HE’S WORKED WITH KEANU REEYES, DAVID BOWIE AND SCARLETT JOHANSSON ALMOST 10 MILLION VIEWERS TUNE INTO HIS SHOW HE'S MADE MORE THAN $13 BILLION IN MERCH AND HE'S A SPONGE.
PRINCE. BEYONCÉ. MADONNA… And a buck-toothed sea-sponge who lives in a pineapple. There’s an odd one out in this list of A-list celebrities who have performed at the Super Bowl half-time show, arguably the most prestigious slot in America’s entertainment calendar. Hint: it’s not Beyoncé.
“I don’t think any of us really saw it coming,” laughs Tom Kenny, recalling the time the “endearing little water-weirdo” he’s voiced for 21 years appeared in front of 98.2 million football fans in February 2019. Originally, SpongeBob SquarePants was not scheduled to make a cameo at the sporting event. Then, democracy happened.
“There was a petition, a couple of people were signing it and sharing it… Next thing you know, the thing’s going crazy,” remembers Kenny. More than a million signatures later, event organisers the NFL had no choice but to give the public what they wanted: the porous, yellow cartoon character, flanked by amphibian friends, wiggling his arms and giggling like a maniac for a brief, bizarre moment midway through the LA Rams versus New England Patriots.
Bizarre moments occur all the time in the wonderful world of . After all, this is a character who, at various points in his two-decade reign on kids’ TV channel Nickelodeon, has mastered astral projection, befriended a giant hamster called ‘Cuddle E. Hugs’ during an E. coli-induced hallucination, adopted a house-music-obsessed pet jellyfish, and discovered the lost continent of Atlantis (ruled by Davidmight not sound that outlandish for a children’s TV show: an endlessly optimistic ocean creature gets into mischief with his sweet-but-simple starfish friend Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), between shifts at an underwater burger restaurant. Delve a little deeper, though, and there’s all manner of weirdness to discover: time travel, Lynchian nightmares, Ray Liotta as a leather-jacket-wearing shrimp...the list goes on.
