SpongeBob Squarepants
The show has been continuously running since last century. It premiered on Nickelodeon in 1999 and has aired hundreds of episodes, multiple feature films, and inspired video games, roller coaster rides, and a Broadway musical. The lovable sponge and his friends have learned to speak 24 languages so that fans across the globe can enjoy.
This post is for the fans and is an analysis of the TV series. That is 14 seasons and 573 episodes. (Most episodes are about 11-minutes long making for a two episode block during a 30-minute TV airing.)
The analysis includes of the scripts of all 573 episodes. Only a single episode, Reef Blower, has no dialogue lines.
Dialogue Counts
As you might imagine, SpongeBob Squarepants gets more talking time than any other single character throughout the series. If you take the top 10 characters by number of lines, nobody is even close to SpongeBob.
Patrick is naturally the runner up. More surprising might be that Plankton’s computer wife cracks the top 10 and that Sandy, the land mammal has placed a distant 6th.
When you take the top six “main characters” and do a comparison through the series, it is again not surprising that SpongeBob holds a strong lead from the beginning. But it turns out that during the early years, Squidward was a [still distant] second and Sandy Cheeks had more screen-time and lines than Plankton.
Of the more than 62,000 lines of dialogue across 14 seasons, the above sea stars speak approximately 70% of them.
How these characters compare to one another as the series goes on is better illustrated below (with both the actual count and the percentage compared to one another which is helpful to normalize things).
But of course over more than 500 episodes, you can imagine that many other characters aside from these six get their 5 minutes of fame. Sure, Plankton appears to get close to 20% of the dialogue in Season 14 when only comparing the fab 6, but look what happens when we take this breakdown per season and include everybody else.
[Click each image below to expand]
Viewing all 14 seasons in one chart, you can see how non-primary-characters get an increasingly large role as the series progresses and the inverse is true for SpongeBob himself. But who are these “Other” characters? According to the source data, approximately 2,500 characters are given dialogue lines. Many of those are trivial such as “Customer #1” or “Incidental 93.” Certainly there are bound to be some duplicates as well, though I opted not to dig through 2,500 lines to group them. But hundreds of these characters have multiple appearances.
Who is “Other”?
Gary is a snail. As SpongeBob’s pet, he has quite a bit of dialogue throughout the years. You would be forgiven if on paper you thought him a cat. With a little over 600 lines of dialogue, he adds much to the conversation.
Other “other” data you’re dying to know: The “My Leg” guy, whose real name is Fred, has 41 instances of his cry for help, “my leg!” DoodleBob speaks about 9 lines including a favorite, “Neahoy, minayay? Neyoyoyminoy, ladyonmamoy.” Smitty WerbenJagerManJensen has 5 whole lines.
Who are the characters with the most appearances in the series? Great question:
And the top 100 characters by appearance (episodes with 1 or more dialogue lines):
What’s in a Line?
Not every line is equal. And it’s fairly predictable which characters have longer dialogue lines with more words. Patrick, after all, was confused as to whether mayonnaise is an instrument. (It is not and neither is horseradish.) On the other end of the spectrum, Plankton went to college.
When you view this data over time and by season, it appears as though the more time that goes by, the less complex the dialogue is in terms of length. A constant, though, is Patrick’s lack of lengthy dialogue. Though single lines like uh might unfairly take away from other brilliant moments like: "Oh come on SpongeBob! You know, I wumbo, You wumbo, He, she, me wumbo, wumbo, wumboing, … wumbology, the study of wumbo? It's first grade, SpongeBob!"
Popular Words
Using some Natural Language Processing on the main characters, we can see that the most used words used by each character gives us a nice insight into who they are. The bigger the word in the word cloud, the more times it was said. (Stop Words like the, a, it, etc. have been filtered out.) The obvious: SpongeBob’s is almost everybody’s most used word.
Mr. Krabs
Mr. Krabs likes money, his restaurant, and his secret formula.
Sandy
Sandy likes karate, all things Texas, and using the word y’all.
Patrick
Patrick likes his friends, ice cream, and frequently starts his sentences with “uh.”
Squidward
Squidward plays the clarinet, frequently is injured (“ow”), and spends too much time talking about things he does not like. (The word “Hate” just missed the cutoff for this chart.)
Plankton
Obviously Plankton’s life is consumed mostly by Krabs’ Secret Formula and his computer wife.
SpongeBob
And Spongebob’s life is centered around all his friends, neighbors, and his love for his fast food job. Fun and Work are among his most used words and I think he uses them interchangeably.
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