Setting
Much of the series' events take place in Bikini Bottom, an underwater city located in the Pacific Ocean beneath the real life tropical isle of Bikini Atoll. Stephen Hillenburg has stated that much of Bikini Bottom was based on the real life city of Seattle. Much of this is supported within the context of the episodes themselves; however, despite implications of the city's location as well as analogies to real life, Hillenburg has stated that he wishes to leave the city isolated from the real world, explaining the Baywatch parody scene from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie as simply a reference to his favorite show of all time. The citizens of Bikini Bottom live in mostly aquatic-themed buildings, and use "boatmobiles", an amalgamation of cars and boats, as a mode of transportation.
Each episode of SpongeBob SquarePants is self-contained, with references to previous episodes being rare. Episodes have ended with the entire town being destroyed, the entire cast being irreparably harmed (Some of which being surprisingly dark for a children's show), characters (particularly Squidward) being sentenced to extended prison or community service sentences, or other catastrophic events, only for everything to return to normal the next episode without any mention of what happened before.
Read more about this topic: List Of Places In Bikini Bottom
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship—a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.”
—Anthony Storr (b. 1920)
“High from the summit of a craggy cliff,
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On utmost Kilda’s shore, whose lonely race
Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds,
The royal eagle draws his vigorous young”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)