Stephen Hillenburg, ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Creator, Dies at 57

Stephen Hillenburg, a former marine biology teacher who created a children’s show that ballooned into an unlikely cultural phenomenon, “SpongeBob SquarePants,” died on Monday at his home in Southern California. He was 57.

Mr. Hillenburg announced last year that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative condition known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Nickelodeon, the channel that has been the show’s home since its premiere in May 1999, announced his death.

“Steve imbued ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ with a unique sense of humor and innocence that has brought joy to generations of kids and families everywhere,” the network said in its statement. “His utterly original characters and the world of Bikini Bottom will long stand as a reminder of the value of optimism, friendship and the limitless power of imagination.”

Bikini Bottom is the underwater home of the show’s title character, a good-natured yellow kitchen sponge, or sea creature, or both, who works as a fry cook, has a pet snail and lives in a pineapple. 

With its frenetic 11-minute episodes (two per show), “SpongeBob” proved irresistible to the 12-and-under crowd, and eventually to many much older fans as well.

“Those 11-minute episodes of Hawaiian-slacker whimsy,” the critic David Edelstein wrote in The New York Times in 2004, “set against flower-cloud backdrops inspired by Polynesian fabrics and punctuated by ukulele music and SpongeBob’s dolphin-on-a-sugar-high chortle, have made Nickelodeon’s ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ a phenomenon not only with little kids, but also with big kids, college students, stoners, gays — pretty much everyone who walks on land or shells out, so to speak, for the tie-in merchandise.”

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[Read more on how SpongeBob SquarePants became a meme factory.]