The voice of SpongeBob, Tom Kenny

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm David B.Chuley. The latest SpongeBob SquarePants movie, the Spongebob movie Search for SquarePants, is now streaming on Paramount Plus.

And that's reason enough to revisit our interview with Tom Kenney, who has been providing the voice of Animation's most celebrated sponge since it premiered on Nickelodeon in 1999. SpongeBob SquarePants isn't the oldest continually running animated series currently on TV. Comedy Central South Park first appeared two years earlier in 1997. Both shows have launched popular Broadway musicals and movie spin offs, and, like Fox's The Simpsons, which launched as a series way back in 1989, All have had a major impact on the current generation, which has been watching these shows and characters all their lives.

When I teach television history to young twenty somethings in college, the one show with which they are more familiar and fluent than any other is Spongebob SquarePants. They all know and love the antics of SpongeBob and his undersea pals, including Patrick the Starfish, Squidward the Octopus, and Mr. Krabs. All these characters and more were created by Stephen Hillenberg, who was a marine science educator as well as an animator. He died in 2018 at age fifty seven, but his characters and his series live on.

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