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The cast of Bikini Bottom looks very different in the new holiday special It’s a SpongeBob Christmas! and with good reason. Instead of the traditional cartoon style used by the TV series SpongeBob SquarePants since its 1999 inception, cable’s Nickelodeon network made the call to devise a yuletide show featuring stop-motion animation, in which puppet re-creations are painstakingly put through their paces for frame-by-frame movements captured by a film camera. And Tom Kenny, longtime voice of the cherubic yellow sponge, has some stories to tell about the process.
SpongeBob Christmas pays homage to 1960s TV specials such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, in which the Rankin/Bass production company churned out annual holiday shows featuring the stop-motion approach. CBS, which owns Nickelodeon, thought so highly of the results that it even aired the episode first—albeit on the day after Thanksgiving and at a too-late-for-moppets time. (“I wasn’t crazy that they put it on at 9:30 at night,” the native East Syracusan says with a laugh. “Nice time slot, guys!”) Nickelodeon has since broadcast the show and will surely add more time slots to its schedule as the holiday approaches. But for those who can’t wait, there is a DVD version currently available from Paramount Home Entertainment.
The plot for SpongeBob Christmas once again concerns rival restaurateur Plankton (voice by Doug Lawrence, a.k.a. Mr. Lawrence), who will never be on Santa’s nice list because of his never-ending scheme to discover the foodie secrets of the Krusty Krab diner. So Plankton threatens to transform every inhabitant of Bikini Bottom into naughty nabobs of negativism by feeding them Jerktonium-laced fruitcakes, causing a pandemic of jerkiness. Yet SpongeBob, who is pure of heart yet dim of brain, remains immune to the fruitcake’s mischievous properties, which makes him the unlikely salvation for Bikini Bottom’s hoped-for happy holidays.
“Jerktonium turns people into jerks,” says co-writer Kenny, “where this radiation turns people into pugnacious, dyspeptic bullies that are spoiling for a fight. Jerktonium may explain the current electoral map!”
SpongeBob Christmas, which also features guest voice work by John Goodman as Santa Claus and Kenny’s frequent alter ego as Patchy the Pirate to handle the narration, has recently earned nominations in three categories for the Annie Awards for accomplishments in animation. And the special has a spinoff album from Nickelodeon Records that’s available for downloads from iTunes and Amazon, with many cast members getting into the act for a dozen new tracks that detour into rock, ballad and country genres.
The DVD’s main extra is the seven-minute making-of vignette “Change of Sea-nery: Getting to the Bottom of Stop-Motion Bikini Bottom,” with lots of background information from the animators, although toddlers should probably avoid seeing this unless they want their SpongeBob illusions crushed. Also, the entire 24-minute episode can be replayed alongside storyboard treatments, and most amusingly, there’s a segment with SpongeBob transfixed by a burning yule log in his fireplace, with a cheesy musical loop that is repeated every 30 seconds.
Aside from the TV special, Kenny’s other big news is that Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures have green-lighted a SpongeBob SquarePants sequel, slated for 2014, 10 years after the original big-screen release. (“I don’t know if it’s SpongeBob 2 or it’s in Roman numerals. I think sequels should have exponents: SpongeBob 2 to the Third Power.”) Yet his boundless enthusiasm for It’s a SpongeBob Christmas! was clearly evident during a recent phone conversation.
Q: How long was the Christmas special in the works?
A: It was fall 2011 when we started working on it. I guess you could say it started gestating with the song “Don’t Be a Jerk (It’s Christmas),” which Andy Paley and I co-wrote in 2009. We wrote it as kind of a calling card to Nickelodeon to do a SpongeBob Christmas album. It was like, “Wow, this is crazy that there isn’t a SpongeBob Christmas album; {there are Christmas albums for} Charlie Brown, the Chipmunks, so why not this?”
So we made this little song, burned our own CDs and gave it to some Nickelodeon suits and some of the people that work on the show. We dropped it on their desks on the day before Christmas break, just running through Nickelodeon and saying “Happy holidays!” So the swallow actually came back to Capistrano a couple years later. It’s pretty amazing that these goofy little seeds that you plant can take root and come back years later in unexpected ways.
I said that I had a couple of ideas, so with Andy Paley, who produced the song and played a bunch of instruments on it, and Doug Lawrence, who does the voice of Plankton, we got together and jammed on this story about this element called Jerktonium. {At the time} in 2009 there was Joe Wilson screaming “You lie!” to President Obama and Michael Vicks’ dogfighting misadventures, really jerkish behavior going on at the same time, and I’m like really unhappy with my species, where the simplest rules of civil discourse are breaking down. I guess that’s the difference between me and {longtime best buddy and fellow East Syracusan} Bobcat Goldthwait: He gets financing and makes this big cross-country movie {God Bless America} and I write a two-minute song that’s sung by an imaginary sponge. {Laughs}
Q: Were you blown away by the final results?
A: Yeah! I was there more than a couple of times while they were working on the animation because I like that stuff. They made the decision to do it full-on stop motion, retro-Rankin/Bass style and I think that got everybody excited. You know, you’ve been doing a show for a long time and it’s heartening to know that you can still take it different places and do outside-the-box things with this franchise. It kind of reinvigorates everyone on the show; it puts a little spice in the Krabby Patty.
So they were shooting it at Screen Novelties in this funky warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. It looked like nothing from the outside, but when you walked in it was like Santa’s workshop. It had this great creative vibe to it. And I knew these guys at Screen Novelties; I met them way back when I did the Mr. Show {the cultish sketchcom with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross that aired on HBO from 1995 to 1998} when they were just starting, when it was total salad-days for them.
It’s a very tactile form of animation, the opposite of this ultra-perfect CGI {computer-graphic imagery} that you see so much. Even when it’s done well by Pixar, you just go, “Wow! I know that every thread on a kilt represents some computer program that exists only to make sure that every thread on a kilt looks like a thread on a kilt.” But that stuff is so perfect, it almost makes something really labor-intensive and hands-on like stop-motion animation, it just makes you love it more, like it’s some vanishing Grandma Moses art.
A lot of it is done on the fly. These guys will be Dumpster diving, seeing something thrown away, and they’ll say, “Wow, that dial will look great on Plankton’s console!” And they’ll jump in and get it and bring it to work the next day. I took my son, who’s 15 and wants to be an animator, down there, and I said, “Hey, check it out! Here’s people actually having fun at work, hot-gluing a thousand boxes of Fruity Pebbles to make the coral reefs!”
Q: It’s reminiscent of those Popeye cartoons in the 1930s created by Dave Fleischer, the ones with the three-dimensional backdrops like Popeye Meets Sinbad the Sailor.
A: Absolutely! It’s very similar because we’re also on tabletops, like those Fleischer cartoons. Bikini Bottom was set up on five or six tables: Here’s Squidward’s house, here’s the Krusty Krab lobster-trap structure, here’s the pineapple, which was a couple feet high and everything else {was built} to scale. It’s old school meets new school. When they were supposed to do a point-of-view show from Santa’s sled, they had a camera on a coat hanger flying over Bikini Bottom! Everybody was having fun.
And everything is practical. Somebody had to make SpongeBob’s cot. And every time a character speaks, there’s a whole bunch of lip positions they have to do. So you stop, you take the mouth off, you put a different mouth on. They had a big sectioned-off box with SpongeBob mouths, Sandy mouths, SpongeBob eyes, Patrick eyes. It made me think of those ViewMaster reels of Peanuts or Huckleberry Hound, when you were used to seeing them in two-dimensional cartoons, but ViewMaster HQ made tabletop dioramas and little armatures and shot the stereoscopic photos for those reels. As a kid, I would go, “Wow, it’s cool to see a 3-D Charlie Brown,” the flattest character ever. It was a new way to see those characters.
There’s a toys-coming-to-life feel for stop motion, and that makes it really magical. It’s amazing that the illusion is still evocative for people, even after a hundred years of stop-motion animation.
Q: What was it like to see Patchy animated?
A: It was a weird out-of-body experience because Patchy’s got my face. I do it live action on the show, so they slap on a beard and a patch and blacken out a tooth and put a pirate hat on me. It’s the same costume we’ve been using since 1999, so it’s getting a little rank, or a little Rankin/Bass. It’s a tip of the hat to the Fred Astaire mailman {from Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, 1970}—Patchy even steals a mail truck—and the guys who molded the puppet armature said my face was shaped like Astaire’s.
Q: How did the album soundtrack come about?
A: Nickelodeon gives you a budget and they don’t care as long as you deliver the album within the confines of that budget, so we hired all these fun old session dudes who get it done and then tell great stories for hours. We hired guys like {bass harmonica} Tommy Morgan {launches into the theme for Sanford and Son} and we made Tommy tell us Vic Mizzy stories {Mizzy was the composer for Green Acres}for most of the day; he played on 167 episodes of Green Acres.
Tommy has done more than 4,000 sessions and he has a log book on everyone, so he put the SpongeBob sessions in his log and we were like “Wow, that’s awesome!” So we said, “Tommy, everybody talks about the Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds, Sanford and Son, Green Acres. What’s something we don’t know that you played on?” And he said, “Well, I played harmonica during the campfire fart scene of Blazing Saddles.” I said, “Wow, did you do the farting, too?” And he said, “No, no, I just played the harmonica.”
I guess I always identify with those session guys, who are invisibly ubiquitous. It’s the same way I kind of think I am because I’m in a ton of stuff and it’s in people’s ears and consciousness, especially for people with kids, but they don’t know who does it.
Q: What’s your all-time favorite Christmas special?
A: I gotta go with the usual suspects: A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). The Rudolph one is the craziest, with the elf that wants to be a dentist, and yet it’s somehow affecting.
Q: And what’s your favorite Christmas episode from a TV series?
A: It’s gotta be The Twilight Zone with Art Carney as the alcoholic department-store Santa. {“The Night of the Meek,” which CBS originally telecast on Dec. 23, 1960.} If that episode doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you’re inhuman.
