Character

SpongeBob SquarePants

SpongeBob is a kitchen sponge who lives in a pineapple and treats a fry-cook job like a vocation. Stephen Hillenburg, a marine-science teacher turned cartoonist, built Bikini Bottom so the gags could be both silly and oddly specific: jellyfish fields, boat-mobiles, and a crab who counts every coin.

The design is a yellow rectangle with holes, a red tie, and eyes that can balloon to fill the frame. That simplicity made the show easy to animate and even easier to quote. Entire internet dialects grew out of still frames: the rainbow, the waiting, the strained smile.

He belongs in this hall because he proved a late-1990s kids’ show could become a shared language for adults without dropping the original sweetness. Optimism, in his case, is not naivete. It is a motor that keeps the square bouncing after every disaster.