SpongeBob's Golden Dream

Bikini Bottom is also an effortlessly postmodern place, a baby-blue void in which all manner of cultural bric-a-brac drifts and combines. Neptune might pop by, or the Flying Dutchman, or even David Hasselhoff: the climactic scene in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie features SpongeBob and Patrick clinging, amid live-action waves, to the Baywatch star’s hairy legs. It even has its own pair of Watchmen-style deconstructed superheroes: Mermaid Man, shuffling in peevish slippers toward senility, and his long-suffering sidekick, Barnacle Boy. In Atlantis SquarePantis, SpongeBob and the gang are magically transported to the lost undersea city of Atlantis, whose Lord Royal Highness, red-lipped and stack-heeled like a Blue Meanie, has the same initials as L. Ron Hubbard (“My friends call me LRH!”). Various masterpieces hang in the great Atlantean halls, and Squidward is thrilled to discover that he can enter them bodily; he climbs into Van Gogh’s crooked bed, and drapes his proboscis alongside the fondant clocks in Dalí’s Persistence of Memory. “Ask your Mama or your Dada,” he sings, perched inside Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, “to tell you about the schism between Minimalism and Cubism...”