Commentary: Idiot Box
- Squidward comes out of his house to see SpongeBob and Patrick hopping around waiting for the mail truck. They get a TV in the mail, but throw out the TV and keep the box.
This annoys Squidward enough that he confronts them about it. - SpongeBob says they don't need a television, “Not as long as we have our...” (he make a rainbow in the air with his hands) “Imagination!”
Squidward dismisses the thought and takes their TV.
- SpongeBob and Patrick drive Squidward nuts by making impossibly real noises from within the box.
When Squidward opens the box, SpongeBob and Patrick are just sitting there, playing pretend.
When Squidward tries to enjoy TV, everything on there is about boxes.
- Squidward thinks they must be fooling him with a tape recorder. He joins SpongeBob and Patrick to find out how they're doing it, but they just sit and make noises.
He thinks they must be fooling him with a tape recorder, so he sneaks in at night.
- Finally Squidward's imagination seems to be working! He pretends to drive a racecar, and he hears racecar noises.
Of course, this is a dump truck hauling him away.
Squidward isn't fun; he's not allowed to see how SpongeBob's fun works; when he tries to have his own fun, it all points back to SpongeBob's fun; and when he tries it with SpongeBob and Patrick, it just doesn't work. This is largely the same story with the same themes we've seen already.
But there's one important distinction from the others: this one is metafictional. The title is Idiot Box, which is a dismissive name for television. It could have been called “Boob Tube.” People call it that because they're worried that children's imagination is wasting away because they're spending all day in front of a machine that pipes in visual fantasies for them—they can't construct their own imaginary worlds. Maybe this is a well-founded worry. Maybe TV was melting my brain back in 2002, when this aired. But isn't it bizarre to get that moral from a cartoon, on Nickelodeon, on the boob tube itself?
Television shows Squidward the boxes to remind him of the real fun he's missing out on. The boxes on TV would then have the same relationship to Squidward as Idiot Box on Nickelodeon has to the viewer.
I wonder what it's for. Do kids pick up on the metafiction? Do they feel accused of being like Squidward, watching the idiot box on TV, being reminded of what real fun is like? This is an empirical question. Somebody please show this episode to a kid and talk about it. Wouldn't it be interesting if the show asked kids to identify themselves with Squidward, while adults identified kids with SpongeBob?
One last note: Squidward does have an imagination. We see it in this shot!
Squidward not only has an imagination, it's powerful enough to control him, to mess up his life. But in contrast with SpongeBob, Squidward has no power over it. When it comes to imagination rainbows, he's impotent.
