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Television

SpongeBob SquarePants

Richard Snowden-Leak wants to know what the perfect burger tastes like.

Imagine a burger so delicious its very recipe is the cause of a feud between two former friends; a burger so enthralling that a cynical, depressed and overworked squid took one bite to develop an addiction so deadly that he exploded. Picture a burger so visually appealing that one can’t help but imagine the bounty of beef, the crispness of tomato, the saltiness of gherkin, and the fluffiness of its bun between your hands. What does it look like in your mind? What does it taste like?

I don’t know about you, but my mouth has started to water, and my stomach is suddenly aware of a burger-shaped hole. Welcome to my hell – into which I would be cast whenever I watched the TV show SpongeBob SquarePants (Nickelodeon, 1999 onwards) as SpongeBob donned his fry-cook’s hat. A deep hunger and jealousy burned in me at those polo-shirt-wearing fish patronising the Krusty Krab, the burger restaurant in the show, tucking into this nectar of the gods that I could never access, their famous burger the Krabby Patty.

SpongeBob stills © Nickelodeon 1999 Onwards

I’ve always been like this, a fool for the idea an image sells. It’s not just animation that does it, it’s advertising too. Advertising sells unachievable perfection, such as what you might call Plato’s ideal form of the burger.

Now this idea is a little muddled. Plato in his Republic describes the ‘World of Forms’ as a transcendent plane of truths where there are the perfect forms (or exemplars) of everything you can imagine: the perfect fridge, the perfect quilt, the perfect cup of coffee, the perfect burger. This Ideal plane, however, is inaccessible to denizens of this world. Here, in the world of imperfection, we have imperfect copies of those ideal forms. So, we have cold coffees, warm fridges, itchy quilts, and squashed UberEats-delivered McDonald’s burgers.

The vague idea of ‘perfect’ is doing a lot of work here. Perfect in Plato’s sense is perfect not only to a single person, but universally. Yet to a tree a perfect world would be a world solely of sunlight, rain, soil and zero fires, their needs and preferences being a little different from ours.

When I think about a Krabby Patty, I am imagining all the things that would make a burger perfect for me; when someone else thinks about it, they’re imagining what would make it perfect for them – much like how two visitors can stand side by side at a gallery and arrive at two wholly different conclusions as to what the art means. Perhaps someone else likes more salt and sauce; maybe they’re imagining that the patty doesn’t have any gherkins on it, hidden beneath that bodacious bun.

The mere image of a burger allows the spectator to imagine tastes and sensations that would make it perfect to them. This technique of implying perfection is what makes adverts so powerful. When you look at a cheeseburger on an advert, every facet has been manipulated – and with the advent of AI generation, photo-real perfection is just a prompt away. The meat never looks too dry or too oily; the salad is always fresh; the cheese is always at that perfect consistency of solid and yet gooey. A further example of this would be how some pizzas on TikTok mix glue with mozzarella to give the cheese more stretch when pulled for the camera.

Does this image of perfection mean that the ideal form of these things is achievable in the real world? No. We must always negotiate the lens of a camera or the backlit panel of a screen to access this perfect realm of food.

Advertising and animation have another thing in common: they’re both vying for your attention. Choosing to go and purchase a burger, or to spend an hour watching SpongeBob make burgers are both transactions. You’re paying a streaming service or cable network for access to SpongeBob episodes, while going to buy a burger is a straight-up trade. There is, however, one mighty difference between the two, which is that animation, at least, lets us stay in the realm of perfection.

I’ll use two examples.

I go inside a McDonald’s. It’s hot. Busy. Walls are saturated by the screams of kids, the taxed shouts of the production line staff, and the squeals of fast-food machines. I don’t know what to buy, so I look at the menu. There it is: the McDonald’s burger in all its manufactured glory, selling me the idea of paradise in a bun. There’s an anxious wait as I pay, then watch overworked underpaid staff shuffle through the motions of assembly. Moist buns slapped on sweaty patties, sandwiching sterilised gherkins and the spit of some alchemical mixture of onion and tomato. The tired, stressed crew member calls out my number, and leaves before I take my order, already behind on the next five orders.

Already the perfection of the burger has been tarnished. Where’s the slowed pace of the chef in the adverts, dropping the ingredients delightfully onto a wooden chopping board, with the gleeful splash of freshly washed lettuce bouncing off? Where’s that artisanal love for the burger that the adverts seem to profess? I realise such things are impossible on a production line. No art, no love: only a conveyer belt of commodity production. What’s more, we have left the world of capitalism that fulfils orders as quickly as the demands arise – ‘just-in-time capitalism’ – and have now entered ‘always-behind capitalism’.

I sit down and imagine myself in the advert, only to be confronted with the final nails in the coffin of perfection: the milkshake is warm, the fries are cold, and the burger is a mishandled chimera of tortured cows and the slave labour production of imported products.

Example two. I stick my telly on. SpongeBob arises from the ever-shifting algorithmic sea. It’s episode one, in which SpongeBob applies for the position of fry-cook.

The Krusty Krab is quiet when he arrives. An employee, Squidward, in private conversation with his boss Mr Krabs, is arguing that SpongeBob should by no means get the job. But Krabs tells SpongeBob to fetch the “hydrodynamic spatula, with port and starboard attachments, and turbodrive.” Little do Squidward and Krabs know they’ve just sealed their own doom, as the eelworms start to arrive in droves. The restaurant can barely keep itself together from their rush, their desire, nay, their absolute need for burgers.

The endless queues, the wait, the insatiable lusting for food. What’s the difference, I wonder, between this and McDonald’s? There’s no sense of rest in the episode. The eelworms could very well tear the restaurant apart.

The Krusty Krab is in ruins. A pall blackens the scene, to indicate a stormy sea. The eelworms’ hunger will never be satiated. The dream of paradise-in-a-bun has now conjured up the nightmarish perdition of a customer-base that wants too much. I could interrupt this overanalysis of a children’s TV show to say that this is a demonstration of capitalism straining to meet its demands, crippled by its own promise of Platonic ideals – that is, until SpongeBob returns with the nonsensical spatula. “They only had one left,” he says in his ‘chaos god’ fashion. Much like in Freudian psychoanalysis, where a dream often functions as wish-fulfilment from a subject’s anxieties, animation seems to operate as a way of soothing capitalism’s desire to have its cake and eat it too: you can have endless queues, and have the endless supply to meet that demand. So of course the perfect spatula exists. That is to say, animation is perfect, and SpongeBob encapsulates exactly that perfection, operating his hyper-spatula with the ease that F1 drivers have over their two-hundred-and-twenty mile per hour cars when turning a corner. That stormy sea of eelworms quietens as burgers fly out in seconds. Their wants go answered; their pains are allayed.

In the world of animation, SpongeBob can repeat-craft the perfect burger for multitudes within mere seconds. This SpongeBob episode had to end happily, after all: the show sometimes has weird, tragic endings that would warrant other articles; but not for its first episode. But it just so happens that this happy ending is actually the antithesis of the reality of a fast-food restaurant. Workers are human. They tire, go hungry, need their lives filled. But all SpongeBob wants is to be a fry-cook. All he wants to do is to create the perfect burger, again and again, which he does.

The episode ends. And unlike my McDonald’s experience, where I left stressed and unhappy knowing that I would return whenever my brain next requires the fast-food drug, I happily press play on the next episode of SpongeBob. I seek again to consume an animated world of perfection, because it’s nowhere to be seen in reality.

Richard Snowden-Leak is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool. They also write fiction, and you can find their work in CHM, Nightmare, and ApparitionLit as RSL.