Stephen Hillenburg, the creator of the megahit Nickelodeon cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants, died on November 26, 2018, on Monday. He was 57. The cause of death was ALS, which he had been diagnosed with in March last year.
Hillenburg graduated from Humboldt State University in 1984. He then became a marine biology teacher in California. His interest, combined with his artistic talent and love of the sea and its creatures, led him to write stories as teaching tools with characters that would later become SpongeBob’s home, Bikini Bottom.
He began his animation career in 1987 and earned his Master of Fine Arts in 1992. Then he began to work full-time on writing, producing and directing on the animated series that would become SpongeBob SquarePants. The first episode aired on Nickelodeon on May 1, 1999 and the series started its full run on July 17 of that year. The series has aired nearly 250 episodes to date. It appealed not only to children but older viewers as well, with college students even organizing viewing parties for the show.
The series has won both U.S. and British Emmy Awards, Annie Awards, and ASACP Awards and has been dubbed in more than 60 languages, including Urdu, Azerbaijani and Maori.
Hillenburg also wrote, produced and directed The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, which was released in 2004 and went on to gross over $140 million worldwide. Hillenburg then wrote the sequel The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water in 2015.
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