I was Nickelodeon-kid growing up, so SpongeBob Squarepants was always a special part of my daily routine. To go a day without watching SpongeBob was a rarity for me, and the amount of iconic lines that I can quote from the show may be unhealthy at the age of 23. We still never got to find out who the real Dirty Dan was…and Heaven only knows why 25 is far more hilarious than 24.
Most people say that the golden era of SpongeBob was during Seasons 1-4—but I’d beg to differ. I enjoyed watching the cartoon until Season 8 when my desire to tune in began to fade. There were two major reasons why I stopped watching the show with one being that I was getting older and phasing out of the cartoon-era of television and two being that the show was beginning to lose the magic that kept me engaged for so many years.
There have been many claims that the original SpongeBob Squarepants Movie was the canon ending for the series. However, the series has managed to go on despite the movie’s release being in 2004.
Shortly after, Season 4 was released during the years 2005-2007 as many consider it the last watchable season of the show.
Seasons 5-7, for me, were still a highly entertaining watch. It is quite apparent, however, that the characters began to be a lot more exaggerated and polarized, losing a lot of the multidimensional traits that made their characters far more dynamic. Patrick became an absolute airhead during this era of the series, and his character has gotten dumber by the episode. SpongeBob’s character was written to be obnoxiously happy all the time, and while being happy-go-lucky is part of the iconic sponge’s personality, it became repetitive and his character lacked the depth it once had during the earlier seasons. Nonetheless, the episodes were pretty funny, even if they centered around SpongeBob and Patrick being idiots who made Squidward’s life a living Hell.
Seasons 8-9 were when the show started to decline for me. The plots of the episodes weren’t necessarily bad, but they became lackluster and lost the original spark that the show once possessed. The 10th season was when the show reached abysmal lows as the animation began to tank and the characters became nauseatingly obnoxious. The show has become even more unwatchable over the years and has made fans lose interest with its exaggeratingly childish animations and lackluster episodic plots.
