A biography for Stephen Hillenburghasn’t been written yet.
“In the '70s, as a kid, someone took me to a Tournee of Animation festival at the L.A. County Museum of Art.”
“A sponge is a funny animal to center a show on. At first, I drew a few natural sponges - amorphous shapes, blobs - which was the correct thing to do biologically as a marine science teacher. Then I drew a square sponge, and it looked so funny.”
“I just kind of figured that the marine biology would be a career, and the art would be something I did for my own self-expression.”
“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.”
“I drew these natural sponges for a while and gave them googly eyes, and it didn't come together until I drew a sink sponge one day. I thought, 'This is the guy.' He's the square peg, literally, in this world of animals.”
“We wanted the humor to come from the characters and their world - you go down there to escape the world up here for a while. So when the crew would write jokes that would refer to American TV or culture, I'd just eliminate them because it just seemed odd that SpongeBob would know about it.”