‘F.O.P.’ puts squeeze on ‘Bob’

Wanda and Cosmo are the next SpongeBob SquarePants.

Wait, let’s try that again in English.

You, of course, know SpongeBob, the recently minted cultural icon who is the title character in Nickelodeon’s wildly popular cartoon about a feisty little yellow sponge who lives under the sea and works as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab.

Well, Wanda and Cosmo are his heirs apparent. They’re the title characters on Nickelodeon’s latest hit, “The Fairly Odd Parents,” a show about two well-intentioned but sometimes bumbling fairies who live in a fishbowl. They empower 10-year-old Timmy, the only one who knows about them, and help protect him from his mean baby-sitter, Vicky, and his benignly idiotic parents, Mr. and Mrs. Turner.

These are parents who often leave Timmy with Vicky-the-yeller and who do things like send a slightly threatening e-mail to the girl Timmy has a crush on, despite his protests. Threats, they tell him, are the way to make a girl really like you. (Huh?)

“ ‘SpongeBob’ paved the way for us,” says “Fairly Odd Parents” creator Butch Hartman. “ ‘Rugrats’ had its own fans, but they all grew up. But ‘SpongeBob’s’ wacky comedy set the stage for us to do this.”

“The Fairly Odd Parents,” which airs at 9 p.m. Fridays and 10 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays, is the second-most-popular show on television for kids ages 2 to 11, just behind “SpongeBob.”

“It’s gone from a show that languished in the bottom of the top 10 to a solid No. 2, and it’s taking off incredibly fast,” says David Bittler, a spokesman for the cable network.

As “Odd Parents” enters its third season, Nickelodeon is pushing it big, with two special episodes. The first, “The Information Stupor Highway,” aired in January, and the other is set for Valentine’s Day.

As with “Rugrats” and “SpongeBob,” the writing on “Odd Parents” makes it funny not only to the 6- to 12-year-olds Nickelodeon is targeting, but also to teenagers and their parents.

“It has an appeal that goes beyond the demographic,” says Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president and general manager. “The richness of the writing makes re-watching possible. It’s very, very clever.”

So clever, the folks at Nickelodeon believe, that it will sustain a flood of products: toys, games, clothing and accessories that will be introduced at the Toy Fair in New York this month.

Just how many “Odd Parents” items will there be? Even Hartman isn’t sure.

“They’ve shown me so much stuff I can’t possibly look at all of it,” he says.

The show fits Nickelodeon’s successful formula of empowering kids as they navigate the world of adults. The parents in the show are the typical Nickelodeon portrayals: Think of the completely oblivious “Rugrats” crowd, or the morons in “Jimmy Neutron.”

“The parents are stupid, but they’re not unloving,” Hartman says of the Turners, adding that there is always a scene in which they hug Timmy (voiced by Tara Strong, also the voice of “Rugrats” baby Dil Pickles). “When kids are kids, everything a parent does seems goofy. Timmy is smart enough to want to control his own destiny, but he can’t do a lot.”

That’s where the godparents come in. They can help with some things, but with others “Da Rules” of godparenting do not allow it.

“Superman had his Kryptonite,” says Hartman. “The rules are their Kryptonite. I had to limit them. The main rules are that no one can know they exist, the wishes have to be wished in Timmy’s voice and the godparents can’t interfere with true love.”

So, for example, they couldn’t retrieve the e-mail Timmy’s parents sent to his love interest, Trixie Tang.

Often the episodes become a lesson of “Be careful what you wish for,” as the godparents fulfill Timmy’s requests in ways he could not have predicted.

The Turner parents may be a little goofy, concedes Zarghami, “but it’s very empowering for kids to have the world of adults being portrayed as a little off. It’s great for kids to be in charge. It makes the kids feel ‘the world could be mine.’ And it allows us to tell really fantastic kid stories.”

Hartman, 38, has been drawing since his childhood in New Baltimore, Mich.

“In kindergarten, the teacher asked us to draw a picture of her. She looked at mine and praised it and praised it again and praised it again. I realized drawing was a way I could get attention from adults. I never played sports. I was always drawing. I used to sit in front of the TV and draw the Flintstones as fast as I could.”

Now drawing is the way to get attention from kids, including his own daughters, 7 and 5. On Jan. 20, 2.7 million of them watched “The Information Stupor Highway,” and more than 228,000 played the interactive online game that day.

Hartman says some kids like Timmy need fairy godparents because they’re not all that happy. But Timmy’s friend Chester (who gets his voice from “Malcolm in the Middle’s” Frankie Muniz) doesn’t have them, doesn’t need them. He lives in a trailer with his family, and he’s happy with who he is, Hartman says.

He and the 45 others who work on the show always start with the idea that it has to be funny, although most of the 11-minute episodes do have some kind of moral.

“We don’t start with the idea that we’re going to teach kids ‘don’t chew your nails,’ ” he says. “We’re looking for high-energy comedy. It has to make us laugh.”