LogFAQs > #956442637

I'd say the show should end, but that's mostly because I've been saying that for like 20 years now. Mainly because I have zero nostalgia or affection for it (it didn't come on until I was already in my 20s). It mostly exists outside of my awareness 98% of the time.

Though it mostly existing entirely outside of my awareness of it (except whenever my niece and nephew used to visit, because they were kids in the 00s/10s and would watch it constantly) is also why I don't really care whether or not it ends. If it runs for another 100 years it wouldn't overly affect my life all that much.



Mead posted...

If kids are watching it and enjoying it then why should they end it?

one of my nieces loves the show and she is only 5

To be fair, your niece also has 20+ years worth of repeats she can watch.

She could watch for nearly 100 hours straight and never see a single episode twice.

So it's not like she would necessarily even know if they stopped making new episodes tomorrow.

(and honestly, kids watch TV shows over and over and over anyway - for most kids, repeats actually make a show better, not worse)

The usual argument for why it should end though is because it's been running so long everyone involved is kind of burned out, they've long since run out of worthwhile jokes or stories, everything's become kind of formulaic, and none of the new episodes they're cranking out are anywhere near as good as the original ones. So a lot of people feel like it would be better just to mercy kill the entire thing before the declining quality just turns the whole mess into something people resent or remember poorly as opposed to something you think of fondly.

People cite The Simpsons as the archetypal "It should have been cancelled years ago" show (with Family Guy getting a fair amount of the same criticism these days), but when it comes to Spongebob Ren & Stimpy might be a better comparison. That show had a brilliant start, but started going downhill after only 6 episodes, bottomed out somewhere in the middle of the second season - and then got appreciably worse once they kicked John Kricfalusi (who created the whole thing and voiced Ren) off the show. By the end it became such a mess that I rarely think of Ren & Stimpy being a "great" show these days, and talk of a new revival of it doesn't excite me as much as it fills me with a dull sense of dread over how utterly terrible it will inevitably be.

Spongebob's already passed a few of those hurdles itself (with its original creator leaving, then coming back, then dying). If even fans of the show who grew up with it in the 00s/10s are saying the show has long since passed the point where it's worth watching, maybe it would be better off stopping.

Not that Nickelodeon will ever allow it to stop. As this point I assume that even if Tom Kenny, Bill Fagerbakke, or Clancy Brown retire or die they'll just recast their voices and keep going. Or find some way to use a computer to just generate new dialogue from old sound clips in some sort of dystopian future nightmare. A thousand years from now, the only things left will be sentient cockroaches and Spongebob.
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