Patrick Star

Patrick in 2009

Eyebrows formerly shaped like “Z’s”, now double lines

Patrick Star is the deuteragonist of the series. He is best friends with SpongeBob and first appeared in the pilot on May 1, 1999. Many of the reviews of him are positive.

Patrick is the ignorant but very humorous best friend of SpongeBob SquarePants. He is portrayed as being an overweight dimwitted, pink starfish residing in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom. Patrick gets dumber throughout the series and has been shown to make many ludicrous mistakes. Sometimes he is wise. As soon as he says his sentence, he forgets it, as seen in Squidtastic Voyage.

Everything in his house is made of sand, and the furniture gets destroyed whenever he or anybody touches it.

## Creation

### Pre-Patrick (1996-1999)

Stephen Hillenburg, a marine biologist and artist, was amazed and fascinated about the ocean and its inhabitants. He started drawing as a child. Later, he created a comic called The Intertidal Zone, starring Bob the Sponge. In 1996, he started to make the series. He wanted Patrick to be the dumbest guy in town. He designed Patrick and SpongeBob as such because "they're whipping themselves up into situations—that's always where the humor comes from. The rule is: Follow the innocence and avoid topical [humor].

### Now-Patrick (1999-present)

In some episodes, he wanted Patrick to have a tantrum. Patrick's emotional outbreak was originally written only for the first season episode "Valentine's Day", where SpongeBob and Sandy try to give Patrick a Valentine's Day gift, and "was supposed to be a one-time thing". Later, he wanted Patrick to have more tantrums.

#### Footsteps

Every character in the show has a unique footstep. Patrick’s footsteps were performed by flip-flops.

### Voice

Patrick's voice is provided by actor Bill Fagerbakke, who also does the voices of numerous other characters on SpongeBob SquarePants. Auditions were made, and they finally found their pick. "Steve is such a lovely guy, and I had absolutely no feeling for the material whatsoever,” Fagerbakke said. "I was just going in for another audition, and I had no idea what was in store there in terms of the remarkable visual wit and really the kind of endearing child-like humanity in the show. I couldn't pick that up from the audition material at all. I was just kind of perfunctorially trying to give the guy what he wanted."

Fagerbakke referred to Patrick as "AquaDauber" (a reference to his role as Michael "Dauber" Dybinski on the 1990s sitcom Coach) in the first few years of working on the show. According to Fagerbakke, Patrick is "enormously entertaining to portray" because "when I'm performing Patrick, there are many secrets that I could never divulge". Fagerbakke's approach in voicing Patrick is "much the same way I would do [to] any kind of character. I'm always looking for opportunities to explore that freewheeling imagination and insanity of children. To be able to plug in to that and let that carry you in to a performance is such a gas, I have so much fun with that. I love kids; I raised two girls and I love being a parent," he said. The cast members record as a whole cast. Fagerbakke says that the situation improves his performance as a voice actor because "there is something remarkable that happens when people are working together that is unique to that." Fagerbakke modeled his performance whenever Patrick is angry after that of American actress Shelley Winters.