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The Patrick Star Show takes SpongeBob’s surrealness and ‘dials it up to 10’ at Comic-Con@Home
SpongeBob SquarePants’ Patrick Star always wanted to be… a star! In his new Nickelodeon spinoff series, The Patrick Star Show, everyone’s favorite little pink starfish finally gets his wish.
During this year’s Comic-Con@Home, the cast of the show gave us a glimpse of what the new show will be like with a table read. Actors Bill Fagerbakke (Patrick Star), Tom Wilson (Cecil Star), Cree Summer (Bunny Star), Jill Talley (Squidina Star), and Dana Snyder (GrandPat) regaled fans with an enactment of an episode and then took questions along with co-executive producers Vincent Waller and Marc Ceccarelli. SYFY WIRE’s own Tara Bennett moderated the panel.
Check out the panel here:
Before getting into the table read of the upcoming episode, “Stair Wars,” the cast and executive producers shared their take on what makes The Patrick Star Show different. “It’s a variety show folded into a sitcom,” Ceccarelli explained. “We could basically just go anywhere we wanted to go with our creativity. We could do genre parodies, we could do all kinds of different segments that would be a little more disconnected and fragmented and fractured, kind of like Patrick's brain probably is.”
The panel then treated us to a table read that emphasized what Faberbakke called The Patrick Star Show’s “non sequitur element.” In “Stair Wars,” Patrick and his GrandPat have a standoff on the stairwell and jump through sequences in the horror genre as well as a cable newscast, among others. The read took advantage of the online format, and had rough sketches of what the eventual animation would look like on most of the screen. The voice actors were at the bottom, allowing us to see their facial expressions while they read the script.
Having the show framed around Patrick, who Faberbakke described as “gooey gelatinous mess of impulses,” is what makes the spinoff different from SpongeBob yet still clearly part of that ecosystem.
“I think the biggest difference is the randomness of the humor,” Ceccarelli said near the end of the panel. “The fact that it’s Patrick's brain that was the baseline, where everything's coming from. It created a world of a bit more creative chaos, because things are bouncing around a bit more inside that empty skull of his. The different visual styles, the different story styles…they all come from that even more surreal place. But that still is similar to the SpongeBob universe because we've always dealt with that kind of surreal sensibility and humor, it's just now we've dialed it up like to 10.”
The Patrick Star Show airs on Nickelodeon on Fridays at 7 p.m. Eastern / 6 p.m. Central.
Click here for SYFY WIRE's full coverage of Comic-Con@Home 2021.
