A Sponge By Any Other Name
Today we know him as SpongeBob SquarePants and you can't really imagine his name as anything else. But before he was "SpongeBob," Hillenburg actually called his porous main character "SpongeBoy."
That name wasn't going to work out, however, since the name was already copyrighted by a mop company. Hillenburg settled on SpongeBob, making sure to include "sponge" in the name so that kids wouldn't mistake him for a block of cheese! Coincidentally, in his comic, The Intertidal Zone, Hillenburg had a sponge character named Bob.
