When Little Rock native and Central High School graduate Rodger Bumpass left Arkansas State University and Jonesboro's ABC affiliate KAIT in 1977, fame seemed like a foregone conclusion. After all, he'd won an announcing contest.
Despite having been involved with everything from the Toy Story movies to The Running Man, Bumpass will always be known for playing a cephalopod.
For the last 16 years, Bumpass has provided the whiny nasal voice of SpongeBob SquarePants' (Tom Kenny) glum co-worker Squidward Tentacles. The Nickelodeon series has reached millions of homes and is popular with two generations around the world. It has also inspired two popular films, 2004's The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, which knocked American Sniper from the top of the box office earlier this month.
Speaking from California, the scion of a landlocked state giddily recalls achieving fame as a resident of Bikini Bottom and being a reluctant friend with a giddy sponge.
"When we first did the show, I got a copy of the pilot and took it home and showed it to my family, and they kind of yawned at it. I don't think anybody knew that it would take off the way it did a couple of years later.
"It just became an American icon. We're now up to, 'I grew up with you,' which is what I would have said to [Warner Bros. vocal virtuoso] Mel Blanc if I ever would have met him. It's wonderful and surprising to be part of that legacy."
The Grim Cashier
In an undersea world full of odd characters like an amphibious squirrel (Carolyn Lawrence), the bumbling starfish Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) and the penny pinching crab proprietor (Clancy Brown) of the restaurant where the starfish and the sponge work, Squidward still stands out. His dour expression indicates that Squidward would probably rather do anything but sell customers fried Krabby Patties.
According to Bumpass, "He's a frustrated artiste. He's better than everyone around him, and yet he has to work in the food service sector. He's underpaid, underappreciated, underwater. His life is so frustrating, and he's surrounded by this insanity that he's the target of and the victim of. He's someone to be pitied."
In the new film, however, Squidward may actually have something to be happy about. Presented in 3-D, the residents of Bikini Bottom even get superhero versions of themselves. The normally wiry Squidward now has a set of six-pack abs. The characters also have to wrestle with an apocalyptic meta-tale (narrated by Antonio Banderas) that's a good deal more complicated than a typical episode of the television series.
"It gets me girls all the time now," Bumpass says. "There's a big difference in scale and scope and importance when you're going from a TV show to a film. The narrative has to be bigger and more important and more detailed. Whereas on the TV show, you can do one 11-minute cartoon on SpongeBob trying to find his show, which we actually have done.
"But in the movie you've got to have a larger universe to go around in. And there's a lot of money being spent to make the film, so there is a little bit more pressure, but it's the same animal as far as the actors go. We're doing our characters and trying to make them as funny as we can. We get more lines that are good, funny lines and that's what they gave us this time."
The success of the series, the films and the merchandising might have something to do with the fact that SpongeBob and Squidward's antics aren't aimed solely at children. For example, in one episode, a training video for making Krabby Patties features Squidward becoming irate at the lovable but bumbling Patrick who seems incapable of handling Squidward's order. Just like the videos that their parents are forced to watch on the job, the video is loaded with insipid acronyms.
It's doubtful that "People Order Our Patties" will do much to sell additional sandwiches.
"I'm not surprised," Bumpass says. "I know the writers, and I know their intent. They work on multiple layers. It's kind of like a parable in that a person of a certain age and sophistication and knowledge will get something out of it. A person who's a little older or wiser will get something else. The parents have told me many times it's one of the few shows that they can sit and watch with their children and be entertained."
The One That Got Away
Curiously, another aquatic creature could have led to on-camera fame for Bumpass, but the timing was off.
"I left Arkansas in the '70s and National Lampoon was just going to release Animal House and start a comedy tour of the entire country," he recalls. "After the success of Animal House, they wanted to do another film. I got a lot of good reviews on the tour, so they were grooming me to be the next breakout actor like John Belushi. They were going to do the third Jaws movie, Jaws 3, People 0. The best thing about the script was the title. I had a love scene with Bo Derek. Unfortunately, because it was a film about a studio making a shark movie, we were going to use the mechanical shark from Jaws, Bruce.
"When Steven Spielberg heard about that, he'd only made two major films at the time. He came over to the studio head and said, 'That's going to ruin the fantasy in my film, so you'd better cancel this movie or I'm walking.' So what do you think they did? They canceled it, so that was my Hollywood tragedy story."
If he's bitter about it, the voice actor doesn't let on. Bumpass has appeared on-camera in Escape From New York and other films but finds voice work "liberating." He also says the business has changed considerably since he started making a living at it.
"I like to work with other actors. We try to do that in SpongeBob as much as we can. It helps for any acting ensemble feel and the improv and the give-and-take when you have more people there. As for preferences, I love working with people, but our technology has changed so that people can just sit in their closets and do the same things they used to have to do in New York or Los Angeles in cabs all day long. In a way it's good, but that also means we're auditioning against 100,000 instead 20, so it's good and bad," he says.
Bumpass, who sounds more like the TV announcer he used to be than his animated avatar, says he's delighted to have an occupation unlike Squidward's.
"That's called a job. He's forced to do this. He's got to make ends meet. Contrasting that with what we are doing, what we as human actors are doing, it's the old saying, 'love what you do, and you'll never work a day in your life.' And that's what we all do."
MovieStyle on 02/27/2015