Crew Blog

Last time I “blogged”, I gave an example of where I get my ideas for SpongeBob “cartoons”. (I guess the real question is where do I get my ideas for what words get “quotation marks”.) In reference to that topic, let me tell you I love my wife. I'm mentioning this not only because I can't say it enough but also because I can't say it often enough on a blog that will be read by up to and including five or more people.

Anyway, my wife is a source of SpongeBob ideas for me. There came a time when she was watching many reality TV shows about people’s houses and how they are decorated. So I thought I could fit this into a SpongeBob cartoon. It seemed like Squidward was the character who would care about home décor so the next question was would he be on one of these shows? How do I get him on one of these shows? After calling around to home makeover shows and their production teams, I finally remembered Squidward is fictional. That means the only thing that could get Squid on one of those shows was my imagination.

Normally, to start a story you have to take a character and throw them off balance in some ways. If everything in their life is going swimmingly (underwater humor) then there’s no story. That’s when I decided Squilliam would be just what I needed. Since they are lifelong rivals, I knew if I started a story with Squilliam showing his house off, then Squidward would feel outdone and have to get on the same show with a fancier house. Usually, when we see Squilliam, his life tends to look a little fancier than Squidward’s. So that would give Squidward an obstacle to overcome… A home not-as-fancy-as-Squilliam’s home obstacle.

At this point, I realized the show I write for is not called “Squidward’s Problems”. It was time to bring in SpongeBob. Naturally, if Squidward needs a fancy house, SpongeBob would want to help, but due to laws of cartoon physics, the only thing that could happen next was mass destruction of Squidward’s home. Which is exactly what happened.

So if anyone tells you reality TV isn’t good for anything, nod silently and tell them nothing. After all, we don’t want to share our storytelling secrets with every negative creep you meet in the supermarket, do we?.