A square, yellow invertebrate as the next television hero? Who'd have guessed it?
Stephen Hillenburg, for one. ''I wanted to do a show about a character that was an innocent, and so I focused on a sea sponge because it's a funny animal, a strange one,'' said Mr. Hillenburg (right), the creator and executive producer of the Nickelodeon series ''SpongeBob Square-Pants.'' ''I thought he was a funny, nerdy, squeaky-clean square.''
''SpongeBob Square-Pants'' (now shown Mondays through Thursdays at 8 p.m. in addition to its Saturday morning time slots at 10 and 10:30) has clawed its way through the algae to become the second most popular children's show on television. (''Rugrats'' is the first.) Only it's not just the children who are watching.
Adults -- including celebrities like Bruce Willis and Rob Lowe -- are also fond of the naive and unflinchingly optimistic sponge who foils his more cynical neighbors in Bikini Bottom, where the Krusty Krab greasy spoon is a social mecca and home-sweet-home is a two-story pineapple.
Mr. Hillenburg, 39, is no stranger to the watery underworld. After graduating from college with a natural science degree, he worked at the Orange County Marine Institute, explaining to budding biologists the subtleties of life in the deep blue sea.
Several years later, he switched career paths, and by 1992 he had gained a master's degree in experimental animation from the California Institute of the Arts.
Aftermaking several independent animated films, he went to work on the Nickelodeon animated series ''Rocko's Modern Life,'' for which he acted as the creative director for the show's final season.
''It finally dawned on me that if I was going to do my own show, all those things I lectured about and obsessed about would make for an interesting world,'' Mr. Hillenburg said.
So he summoned the invertebrates: SpongeBob; his best friend, Patrick Starfish; Mr. Krabs, SpongeBob's boss and the greedy owner of the Krusty Krab; and Squidward Tentacles, its creativity-stifled waiter. The result is an amalgam of science and whimsy that recently propelled the series into prime time -- a reaction that Mr. Hillenburg finds only a little surprising.
''I think we all thought the show would be good, but I didn't ever assume it would catch on in a mass audience sort of way,'' he said. ''That's unexpected, and we're flattered and relieved.''
''Our characters act silly, even totally ridiculous at times, and most of our jokes don't come out of pop cultural references,'' he added. ''It seems like we're aiming at a child audience, but everyone can laugh at the basic human traits that are funny. It's playful, the humor is playful, the world is playful. You can kind of let go.''
Kathryn Shattuck
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