How Nickelodeon Brought SpongeBob to the Super Bowl

When the Kansas City Chiefs scored the winning touchdown during a historic overtime nail-biter at the Super Bowl on Sunday, viewers were on the edge of their seats — including none other than SpongeBob Squarepants and his best friend, Patrick Star. An unlikely pair to have anything to do with one of the biggest sporting events of the year, one might think, but the beloved animated characters turned out to be the breakout sports commentators of the night. In a Super Bowl and Nickelodeon first, the network, owned by ViacomCBS, tapped SpongeBob and Patrick, voiced by Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke, alongside human sports commentators Noah Eagle and Nate Burleson, to call the game set in the animated, fictional world of Bikini Bottom.

The broadcast — which was seven months in the making and combined augmented reality, animated graphics, and real-life events — was an instant hit with viewers. Clips from the broadcast quickly began circulating on social media on Sunday and skyrocketing to viral status, with viewers praising the hilariously unconventional experience of watching SpongeBob and Patrick make light of the game. It was a tremendous group effort across a number of production teams, but when it all came together, everyone knew they had the chance to make some “magic.”

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“You’re taking a product like the NFL, which within itself is so successful, then you’re combining that with the best animators in the world at Nickelodeon, and the best production team in the world at CBS,” Shawn Robbins, Nickelodeon’s executive producer of the broadcast, tells Rolling Stone. “You’re bound to be able to make some great magic.”

The Nickelodeon team started working on the Super Bowl special back in June, Robbins says, when senior executive Ashley Kaplan first suggested that Nickelodeon should bring the Super Bowl to Bikini Bottom. “I was like, wow, this is cool,” Kenny, who has voiced SpongeBob for 25 years, tells Rolling Stone. “I get to [voice SpongeBob] all the time, which I love doing, but there’s this other wrinkle to it now. That is kind of exciting and also kind of risky, and the risk is cool.”

While traveling to Bikini Bottom on Super Bowl Sunday might have been a new idea, Nickelodeon is no newbie when it comes to the world of sports. The network first started doing live sports broadcasts back in 2020 when CBS Sports’ President David Berson was renegotiating the network’s deal with the NFL. He proposed the idea of putting football games on Nickelodeon as a way to gain a younger NFL audience. After five broadcasts in the last few years — including a wild card NFL game in 2021, Christmas Day “Nickelodeon NFL Nickmas” games in 2022 and 2023, NFL Slimetime shows — Robbins says they began to feel confident about their ability to connect with viewers in a new, authentic way.

In fact, Robbins says, part of the goal was to make watching sports, particularly football, easier for parents by finding a way to get their kids involved. And by adding SpongeBob and Patrick to the mix at the Super Bowl, they even managed to reach a millennial audience because of the lasting nostalgia of the animated show.

“You want mom and dad to be able to sit there and enjoy the game, and you want to create something where the kids could also want to stick around,” Robbins says. “The game of football really matters to us, and we’re trying to protect the game as well and keep the integrity of the broadcast, but we want to be silly around it so the kids stick around, and it makes it really interesting for them to learn the game.”

Robbins has worked with CBS since 1998 and on 13 past Super Bowls, but he says the task to create a Nickelodeon broadcast still stood out as a unique challenge. When navigating the broadcast’s logistics, Robbins says there were hundreds of people involved across a number of teams on what would become one of their biggest projects to date. This meant figuring out a lot of details ahead of time, including how to make the stadium look like it was underwater. In order to achieve this, production combined real-life footage from the actual game with a green screen, allowing them to animate the game using graphics of floating jellyfish and other sea-like themes.

Once the technical and animated details were sorted, the team had one last important step to figure out: how to get SpongeBob and Patrick to become sports commentators. Not being much of a football fan, Kenny says that Sunday’s game was the first Super Bowl he ever watched. Fagerbakke, on the other hand, loves all things football — but the voice actors’ real-life affinity for sports was irrelevant when it came to their Super Bowl performances. SpongeBob and Patrick were meant to be a breath of fresh air and provide an alternative perspective on the game, in contrast to other Super Bowl coverage that typically includes more hyper-masculine and macho commentary.

“The sum total of my football knowledge could fit in Plankton’s jockstrap,” Kenny jokes. “When they brought up I was doing it, I said, ‘I really don’t know much about football,’ and they said, ‘That’s fine because the concept is going to be that the SuperBowl at Allegiant Stadium is just dropped into Bikini Bottom and it’s this crazy, unfamiliar, alien thing to SpongeBob.”

A crew of about 200 people worked on the live telecast, with teams between Las Vegas and New York City feeding information and graphics to one another in real-time. “If a play would happen or if we would show a cutaway shot of Patrick Mahomes, we’d send that shot to New York, a graphic animator would put a pirate hat on him, send it back to us, and then we rolled that back into the game,” Robbins explains. “One of my favorite graphics in the show is ‘three hours later’ when Kansas City scored their first touchdown. It was so funny because the game was a little boring for a second there. Someone in graphics, Jack Kempner, comes up with this amazing graphic that connects SpongeBob back to the game on the fly.”

Eagle and Burleson, who regularly host Nickelodeon’s live sporting events, sat in front of a green screen during the Super Bowl. And while it might have looked like they were sitting next to a yellow sponge and pink starfish, Kenny and Fagerbakke were also there with them in person, decked out in augmented reality gear that animated them in real-time. Kenny and Fagerbakke wore AR suits with iPhones attached to their faces in order to capture their facial expressions and body movements. There were two days of rehearsals leading up to the Super Bowl on Sunday, but the voice actors didn’t have a script; they spent hours improvising and riffing off of one another in order to prepare.

While Kenny says he largely identifies as a “very positive person,” even he couldn’t help but feel some nerves leading up to the big day — he knew there were a lot of potential ways for the telecast to go wrong. There was also the question of whether anyone would actually like this.

“It’s not like we were afraid that we were going to say something inappropriate and destroy the zillion dollar IP that has made us a living the last quarter of a century, but I was like ‘Wow, they have a lot of trust in us,’” Kenny says of Nickelodeon.

The chemistry between Kenny and Fagerbakke was undeniable. Yes, the duo have been feeding off each other for decades on SpongeBob, but they also credit Eagle and Burelson for helping make their jobs feel more seamless. Sandy Cheeks and Larry the Lobster even made appearances as on-field correspondences.

“They’re professional broadcasters, and it’s a pretty amazing skill set. I was sort of dazzled by how good they were at their jobs,” Kenny says. “Everybody was just functioning at a really high level to bring this thing to life and make it happen.”

Due to the hecticness of the night, Robbins wasn’t able to monitor fan response to the broadcast on social media. Luckily, some of his crew members relayed the positive reactions they were seeing on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“To get the feedback immediately from the Twitterverse is great for us, even though we all knew going into this that we were doing something very, very special,” Robbins says.

And boy, did the internet have fun with this one. Viewers took to X and shared screenshots of their favorite graphics during the broadcast, like when Nickelodeon referred to Travis Kelce as “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend,” and SpongeBob talked about the low score of the game, joking his and Patrick’s IQs were even lower. Kenny thought it was especially funny when people shared the photo of Travis Kelce yelling at his coach Andy Reid with the caption: “You are making me look like a jackass in front of SpongeBob and Patrick.”

“For some reason, SpongeBob really lends himself to memes,” Kenny says. “It’s been going on for years now, and I just love the cleverness and the great writing of these funny people who can write these concise little jokes using found imagery.”

Another popular joke that SpongeBob made during the telecast was when the camera panned to Leonardo DiCaprio in the audience and Spongebob couldn’t help but take a playful jab at the actor’s dating history. “Leonardo DiCaprio, 25…that’s about his dating history,” Kenny, as SpongeBob, said, which was also a reference to an episode of SpongeBob when the animated character goes crazy over the number.

“That kind of just came out of me,” Kenny says. “There’s an episode where the number 25 is the punchline to every joke, and the fans know that. I also thought, ‘That’s DiCaprio’s magic number,’ and it just tumbled out of me. I didn’t want to look mean. SpongeBob can never be mean; he’s just so naive and positive that he wouldn’t be randomly mean to somebody.”

Online chatter about Nickelodeon’s Super Bowl broadcast hasn’t died down since Sunday, with some people calling for SpongeBob and Patrick to continue calling more NFL games and even expanding beyond live sports events. One viral post on X requested the Bikini Bottom duo to “do a companion broadcast on election night.”

“Patrick from SpongeBob explaining the electoral college and slime being dumped on the losing candidate during their concession speech,” comedian Brad Williams shared on X.

While Robbins says he’s “not the right guy to help with the election,” he agrees that Kenny and Fagerbakke have a limitless ability to bring a little bit of humor and levity to more television events. And Kenny tells Rolling Stone he’s “ready to suit up” if the opportunity comes his way.

“SpongeBob and Patrick probably have even less understanding of the Electoral College than the average American does, which is pretty much zilch. I mean, everything I know about the electoral college, I learned from [the play] Hamilton,” Kenny jokes. “But I’m down.”

But until another opportunity presents itself, election coverage or elsewhere, Kenny says he’s still processing the seismic way in which SpongeBob played a role in this year’s Super Bowl, becoming a part of some of the biggest pop culture moments this year.

“We know SpongeBob is successful as a brand, but when you’re driving down the Vegas strip, and the Sphere is SpongeBob, it’s kind of amazing. We feel really lucky. I know it’s corny, but we were like, ‘Wow, this is pretty rarefied.”

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