It was over 25 years ago that we caught the first glimpse of the world’s most famous buck-toothed sponge, the googly-eyed fry-cook who lives in a pineapple under the sea. It was, of course, SpongeBob SquarePants.

Now, over 300 television episodes later, it has become practically impossible to avoid this loveable porous creature, finding him in video games, a Broadway musical, memes, and cinema.

While numerous 90s kids’ animations have come and gone, the SpongeBob franchise is still churning out content, the most recent being its fourth film, Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie.

This Netflix film expands the underwater world by centring on Texan squirrel scientist Sandy Cheeks, who drags SpongeBob along to save their fishy pals from being cloned by a pug-toting villain (played by a live-action Wanda Sykes) in dry-land Texas.

The film comes over a quarter of a century after the pilot episode, and it technically doesn’t even centre on the sponge himself, yet it remained in Netflix’s Global Top 10 for three weeks running. So, how has this weird spongy dude, along with his motley crew of friends, remained relevant for so long?

It’s largely thanks to Gen Z and younger millennials. Despite SpongeBob technically being a kids’ product, young adults have been drawn to the franchise’s signature absurdism, which has held strong since it first landed on TV in 1999.

For example, in season one, SpongeBob’s curmudgeonly neighbour Squidward travels through time using a mysterious time machine, landing in a white void where logic ceases to exist. Was it trying to teach us anything? No, but it was surreally hilarious.

Elsewhere, a scene in Saving Bikini Bottom sees the town scooped out of the sea by a Texan laboratory. As it ascends from the ocean floor, the residents panic, pouring soft drink into their eyeballs and running head-first into the growing abyss below them.