SpongeBob SquarePants Executive Producers Talk Merging the SpongeBob Universe for The Tidal Zone Crossover Event (Exclusive)

Establishing The SpongeBob Universe

NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK.COM: This is a big deal. This is the first time I've heard the term SpongeBob Universe coined, so with all of the multiverses that we have going on nowadays, what sparked the idea behind making this a concrete universe with all three series?

MARC CECCARELLI: Well, Nickelodeon wanted to expand the content and see if we could use these characters in different situations, so that they just have more content. So we tried to find ways of splitting off the characters into different situations that would work on their own as their own shows -- apart from the SpongeBob Universe -- would offer something different with the same characters. It's such a great cast of characters. SpongeBob started off with SpongeBob as the main character, but over the years, all the other characters have really been developed.

VINCENT WALLER: It's a huge fan base.

CECCARELLI: And so it seemed like a natural progression at this point. Since we're still on the air after this much time and we've done that much development with the characters, why not break them off and see how they operate in their own different spaces?

From The Twilight Zone to The Tidal Zone

CB: Speaking to that, The Tidal Zone very cutely cribs from The Twilight Zone. This is the packaging behind it.

WALLER: Which we grew up loving.

CB: Why was The Twilight Zone chosen as the inspiration behind telling these stories?

WALLER: Oh, I think we just wanted to do some stories that were different, that weren't just in the box. And anything can happen. If it's a Tidal Zone story, anything can happen. There's no ground that ... Gravity doesn't necessarily work. It's whatever we decide we can jam in there, magical, mystical, scientific, whatever. It's a pastiche of all these things.

CECCARELLI: Most of our writers are from the same sort of generation that we are. So we all grew up with Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, the Night Gallery, all these anthology weird shows that were all in syndication, so they'd be constantly on. So it was something that we've all loved. And SpongeBob the show is already really weird, so we had to find a way to make it even weirder.

WALLER: Yeah, once you already have fire underwater, you really have to go out of the box.

Going Even More Out of the Box

CB: How tough it was it to take the already wild cartoon where we've seen sea bears and stuff like that, but to make it The Twilight Zone friendly with things like the cursed phone and Binary Bottom? How tough was it to go so far out of the box yet still be SpongeBob?

WALLER: Well, I mean, off the top of my head, luckily with [The Patrick Star Show], we had already invented the time closet, which was just a perfect zipper between all the different time periods of SpongeBob. So I mean, we could have thought of other ways around, but that was already just like, boom, there it is. All you have to do is end up in here lost.

CECCARELLI: Yeah. We were doing four, or actually I think it turns out to be about five different stories in it. We needed to find some way to link them all together. And so we have the French narrator filling in for the sort of narrator, Rod Serling sort of thing. And so that was a linking device, and then the time closet from [The Patrick Star Show] was a good device to also weave the points between the five different stories.

WALLER: And then Binary Bottom, just completely out of the box, everybody's robots. And then on the Kamp Koral side, Switch Glitch is just the classic Freaky Friday, but it turned out really well with [Bill Fagerbakke, voice of Patrick Star] and [Jill Talley, voice of Karen] doing each other's voices when they're not inside their head.

Putting The Crossover Together

CB: What went into organizing the Tidal Zone specifically? Was there a question of, "Okay, we'll start off with Patrick Star, then we'll go into a SpongeBob and then a Kamp Koral"?

CECCARELLI: Each of our writing sessions we've come up with...since we have so much content to make every year with the three different shows, we usually break about three stories a week in our writing rooms.

WALLER: For each universe.

CECCARELLI: And we do our white-boarding and we come up with the outline of the episode, and then the writers go off and write that. So we wrote all four of the episodes or five of the episodes back to back so that we could keep an eye on each one and interweave elements from one to the other. So it was just kind of the proximity of how we developed the stories that helped us.

WALLER: It's been such a long build that I've had to go back three times and watch the whole thing again, just to remind myself of exactly what comes in what order again.

CB: Was there something in particular that, because this is the first crossover event with all the shows that the team as a whole wanted to get across, "We need to absolutely nail this in this regard for this one"?

CECCARELLI: Oh gosh, everything happens so fast in our show from one thing to the next. It's difficult to do that kind of stitching together of elements. So it was whatever we could grab and push together in the moment, sort of.

WALLER: There are no words covered with the mathematic equations of exactly how this will work out.

CECCARELLI: And no Beautiful Mind sort of head streams.

WALLER: Yeah, it's more like a closet full of clowns running into each other in the walls.

Is The Tidal Zone Canon?

CB: I was definitely curious about that because the fans, we're all so obsessed with multiverses and stuff like that these days. And now SpongeBob has one.

WALLER: For years people would ask chronology and linear, and it's like, there is none. It's like any SpongeBob you're watching, it could be any time. This one didn't come before that one, other than things like "Tea at the Treedome" where Sandy actually meets them for the first time. And it's clear that that's when that is. But then when we have three shows, it actually does start to interlock and go, "Okay, there's kind of a thread here."

CECCARELLI: We always have this sort of view that continuity is kind of the enemy of the weird, surreal humor that we do on the SpongeBob show, where we want to do just anything. So if we have to be beholden to something that's like in a canon or part of a chronology, it sort of puts a governor on our creativity. But then we also like playing around with canon and messing with it and the idea that there is a canon. We like to tweak it and play games with that idea. So it's all just us having fun in the writers room and looking for ways to surprise ourselves and the audiences.

WALLER: Make each other and the world laugh.

Any Favorites?

CB: Now, speaking to that, this one might be a tough one, but do either of you have a particular favorite in Tidal Zone, one that says, "Okay, if I only had the chance to watch one as a viewer, I should watch this particular one"?

CECCARELLI: That is a difficult question.

WALLER: It is. That's tough. Yeah.

CECCARELLI: I mean, there's sequences in all of them that really stand out as ones that really I love. I'm really fond of, especially, the Binary Bottom one, because it's so visually inventive. We got to redesign basically all of the characters, all of Bikini Bottom. And as cartoonists, that's something that we love doing. We love that little side of it. So when we have an opportunity like that, the way our production pipeline works, you can only do so many new designs and new things per episode because there's only so much that our crews can handle. So it's a real heavy lift when we do an episode like that one.

WALLER: Where everything changes. It's like, yep, that was the world before now this is this one.

CECCARELLI: Just in terms of how difficult that one was, that one sticks with me.

WALLER: Yeah. That was a heavy lift. For me, just as far as joy of watching, again, it's because I like the Shrinking Stars. I love Binary Bottom, but I did really like the interplay with Bill and Jill taking each other's spots and we weren't even sure. It's like, "I don't even know if they're going to be able to do imitations of each other." But I thought it worked out really well.

CB: Yeah, I thought you got different voice actors for a moment.

WALLER: Can Bill do a Chicago accent? Well, by God he can.

Could There Be More Crossovers?

CB: I'm just putting this out there, I don't know how much of this you can tease or put out there, but what is something you're hoping to do with the next crossover?

WALLER: Well, we are constantly tapping into...It's like we've been on a little bit of a Fleischer kick the last couple of seasons, which keep your eyes open. There's a lot of really sweet stuff coming down the aisle on that. Again, different world. You get there and it's like, whoa. Everything is upside down different. And I can't say much more than that without giving too much away.

CECCARELLI: It'll definitely be like in the writers room. I mean, I can't tell you for sure what's going to be coming in the future because we're constantly writing new stuff. But The Tidal Zone idea really jazzes all of us in the writers room. So I'm sure we'll be bringing more of those back in the future if we can convince the network, which isn't too difficult. They love it.

WALLER: And we've gotten a lighter diving helmet, so I'm looking forward to that because that weighs 70 pounds.

CECCARELLI: The diving helmet that he wore for that thing was, how many pounds was that? 70?

WALLER: 70 pounds.

CECCARELLI: It was crazy. So after we shot that, we ended up finding another replica that's a lighter version of it for the next time we use it.

WALLER: It's like it's 25 pounds. I can do 25 pounds in my sleep. Yeah, that'll be fine. There are a couple of shots where I'm having to react to things and leaning back with 70 pounds on your head and not dying. And again, if the acting is ever off, you can't blame [Tom Kenny, voice of SpongeBob SquarePants] because that's me trying to pantomime to what he's doing with a 70 pound thing on my head.

READ MORE: SpongeBob SquarePants Reveals First Trailer for Upcoming Nickelodeon Crossover | SpongeBob SquarePants Multidimensional Crossover Special Gets Premiere Date | SpongeBob Universe Announces First Major Crossover Special For Nickelodeon

SpongeBob SquarePants Presents The Tidal Zone premieres on Nickelodeon on January 13th at 7:00PM EST.