The Intertidal Zone

Stephen Hillenburg made SpongeBob SquarePants and died at 57 from ALS.

He came to animation from marine biology—studied it at Humboldt State, then went to CalArts for experimental animation. He worked at an ocean institute and drew a comic called The Intertidal Zone. He showed it to Martin Olson, who’d worked on Rocko’s Modern Life, and they developed it into a show they could pitch.

The pilot aired May 1, 1999. SpongeBob moved into a pineapple under the sea and got a job at a fast-food restaurant, and somehow this became one of the most durable things in pop culture. Twenty years later it’s still there—kids watching it, movies and spin-offs and everything else. The show kept going long after Hillenburg.

What gets me is the specificity of it. SpongeBob is absurd but grounded. The world follows its own logic. The jokes work because he committed completely. That doesn’t happen by accident. He had this weird combination of actual knowledge and genuine imagination, and he knew how to use both without letting it become precious or self-aware.

ALS is cruel in that particular way—someone whose work was entirely hand-driven, visual, kinetic. But he made something that survived him. The character keeps going, the show keeps going, the memes keep going. Hillenburg becomes something that happened to SpongeBob, and SpongeBob becomes this fixed fact in the culture.

I’m trying not to get sentimental about it. He made something dumb and perfect, and then he died, and it kept existing without him. Which is beautiful and brutal in exactly the way these things are.