The 12th Annual Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards was held on May 1, 1999, at Pauley Pavilion at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Actress Rosie O'Donnell hosted the ceremony for the fourth time. 3rd Storee, Britney Spears, TLC, and NSYNC performed live from Orlando, Florida. About 6.2 million children participated in voting. The ceremony is also notable as leading into "Help Wanted/Reef Blower/Tea at the Treedome", the pilot episode and first airing of the now-long running animated series SpongeBob SquarePants.

SpongeBob SquarePants (also simply referred to as SpongeBob) is an American animated comedy television series created by marine science educator and animator Stephen Hillenburg for Nickelodeon. The series chronicles the adventures of the title character and his aquatic friends in the fictional underwater city of Bikini Bottom. Being the fifth-longest-running American animated series, its high popularity has made it a media franchise. It is the highest rated series to air on Nickelodeon as well as the most profitable property for Paramount Consumer Products, having generated over $13 billion in merchandising revenue as of 2019.Many of the series' ideas originated in The Intertidal Zone, an unpublished educational book that Hillenburg created in 1989 to teach his students about undersea life. He began developing SpongeBob SquarePants into a television series in 1996, and in 1997, a seven-minute pilot was pitched to Nickelodeon. The network's executives wanted SpongeBob to be a child in school, but Hillenburg preferred SpongeBob to be an adult character. He was prepared to "walk out" on Nickelodeon and abandon the series, but he compromised by creating Mrs. Puff and her boating school, so that SpongeBob could attend school as an adult.Nickelodeon aired a preview for the series in the United States on May 1, 1999, following the airing of the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards. The series later officially premiered on July 17, 1999. It has received worldwide critical acclaim since its premiere and had gained enormous popularity by its second season. The thirteenth season began airing in October 2020, and the series was renewed for a fourteenth season on March 24, 2022. The series has inspired three feature films: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), Sponge Out of Water (2015), and Sponge on the Run (2020). Two spin-off series, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years and The Patrick Star Show, premiered in 2021. As of February 2022, four additional films are in the works – consisting of three character spinoff films for Paramount+ and a new theatrical SpongeBob film.

SpongeBob SquarePants has won a variety of awards including six Annie Awards, eight Golden Reel Awards, four Emmy Awards, 18 Kids' Choice Awards, and two BAFTA Children's Awards. A Broadway musical based on the series opened in 2017 to critical acclaim.