Rant #2,269: Way Down

I didn't oversleep that badly this morning, maybe 20 minutes or so, so compared to the previous morning, that wasn't bad.

I woke up to find out that Stephen Hillenburg died at a really young age--57 years old--and that made me kind of sad.

If you have had any children born during the past 20 years or so--I have one, my son--you know exactly who Hillenburg was, and how he made your kids's lives just a little bit brighter with his creative spark.

Hillenburg was the creator of the world of SpongeBob SquarePants, the cartoon creature who lives under the sea and with his gaggle of aquatic characters, enthused millions of kids during the past two decades or so.

In fact, I would say that along with Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, his cartoon creation was probably the most popular and influential over those decades.

Hillenburg, who had motor neurone disease, or ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig disease, had been diagnosed with the ailment about a year and a half ago, and he succumbed to it yesterday.

The Nickelodeon Network had shown "SpongeBob SquarePants" cartoons since the late 1990s, and the character--and his other mates of Bikini Bottom--became the animated standard bearers of the network during that time.

The cartoons featuring SpongeBob were witty, not necessarily written for kids but enjoyed by them, and featured a number of big-name and small-name stars who were part of the action, ranging from Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine to "Baywatch" denizen David Hasselhoff.

The show was so popular that not only has it spawned a whole universe of SpongeBob SquarePants products--everything from apparel to videos to CDs--but it also was developed into a few movies and a Tony Award-winning Broadway show, and it is certainly one of the most popular cartoons directly developed for TV in the past 50 years or so.

For the uninitiated, it is truly difficult to describe the world of Bikini Bottom that SpongeBob SquarePants inhabits, but to sum it up in a nutshell, the residents of the undersea world feel, experience and deal with the same problems we have on land--everything from anxiety, workplace disputes, good versus bad and romance, but they do it in a comedic style that both kids and adults can enjoy.

This is real G-rated entertainment, and it is handled in such an adult way that it goes beyond that rating, and is actually rated "F" for fun.

I can think of no better way to describe this world, and Hillenburg injects almost every episode with some type of cultural reference that might be above young kids' heads but certainly not the adults watching.

Where did Hillenburg's vision come from? Reports are that the basic ideas for the undersea world populated by SpongeBob actually came to the fore in an unpublished comic book that he created in 1989, an educational tome called "The Intertidal Zone" that he used in the classroom as an educator,

Hillenburg first worked on "The Rugrats" cartoon series, and also worked on "Rocko's Modern Life," and 10 years after his vision came to view, Nickelodeon gave the go ahead to "SpongeBob SquarePants," and 200 episodes later, the rest is pretty much history.

The series has won numerous awards, including four Emmy Awards, and its characters--not just SpongeBob but also Mr. Crabbs and Patrick Star, among many others--have endeared themselves to both kids and adults the world over.

Hillenburg will definitely be missed, but his creation will seemingly live on forever.

With Mickey Mouse recently celebrating his own 90th anniversary, there is no reason to think that SpongeBob himself can't reach that age, too, in the future.

Let's all go to the Krusty Krab and discuss this possibility over a nice lunch prepared by the main fry cook there ...

SpongeBob SquarePants, of course!