Anonymous
10/08/25(Wed)12:30:05 No.150734110

File: The_Complete_3rd_Season.jpg (1.1 MB, 1568x2216)

1.1 MB JPG

Anonymous 10/08/25(Wed)12:30:05 No.150734110

The idea that pre-movie SpongeBob is the best cartoon run ever made is completely ridiculous. It might as well be historical revisionism from people who were overexposed to those old episodes as a child. Just because something is the most popular, doesn't make it superior to everything else. Whether or not SpongeBob has a lot of memorable jokes and visual gags is irrelevant when discussing its actual quality. It'd be like insisting that the more memes you can extract from a piece of media, the more value it has. No other cartoon besides SpongeBob has been able to subsist entirely off memes, to the point nearly all the classic episodes are more known for the reaction faces and art style changes than the plot, the dialogue or even the jokes.

In truth, SpongeBob's stories are just vehicles for the characters to make stupid faces and subvert expectations. This was done before by countless other series, all SpongeBob did was remove any artifice that it existed for anything more than pointless humor. It's also no surprise that, when compared to Rocko's Modern Life, or really any other previous Nickelodeon series (including the live-action ones) SpongeBob's conversations have a sort of detached feeling to them. The cast talks AT each other and it's rare for anything saccharine or wholesome to occur, because it goes against the narrative thrust of most episodes. As much as people want to claim SpongeBob advanced comedy in cartoons by hiding adult humor behind the kid stuff, this is kind of a reductionism, because once you ignore the tepid societal critique in the show, it is literally nothing but empty slapstick with no buildup and rarely any payoff.

Abvove all else, insisting S1-3 of SpongeBob is legendary just furthers the notion that all series start off good and then inevitably become bad over time. It's not that this isn't true to an extent, but what does it lead to? Stop putting things on a pedestal just because they're part of a bygone monoculture.