If you’re an OG fan of SpongeBob SquarePants—which celebrated its 20th anniversary this July—you can likely can pinpoint exactly when the quality dropped off: the start of Season 4.
As Nickelodeon’s longest-running original series—with 247 episodes in its twelfth season, two feature-length films, and a brief Broadway stint—it’s no surprise that the show hit a lull. After all, we’ve seen it with plenty of other popular series. But it happened woefully early on for SpongeBob, making it so that the show has been bad for longer than it’s been good.
Luckily, those first three seasons were so good that it almost doesn’t matter, because they were so high-quality that they far outweigh the other nine.
The decline didn’t happen out of nowhere. Fearing the show would become repetitive, creator Stephen Hillenburg and many of the other original writers left at the end of Season 3 following the 2004 release of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. And while the new writers, led by Paul Tibbitt, tried to maintain the style and sense of humor that Hillenburg and his team instilled, the show ended up ultimately falling flat.
The new writers opted for a more kid-friendly humor, isolating the older fans who tuned in for Hillenburg’s signature wit and sarcasm. The series ultimately went the way of many Nickelodeon cartoons, full of a) screaming characters having meltdowns over minute issues that are easily resolved within the 11-minute episode and b) unnecessary and cringey toilet humor, both of which are the marks of a failing Nickelodeon show.
The new episodes also incorporated more slapstick humor, and each character became a caricature of their original: SpongeBob became immature, Patrick was dumbed down to a point where it was difficult for him to do anything, and Squidward was the butt of every joke and the target of all physical pain.
Hillenburg did briefly return in 2015 with the franchise’s second film, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water. Unfortunately, the series never fully recovered, since it had already mostly lost all of its initial fans.
Hillenburg was diagnosed with ALS in 2017, and though he said he would continue to work on the series throughout his diagnosis, he passed away from heart failure brought on by the ALS in 2018.
However, the first three seasons remain cherished favorites for devoted fans who want to jump right back into the hilarity. Hillenburg created a Nickelodeon legacy with SpongeBob, and while others can try to match that wit and cleverness, it’s the originals that will remind us that, no, mayonnaise is not an instrument.
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