It’s been seven years since SpongeBob Squarepants creator Stephen Hillenburg died – and it’s not just his creations that live on; it’s his memory, too.
“I still think of him every day,” Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob says. “Literally, every day.”
In part, that’s because of how much Hillenburg transformed both Kenny's life and that of Bill Fagerbakke, who has played SpongeBob’s best friend Patrick Star alongside him since the show had its premiere in 1999. But more so, it’s because he misses his friend.
SpongeBob's voice came to life on the back of that friendship. It was not intentionally crafted in an audition room – it wasn’t even created on purpose.
Years before Hillenburg conceived of the show – when they were just two young guys trying to break into the entertainment world – an experience at an audition occurred which would go on to inspire SpongebBob's signature sound.
“Years go by, and Stephen somehow remembered [the impression of] a voice that I did from me telling him a story about somebody that I’d listened to and observed – and he said ‘that guy is this voice,” Kenny tells The National.
The anecdote concerned a frustrated man auditioning to become one of Santa Claus’s elves in a Christmas advertisement, Kenny said on WTF with Marc Maron in 2012.
It was never intended for anything. But that’s the magic of friendship – your friends see things in you that you might otherwise ignore.
As a creator, Hillenburg was like no other. In the first three seasons, he stayed in the room with Kenny and Fagerbakke as they recorded – guiding them along the way.
“This was very unusual. He would have a table set up in the room – not to be with the engineers, but with us. And he’d be doodling as we were recording, and he would giggle. It was so immediate and intimate that I’ll never forget that,” says Fagerbakke. “That was a very important part of my development of Patrick.”
What that intimacy produced, over time, was not just affection or loyalty, but discipline.
SpongeBob is now a quarter of a century old – an age at which most animated characters have been softened, flattened or recalibrated in response to new audiences and markets. Yet the voice Kenny found with Hillenburg has barely shifted. It remains emotionally transparent, pitched somewhere between eagerness and anxiety, incapable of irony. That consistency is not accidental. It is the result of a character defined early, then protected from drift.
Kenny is explicit about that continuity. “Nothing has changed in terms of the characters they are,” he says. “Those are the parameters that SpongeBob and Patrick are still written to and live by.”
The comedy can escalate, but the characters themselves are not allowed to become knowing, cynical or cruel. The line was drawn early – and it has never moved.
“The notes that Steve gave us at the time are the two tablets that came down from the mountain – the 10 commandments of SpongeBob. You know – thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s pineapple,” says Kenny. “They are still the characters who he created. He knew what drove them.”
What neither Kenny nor Hillenburg could have anticipated was the scale of what followed. “It’s become a real part of the connective tissue of people’s lives, families, generations,” Kenny says. “They’ve experienced SpongeBob together. It sounds kind of pretentious when you talk about it, but people just tell me that all the time. It wasn’t something we ever foresaw.”
That longevity, he adds, is inseparable from Hillenburg himself. Not just creatively, but personally. “He was obviously a formative person in my life, and Bill’s life,” Kenny says. “He gave us this opportunity to do something we really liked doing for a long time – and make a living at it. And not be living in a cardboard box under a bridge, which is nice.”
It is a modest way of describing an outsized legacy – one built not on reinvention or escalation, but on recognising something fragile early on, and then refusing to tamper with it. SpongeBob’s voice endured not because it was endlessly refined, but because it was understood between people who cared about each other on a human level – and then left alone.
And even without Hillenburg giggling in the recording booth, his joyful spirit still shapes each instalment – including The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants, being released on Christmas Day in cinemas across the Middle East.
As Mark Hamill, who plays The Flying Dutchman in the movie, says: “If the audiences have even a fraction of the fun I had making this movie, they're in for the time of their life.”
