally do everything he couldn’t do with SpongeBob around, and then showing him doing absolutely nothing over a time period of three days, shows the audience the motive of Squidward as having freedom yet also demonstrating how little that freedom is actually worth. By the time SpongeBob and Squidward have the interaction with the doctor, the episode is one of the series’ most surreal, and the concept of the doctor being completely freaking useless, and that a snail could be “fixed” with snail plasma, is one of my favourite jokes in the season. I like to think of SpongeBob’s snail transformation as the guilt Squidward feels for neglecting Gary, showing that when something is looming over you emotionally, it is a constant and the psyche, even when distracted, will always come back to it. That’s the main point of the series: to look at these characters as playthings to tell a fascinating and oddball story that gives insight not into the characters but into wider ideas, instead of looking at them as a consistent character that is unwillingly dropped into episodic situations that don’t fit them by writers. After all, throughout this whole episode, no one is working at the KrustyKrab – and we see how the restaurant can’t function without SpongeBob in other episodes, so within this one isolated 11 minutes, the KrustyKrab essentially doesn’t exist… and the episode is better off for it, so who cares?

#2. “Dumped”

Okay, so there’s one theme you’ll notice through these episodes, and that’s that they all include Gary the Snail as a major plot point. Why is that? Well, Gary isn’t really that interesting of a character to develop a full plot off of. He can’t talk so communication is always limited, he’s so slow since he’s a snail so he can’t go anywhere quickly. He relies purely on the guidance of the characters around him, which makes him kind of a moot, pet dog-like character but also gives possibilities for the writers to be very creative. Typically, there isn’t as much creativity as there is just straight-up cruelty to our poor snail, but we’ll get to that in later seasons… or in the next episode I review but that’s not just yet. Gary is a flat piece of bread and other characters decide how to prepare him, which is honestly kind of how the show treats everyone, but considering Gary has so little to the input, there’s no defence of Gary or really, any involvement of Gary. He’s like a clam or a Krabby Patty, or to compare it to other shows, Santa’s Little Helper in The Simpsons. He serves a low-effort purpose usually fulfilled, and characters usually fulfil their purpose onto Gary as well, but on the rare occasion that this balance is uneven, the narrative will develop around it. In “Dumped”, Gary’s purpose is to spend time with SpongeBob, but he’s spending more time with Patrick and through the simplest of premises, the episode is established.

So, we’re in season two now, so the show has established itself, its premise, its characters and its reason to exist pretty solidly – yet it does look worse as a result of digital colouring and animation that I don’t think has aged well as season one. It’s an odd complaint but if there’s one thing seasons two to three – or even four – suffer from, it’s the lack of organic cell animation with all the goofy smear frames and looney-style character movement. I think the digital art restricts it so much more and it’s a shame, although that probably emphasises the wittier dialogue-focal humour present from these years and there are still times where the seasons do look great for their time. Oh, and the titlecards are always fantastic, especially with how this one has the unnecessarily melodramatic piano music backing it.

I didn’t actually know this episode was hated until I got this list sent to me, and I had no idea why so I chalked it up to the fact that this is another “SpongeBob, Patrick and/or Squidward treat Gary badly” episode. Since we’ve decided that Gary is little but a commodity to the writers, I thought I wasn’t going to be bothered by this episode… yet I’m just not a fan of this one at all. Gary never really chased SpongeBob in the first place, Mr. SquarePants just found easy places to find when playing tag, and Gary slowly found him before going to Patrick. Since Gary is an item, I don’t see the point in SpongeBob’s frustration and therefore “DadMomAngryPants” just ends up as unlikeable, putting Patrick in the sane man position. Gary just wants to spend some time with Patrick because he’s a small pet who decided he wanted to be with Patrick, who’s treating him presumably just as well given the fun they’re having. The narrative in this case isn’t really that intriguing, especially since it’s only SpongeBob who’s irrational. Sure, that may be the point: that people can see betrayal in the tiniest, mundane, unimportant events in life, and that would be good if any of it were actually funny. It’s just a long slog of an episode to watch, and by the time that SpongeBob adopts Lary, it’s a complete meander and too much of the episode consists of SpongeBob yelling and crying in Tom Kenny’s most desperate rasp. How pathetic. See, the fact that the pay-off of him just wanting the cookie in Gary’s pocket – though it should have been hinted at earlier – would have made me enjoy the episode more knowing that the point of it is essentially to use SpongeBob as a humanisation of paranoia, but since Patrick also has an abrupt irrational reaction when Gary is separated from him, maybe it’s about how ALL humans are paranoid? I say “separated”, but neither character are ever really separated from Gary at all, since they live on the same street and SpongeBob and Patrick never stop being friends in the episode, so really there’s nothing to this episode aside from delusion.

#3. “The Great Snail Race”

Season three – the last season with Stephen Hillenburg’s direct involvement because to idiots, this defines where the show arbitrarily goes from “good” to “ScumBob” territory, as if the show developing, establishing and experimenting with the format is indebted to disrespecting the creator of the show rather than, you know, writing creatively. The beginning of this episode where Snellie is introduced is REALLY funny, like there are so many good lines from the interactions between SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward, and the close-up of Gary the “mutt” is really excellent. It really shows how easy this show is to watch when it’s actually funny – the episode feels like it’s half the length of “Dumped”. The running gag is what “The Great Snail Race” really loves to use, with a side dish of cynicism against the establishment. So many of SpongeBob’s lines in this first half are angry meta rambles about sexism, pseudo-science and overall just inequality that he seems so blissfully unaware of, and it’s a pretty fascinating watch. I’d say it’s out-of-character if the whole point of this series was to eradicate what “character” means in SpongeBob. The idea of Gary being inferior to Snellie because he watches cartoons and enjoys the little pleasures of working-class life whilst SpongeBob severely overworks him. Given that SpongeBob is obsessed with his own job, it makes sense for this capitalist routine to be ingrained into this absorbent, yellow, porous and brainwashed sponge’s head. Oh, and I love how Squidward has this false superiority complex just because he has a pedigree snail instead of a mutt, because Snellie is “bred” better than Gary, when in reality, Squidward isn’t any better – he didn’t even train Snellie as far as we know, just relying on the fact that she was “bred” into wealth and inherited perfection. He doesn’t even refer to Snellie by her name at the end, just the cost.

The whole climax where everyone in the audience essentially condemns SpongeBob’s overworking of Gary by being in shock from his eyes bursting and his shell shattering shows how that people indoctrinated into what “modern” western society looks and feels like are only ever surprised when the machine they sweat to keep running starts collapsing. Or, you know, it’s Funny Sponge. Patrick is so cute with Rocky and it’s good that in such an oddly dramatic and aggressive episode for the show, there is a great balance between the wholesome and the terrifying capitalist rhetoric because, come on, when it’s this spread out and this evident in the unsubtle writing, I can’t be looking TOO far deep into the narrative. Above all, it ends with a positive note: love knows not the separation of class or race, and truly has no boundaries. Peace and love for all… except of course, if you’re Sexist SpongeBob, who gets his butt rightfully and cleverly kicked by Sandy at the end of the episode.

Conclusion

Yeah, I get why people don’t like “Dumped” but I found myself really enjoying the other two episodes here, even if I generally agree that Gary isn’t a good character to base narratives off of. Oh, and anyone notice how no-one works at the KrustyKrab in any of these episodes? I guess SpongeBob and Squidward are on zero-hour contracts, except in this case quite literally. For our one pre-movie romp this series will have – we’re into season four and beyond from now on – I think this went well. Thanks for reading my rambles on Funny Sponge and I’ll see you whenever I decide to spend an hour writing about how children’s cartoons involving sea creatures criticise the establishment through snail races. Sponge defended.

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