Like many kids growing up in the early 2000s, I remember watching and enjoying the cartoon "Spongebob Squarepants" on a regular basis. To this day my friends and I can still quote hilarious and memorable moments from classic episodes such as "Band Geeks", "Chocolate With Nuts", "The Bully", and "The Fry Cook Games."
Spongebob had a large presence in our early lives, which makes it extremely painful to watch it fall from that glory in recent years. For the last few years many have noticed that the show has had a drastic decline in writing quality. For the longest time, I couldn't quite put my finger on what the newer seasons were doing wrong compared to the older ones. After thinking on it recently I think I may have found the answer I was looking for.
Despite the fact that the show was aimed at children, the show focused on many adult aspects of life such as getting a job, learning how to drive, and dealing with neighbors. The show also had somewhat of a cynical edge when it came to the jokes, which helped make them funnier. The show also featured spot-on comedic timing and no joke felt like it ran too long or too short.
Like many of the great Nickelodeon cartoons of that era, the show mixed clever and sometimes subtle jokes with somewhat adult themes hidden under the surface. This mix is what launched the cartoon to the success and led to a feature film, simply named "The Spongebob Squarepants Movie", being released in 2004. After the film's release, however, is when the problems started to arise.
Many mark season 4, the season after the film, as the beginning of the decline. While the season is still good overall, you start to notice that many of the issues that plagued later seasons, poor comic timing and the loss of its the clever cynical edge, began to appear in this season.
As the seasons went on the problems got worse and worse which ultimately led me to stop watching the show altogether. The show lost the edge and cleverness that allowed it to gain an adult audience and devolved into a generic "kids show" that feature pandering baby humor. Rather than having a clever level of cynicism, the show became downright mean-spirited at points (to see proof of this watch how the character Patrick goes from a lovable idiot to a downright insensitive, careless jerk).
The loss of those two aspects are what ultimately affected my enjoyment of the show. The jokes didn't seem that clever and they would often drag an already unfunny joke on for minutes which would just make it grating to watch.
Many of these problems seem to have started after the show's creator, Stephen Hillenburg, left as the executive producer of the show shortly after the first movie. It seems like much of the creative drive and clever writing that the show had seems to have left with him. The seasons that played during the late 2000s and early 2010s ranged from tolerably generic to unwatchable garbage, such as "Big Sister Sam", "One Coarse Meal", and "Earworm".
The most recent film, "The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water", saw the return of Stephen Hillenburg as one of the writers, which helped amplify the films comedic quality. Stephen has also returned as executive producer of the show as of season 10. Even though I have not watched season 10, I have heard some decent things, I hopefully this could mark the beginning of the show's return to its former glory.
However, the show has quite an uphill battle to face when it comes to winning back the older fans. The show currently finds itself in the same position that "The Simpsons" does (a show past its prime, yet still goes on and on). Hopefully the show can return to some level of quality and can, eventually, end with some kind of dignity.
