Jonathan Storm: Get the birthday cake, Mr. Krabs - SpongeBob has turned 10

SpongeBob is 10.

In the real life of Bikini Bottom, where he resides under the sea in his fancy pineapple, it's difficult to gauge the age of everybody's porous, absorbent, and yellow best friend.

The most rabid of his legions of fans debate whether he turns 23 today, as listed on a driver's license in one episode, or is well over 30, as indicated by the 374 consecutive employee-of-the-month awards credited to him in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie of 2004.

However old he is, he came to the cold, harsh topside world on July 19, 1999.

And Nickelodeon has never been the same.

"I don't think that he is necessarily the only representative of our brand around the world," said Cyma Zarghami, president of the network and the MTV Networks' Kids and Family Group.

But he might be this weekend, when the station goes all out - 50 hours straight - for the anniversary.

Prelude to the festivities comes tonight at 9, when Nick's sister station VH1 premieres Square Roots: The Story of SpongeBob SquarePants.

In the vein of the VH1 behind-the-scenes music efforts, the one-hour documentary is a not terribly scintillating yet somewhat informative examination of the makers of Bob, complete with fan-appreciation clips featuring folks ranging from little kids to LeBron James.

The NBA all-star selects famed restaurateur Mr. Eugene H. Krabs as his favorite SpongeBob character. "It's all about me money," quotes James, referencing his own $15 million-plus annual salary and Mr. Krabs' extreme concern for cash.

James also gets to use that so-much-fun Arrrrrrrgh pirate voice that's been around since Lionel Barrymore stumbled into Jim's mother's pub in Treasure Island in 1934 but has gained new popularity in the 10 years of SpongeBob.

The documentary was commissioned by Nickelodeon, where the real fun starts Friday at 8 with the 50-hour SpongeBob SquarePants marathon to celebrate the anniversary of the show. It will include top-10 countdowns of fan favorites and stories selected by celebrities. Nickelodeon will not reveal the names of the participants in advance, but they may include Johnny Depp, who once played Jack Kahuna Laguna in the cartoon, Scarlett Johansson, who was Princess Mindy, or President Obama, who has said he watches the cartoon show with his daughters.

Check that. The marathon is 49 hours and 45 minutes. One of the 11 new SpongeBob adventures (bringing the 10-year total of separate stories, from seven-minute shorts to a full-length feature film, to more than 260) finds Bob's square pants hopelessly shrunk in the dryer, so he dons a pair of round pants, and nobody can tell who he is.

That sad situation well characterizes the Silliness of the Sponge. The most trivial circumstances evolve into stretchy, squishy lunacy, with the ever-optimistic invertebrate (phylum: Porifera) suffering outrageous agony and rebounding, always with a smile.

In another new episode, for instance, Spongey takes a shower and then gets caught in a wringer as he tries to dry out. Think about it. He lives in the ocean.

But SpongeBob always returns to Mr. Krabs' Krusty Krab restaurant, "the finest eating establishment ever established for eating," says Bob in the very first episode.

SpongeBob works there as the ocean's most skilled fry cook, and his neighbor, Squidward Tentacles, mans the cash register.

Squidward can't stand SpongeBob and his sunny attitude, and the fact that SpongeBob is so sweet that he can't feel Squidward's antipathy makes the octopus (though he only has four legs and two arms) even grumpier.

SpongeBob lands his job in the first episode when busloads of anchovies pull into the parking lot (What's that "smelly smell that smells smelly?" wonders Mr. Krabs) and our yellow fellow manages to serve them all in a jiffy.

Creator Steven Hillenberg has a degree in natural sciences, with an emphasis on marine biology, and he told me ages ago that when he was making up his cartoon, "I'd want creatures that wouldn't have been used. I knew a lot about tide-pool ecology. Those animals are the oddballs of the sea."

Sponges and crabs and starfish and snails.

"A sponge seemed like the oddest choice" to be the star, Hillenberg said. "I drew some natural sponges, which weren't really doing it. I drew a sink sponge as a joke, and I realized, 'There's the essential, the square peg.' "

So, unlike the other characters, including Gary the meowing snail and Plankton the evil plankton, SpongeBob is not based on any animal, but rather on polyurethane and various chemicals - including yellow dye, though not the same food coloring derived from coal tar that has been used in the millions of SpongeBob birthday cakes baked around the world.

Translated into 26 different languages, SpongeBob is the favorite kids' show in China and lots of other countries, including Germany, where he's known as SpongeBob Spongehead, and France, where he's Bob the Sponge. The name may not translate so well, but the humor does.

The show has been a gift not only for Nickelodeon and the kazillions of manufacturers who have churned out more than 10,000 different products - everything from T-shirts and key chains to squirt guns, plush toys of his pineapple house, patio furniture, cell phones, DVD players, and TV sets - and raked in more than $10 billion, but for the actors who have been doing the voices, lo, these 10 years. They include Tom Kenny (SpongeBob), Bill Fagerbaake, and the one with the cartoon name of Mr. Lawrence, who voices Plankton and hails from just up the road in East Brunswick, N.J.

"I get handed precious little in this town," Fagerbaake, best known as lummox "Dauber" Dybinski on Coach, said by phone from Los Angeles, "but I landed a good one there."

Yep. Like an annuity. Fifty-hour marathons may be few and far between, but it's hard to imagine a day when SpongeBob and Co. won't be back for more frolic and fun.

Television

Square Roots:

The Story of SpongeBob SquarePants

Tonight at 9

on VH1