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| Look, an image from "Procrastination"—an episode I will not be talking about! |
Hi! My name is Dax. I’ve written on the internet about various shows for almost a decade now, but there’s something that I’ve always wanted to cross off my ever-expanding list of things to write about: SpongeBob SquarePants! Yes, he of the pineapple under the sea, of an absorbent and yellow and porous quality! And you might be thinking… really? Hasn’t everyone talked about this show enough? Haven’t we all jointly agreed that the show is a cultural juggernaut which, in its heyday, yielded some of the highest-quality children’s animated programming of all time? We have, and I acknowledge that! But get this: I’m not here to talk about that era of the show.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the debut of Season 4, and I have an interest in talking about this post-classic period of SpongeBob for a lot of reasons. One: while I’m incredibly familiar with the show’s earliest years as someone who spent their childhood glued to Nickelodeon (it was legitimately the only channel I watched for at least a decade, for some reason!), Season 4 was the first season of the show—let alone any television—that I actively followed along with, tuning in for every new episode and anticipating the specials as if they were must-see television. And two: while I don’t want to say that Season 4 onwards gets an exclusively bad rap, I’ve found myself constantly disappointed by how dismissive people are of it within online discourse.
To clarify: I don’t disagree that Seasons 1-3 was the best time for the show. I think that’s pretty undeniable. But over and over again, I’ve seen everything that follows being disrespected, slighted, or not taken into account. It’s strange to think that the vast majority of the show’s timeline could be so readily written off, let alone generalized as “THE BAD YEARS,” “SCUMBOB,” or whatever other clickbaity terminology the bulk of online SpongeBob critics have used as their lens for analysis. I’ve always been very dissatisfied with that. The show is far from consistently brilliant, but an episode of television, no matter how good or bad, is a colossal effort. I think that commands respect, and while I can’t always approach the show kindly—I’ll get out of the way right now that yes, there are some very dispiriting episodes of the show—I want to approach it with curiosity, patience, and a willingness to follow along with the show as its identity changes and evolves. I want to rise above that toxicity; I think I can do the show better than that.
So every week, I will be publishing a review of each episode pair, starting with “Fear of a Krabby Patty / Shell of a Man!” I hope you join me on this journey of the good, the bad, and the splinter—which spoiler alert, I don’t think is the worst. It’ll be an interesting ride!
Also, as a minor bit of house-keeping: the airing order of the episodes, compared to the official production order, is a complete mess. And then there’s also a completely different packaging order, which has dictated how the season is organized in official releases. Why? I have no idea; episodic shows like this can get very messy, and Nick was never above doing weird curations to try to get as much juice out of certain episodes as possible with hyped-up events and specials that, quite frankly, feel like they were produced under duress. For the sake of simplicity, I will be following along with the packaging order, AKA how the episodes are ordered on both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia SpongeBobia.
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