He’s absorbent, yellow, porous, bucktoothed - and beloved. SpongeBob SquarePants, the animated, dorkily dressed sponge with a big heart who lives in a pineapple house at the bottom of the sea in Bikini Bottom, has been on Nickelodeon since 1999. Stephen Hillenburg, who passed in November 2018, was a marine biology educator who created SpongeBob (known first as “Bob the Sponge”) in the 1980s as a teaching tool, then brought his saltwater menagerie to Nickelodeon. SpongeBob has since starred in feature films and even a Broadway musical.
Managing to delight both kid and adult fans, SpongeBob and his aquatic pals continue to entertain us with their underwater antics, thanks in large part to the talented actors who voice the characters. As Tom Kenny, the longtime voice of SpongeBob, told Den of Geek, “When I step into that booth, I really feel like I am SpongeBob for a few hours. I think like him, I talk like him, I'm him, until I leave the recording booth.”
It’s the same, he said, for the other actors, including Bill Fagerbakke as Patrick Star, SpongeBob's lovably dumb starfish pal who lives under a rock; Rodger Bumpass as Squidward Tentacles, his grumpy octopus (not squid) co-worker and neighbor; Clancy Brown as Mr. Krabs, his greedy boss; Carolyn Lawrence as Sandy Cheeks, the cowgirl squirrel scientist; and many others.
Among other SpongeBob fan theories, one of the more entertaining suggests that the characters on the show even represent the Seven Deadly Sins. Watching SpongeBob SquarePants, however, is still a pretty wholesome pastime. If you've ever wondered what the actors look like who play your favorite animated marine animals (or in the case of Karen Plankton, a computer), dive in for a look at the talent behind the denizens of the deep and patrons of the Krusty Krab.
