Just how fast did Hasslehoff have to swim to get Spongebob and Patrick back to Bikini bottom in time?

[Thar 502]

Welcome to another one of Thar’s trains of thought nerding out over overly-logical shit for non-logical bullshit. This might be one of those things where people might already know it, but figuring this shit out felt like a revelation to me and I just wanted to get it all in writing. In any case, today I would like to share a recent rabbit hole that I found myself digging through.

To provide the full context of this, let’s start off with what prompted the initial question: I was listening to an episode of a podcast called The Last Podcast on the Left, a podcast discussing various figures and events with a macabre or mysterious theme such as serial killers, cults, urban legends, horror stories, etc. The episode in question was part of a three-episode series about Josef Mengele, the lead medical expert in Auschwitz, who was known to have gotten away with thousands of cruel experiments on the camp’s prisoners during the Holocaust.

Anyway, during this episode, the guys would occasionally go on a tangent to relieve the listeners of the morbid details of the subject they’re discussing, during which they mentioned Spongebob. Naturally, this had me thinking of Spongebob and Bikini Bottom.

“Hold up, Bikini Bottom… is that a real place?” I asked myself, opening up google without so much as a second thought. In my research, I managed to learn the following:

Bikini Bottom is based off the isle of Bikini Atoll, a territory of the Marshall Islands on the western Pacific. The island name is based off the Germanic transliteration of the Marshallese term Pikkini Atoll, translating to “surface of coconut.”

“Wait, so that’s what that means… so does that mean…” Again, I thought to myself as I made the connection to the swimwear, bikinis, realizing the name might actually attribute to the top piece of the suit covering the wearer’s “coconuts”, more literally simply being on the “surface of the coconuts.” Whoa.

Anyway, another thing I learned is that the island of Bikini Atoll was used by the Germans as a nuclear bomb test site, which may or may not be considered canon in the Spongebob lore after the use of stock footage of a francium bomb test on the episode “Dying for Pie” after Squidward took a full pie bomb directly to the face. This also brings the assumption that all the characters in Spongebob are mutations as a result of these experiments, even though Tom Kenny himself “debunked” this theory by saying he doesn’t believe that’s the case. Interesting regardless.

In any case, a new query opens up in my mind: Considering where Bikini Atoll is located, in the Spongebob movie, Spongebob and Patrick had 6 days to retrieve King Neptune’s stolen crown from the coastal sundries shop Shell City. Considering the two later ran into David Hasslehoff running in slow motion on the beach, this alludes to his role in Baywatch, meaning Shell City is located on the coast of LA, California. After making some measurements, Bikini Atoll is roughly 5000 miles (~8000 km) from the coast of LA.

So if we can assume it took a couple days for the two to travel up until their encounter with the deep diver, aka the “Cyclops”, it must’ve taken up maybe a day or two for the latter to get back to the coast of LA to his shop. After they escaped from the shop, they were racing against the clock to return the crown just before Mr. Krabs was executed. Considering this, David Hasslehoff had to have swam nearly 5000 miles across the Pacific Ocean within the remainder of time that they had. So regardless of just how long their journey took going one way (because let’s face it, nothing is ever logical in the Spongebob universe), Hasslehoff was HAULING ASS, having to swim at LEAST 100 mph… nonstop... and that’s assuming it took them a couple days. If they left the coast at the same time that Neptune started making his way back to the Krusty Krab, we can assume speeds over mach 100 (roughly 75,000 mph) to get them there in a few minutes.

Granted, there’s no way of telling exactly how long it took them, but the fact that Hasslehoff managed to swim that far that quickly is one hell of a feat.

So yeah, that’s my TED talk on how ridiculous it sounds to apply logic to this kind of shit. Thank you and have a good night!