“Unmasking the Undersea Phenomenon: The Surprising Secrets Behind SpongeBob SquarePants’ Creation!”
Sadly, a dark cloud passed over the animation world at the end of November 2018 when it was announced that Hillenburg had passed away in his home at the too-young age of 57. The following day, his ashes were appropriately scattered in the Pacific Ocean.
Steven Hillenburg Was A Marine Biologist
Stephen Hillenburg didn’t create SpongeBob SquarePants out of the blue. In fact, Hillenburg had a long relationship with the ocean. Hillenburg was an actual marine biologist before he went into animation and he even got a degree in natural resource planning with an emphasis on marine resources.
He taught Marine Biology at the Orange County Marine Institute, where he created a comic book called The Intertidal Zone that featured an early iteration of SpongeBob. It was just enough to reignite Hillenburg’s passion for animation, so he went back to school to study experimental animation at CalArts.
A Sponge By Any Other Name
Today we know him as SpongeBob SquarePants and you can’t really imagine his name as anything else. But before he was “SpongeBob,” Hillenburg actually called his porous main character “SpongeBoy.”
That name wasn’t going to work out, however, since the name was already copyrighted by a mop company. Hillenburg settled on SpongeBob, making sure to include “sponge” in the name so that kids wouldn’t mistake him for a block of cheese! Coincidentally, in his comic, The Intertidal Zone, Hillenburg had a sponge character named Bob.
