Coming on about halfway through the first season of SpongeBob SquarePants as a Storyboard Artist, Vincent Waller says that the show was “at the point where people would say SpongeBob Who? Is he made of cheese?” Jump ahead to Season 8 when Marc Ceccarelli was hired as a Board Writer, and “the show was already a mega, mega hit,” he says.
At that time SpongeBob was still outline-driven, with the outlines created first and then dialogue and other elements added during the boarding process. Ceccarelli recalls how stressful it was to test this way for such a high-profile show: “They gave out a paragraph from one of the episodes that was still in production at the time.” Using pencil and paper, he worked so hard that he developed a giant blister on his finger. But that stress paid off. He was hired, and his test was used in the episode.
Twenty-five years into the franchise, Waller and Ceccarelli executive produce and show-run what can inarguably be called a worldwide phenomenon. When they took over at the tail end of Season 9, the series had just gone from outlines to scripts, and they filled the writers’ room with board writers who wanted to become script writers. They also stacked it with people who understood how to write in the show’s shorthand. While the typical animation script for an 11-minute show is around 22 pages, the gag-heavy SpongeBob scripts come in at 14 at the most. “They don’t look like traditional scripts. They have big blocks of descriptive text,” says Ceccarelli.
Now working on Season 14, they still find they’re able to keep it fresh. Not only do they have crew that’s been on the show from the start, but they also have younger people who grew up as fans of SpongeBob and are now just starting out. “We’re constantly getting new talent, new ideas, new juice for the same old stuff so it doesn’t feel like the same old stuff,” Ceccarelli says.
Waller also notes how he continues to feel in sync with the show’s humor, which he connected with from the get-go: “It’s not like I had to learn a different language. This show already spoke spoke my language… Keep it simple and weird and surreal. That’s how my head works.”
They also give a nod to the spin-offs for helping them not feel stuck in a rut. The Patrick Star Show let them get weirder and less narratively structured with more non sequitur tangents. And Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years allowed them to work with younger characters in a different environment. Plus, there is the issue of continuity—which isn’t an issue for the SpongeBob franchise. “Every episode is pretty much a standalone,” Waller says. This allows for an even greater degree of creative freedom.
When the world went into lockdown and Ceccarelli was at home using an ironing board for a standing desk, his wife told him all she heard coming out of his office was laughter. “One of the reasons the show is so good,” he says, “is because we’re kind of making it for ourselves. We’re the first audience. We have to really impress ourselves and make ourselves laugh—and we do that every day.”
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