Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #230 Spongebob's Atlantis Squarepantis (2007): When David Bowie Met Spongebob Squarepants
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the complete filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for backers as well.
I recently finished up my journey through the films and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen, a profoundly bittersweet milestone and am approaching the end of my look at Bowie’s film work as well.
At this point I’ve written up the vast majority of the films Bowie has appeared in both major and minor, seminal and screamingly, perversely pointless and inessential. I’ve marveled at Bowie’s beauty and talent and been consistently flummoxed by his choice of projects.
All that’s left are some of Bowie’s heaviest films, stone cold downers like The Last Temptation of Christ and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as well as the transcendent concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which reduced me to tears multiple times the last time I saw it.
Alas, I’m on new anti-anxiety medication that has temporarily turned the fine-tuned engine that is my brain into pudding so I chose to write about one of the more unexpected entries in Bowie’s IMDB entry, his voice performance as Lord Royal Highness in 2007’s Spongebob’s Altantis Squarepantis.
Yes, that’s right. In addition to being one of our greatest, most important and influential artists, David freaking Bowie did a voice on Spongebob Squarepants. And he fucking rocked it.
David Bowie did not have to try at all when blessing the stoner favorite/kiddie smash with his majestic presence. He honestly could have coasted from 1984 on and the work he created before that would grant him a lifetime pass.
But David Bowie most assuredly did try when guesting on a cartoon about an amiable sentient sponge who works at a fast food restaurant.
Bowie really brought his A-game to Spongebob Squarepants. He doesn’t just do a celebrity voiceover: he delivers a real performance with a voice at once gnomic and kind, endlessly benevolent yet with an undercurrent of mischief.
Lord Royal Highness is like a non-sinister version of Willie Wonka, the morally and spiritually evolved leader of the Lost City of Atlantis, an advanced society that long ago transcended greed and hatred and materialism and consequently is perfectly out of step with the rest of the world.
As an actor and a musician Bowie finds himself drawn to fantasy and science fiction as themes and genres. So perhaps what attracted him to this project was that it has a premise that recurs throughout fantasy genres: what happens when people with all of the weaknesses endemic to being human encounter an uncorrupted paradise? What happens when we foolish mortals stumble into Eden?
The answer is almost invariably that we fuck it up in record time and have to race back to our shitty home worlds while we still can. Only in Spongebob’s Atlantis Squarepantis, a forty-five minute made for television musical special, the all too human fuck-ups are brightly colored anthropomorphic sea creatures. Otherwise the dynamic is pretty much the same.
Spongebob’s Atlants Squarepantis finds Tom Kenny’s lovable goof Spongebob Squarepants and best friend Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) accidentally stumbling upon the missing part of a medallion that opens up a path to Atlantis.
Good-hearted simpletons Spongebob and Patrick just want to see the world’s oldest bubble but their companions on the trip to Atlantis have loftier ambitions. Struggling artist Squidward Tentacles (Rodger Bumpass) is looking for inspiration and a creative nirvana. Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) just wants loot while the preternaturally cheerful and science-minded Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence) is excited about Atlantis as a technological utopia far beyond her wildest imagination.
Plankton (Mr. Lawrence) stows away with the crew with a mind towards using Atlantis’ advanced weaponry for his own sinister ends. Bowie’s Lord Royal Highness, who looks like an unused design from Yellow Submarine with his blue skin, formidable proboscis and visible brain, could not be a more gracious and considerate host.
The underwater monarch gives his guests everything they could possibly want or need, and with a smile but the blundering Spongebob and Patrick can’t help but screw things up by accidentally destroying Atlantis’ greatest treasure: the oldest bubble in the world.
Songs are sung, but not by Bowie, alas, and dreams are fulfilled and then un-fulfilled in short order as the Bikini Bottom gang encounters a world that’s perfect but not so perfect that they can't screw it up.
I don’t know that I’ve ever watched a full episode of Spongebob Squarepants but this was an excellent introduction, if only because it features one of David Bowie’s most committed performances, live-action, voiceover or otherwise.
I can see why Spongebob Squarepants is a money machine for Nickelodeon, which has reportedly made 19 billion dollars in merchandising revenue from the show. And most of that, confusingly, comes from bootleg merchandise at head shops.
Man, head shops really love Spongebob. He’s right up there with Bob Marley and Ricky and Morty.
Spongebob’s Atlantis Squarepantis is hosted by Tom Kenny as Spongebob super-fan, pirate and Encino resident Patchy the Pirate, who has a parallel adventure involving his home town disappearing like Atlantis and then re-appearing just in time for his return.
The live-action Patchy the Pirate subplot is so purposefully and deliriously strange that it makes the Spongebob part of the special seem positively normal by comparison. Kenny is clearly having a blast playing a grumpy pirate with an egregiously fake beard and Halloween store costume.
Spongebob’s Atlantis Squarepantis beautifully illustrates what makes Spongebob Squarepantis such a wonderful vehicle for Tom Kenny’s extraordinary talents.
As someone who is way too emotionally invested in Mr. Show and its cast I’m relieved that one of its brightest, most versatile performers would go on to fame and fortune as the voice and soul of one of the most beloved cartoon characters of all time.
Kenny’s high pitched squeal became deeply ingrained in the very fabric of American life with a trippy animated smash with a lot of Mr. Show in its DNA, a cult oddity that’s as boldly, brazenly weird as anything on Adult Swim but also unexpectedly wholesome.
Spongebob Squarepants is so successful, big and beloved that it knew that it could get away with just about anything. Spongebob’s Atlantis Squarepantis revels in that freedom to be as trippy as it wants to be, particularly in live-action wrap-around segments filled with references guaranteed to fly over the heads of children, like 8-tracks, Beta-maxes and Frampton Comes Alive.
Spongebob’s Atlantis Squarepantis is certainly one of the more unexpected titles on Bowie’s resume but also one of his stronger efforts. I don’t know if that speaks more to the special’s loopy charm or the perversity of Bowie’s film choices but I was pleasantly surprised by this weird and wonderful anomaly in the great man’s body of work all the same.
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