anchors, and boilerplate, and rivets. The pilot and the rest of the series feature the "sky flowers" as the main background. When series background designer Kenny Pittenger was asked "What are those things?," he answered, "They function as clouds in a way, but since the show takes place underwater, they aren't really clouds." Since the show was influenced by tiki, the background painters have to use a lot of patterns. Pittenger said "So really, the sky flowers are mostly a whimsical design element that Steve [Hillenburg] came up with to evoke the look of a flower-print Hawaiian shirt—or something like that. I don't know what they are either." Casting While Drymon and Hill were writing the pilot, Hillenburg was also conducting auditions to find voices for the show's characters. He had created the character of SpongeBob with Tom Kenny, in which he utilised Kenny's and other people's personalities to help create its personality. Drymon said, "Tom came in a few times so we could pitch him what we were working to help him find the right voice. Tom had already worked on lots of other animated shows, and Steve wanted to find an original sounding voice." Kenny originally used the voice of SpongeBob for a very minor female alligator character named Al in Rocko's Modern Life who appeared in the episode "Dear John." Kenny forgot the voice initially, as he created it only for that single use. Hillenburg, however, remembered it when he was coming up with SpongeBob and used a video clip of the episode to remind Kenny of the voice. Kenny says that SpongeBob's high-pitched laugh was specifically aimed at being unique, stating that they wanted an annoying laugh in the tradition of Popeye and Woody Woodpecker. Kenny also provided the voice of Gary, SpongeBob's meowing sea snail, and the narrator in the episode. According to him, "It was always Steve's intention that the narrator is a nod to his beloved Jacques Cousteau." Kenny described Cousteau's voice as "very dispassionate, very removed, very flatline, even when he’s describing something miraculous and beautiful." At first, they found that the narrator "just sounds bored," so they decided that he "has to sound a little fun and playful." Kenny said, "'Let ees the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life.' We found that after a while we had to make the narrator a little more playful than that."