For Shark Week: Some Jabs at “Jabberjaw”

July 23 marks the beginning of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week this year, an annual tradition since 1988. I have always been shocked at how successful this promotional campaign has been with the public. It genuinely generates buzz and interest about SOMETHING for a week every year, sometimes the titular creatures it ostensibly celebrates, sometimes the network’s ludicrous programming. People love sharks. But can they find it in their hearts to love…Jabberjaw?

I was about 11 when Hanna-Barbera released this patently craven mash-up of trends in Fall of 1976. In emulation of the monster box-office hit Jaws, which had been released the previous summer, it has a great white at its center. Only, the eponymous carnivore has the voice and the personality of Curly from the Three Stooges. Back then the Stooges were still very popular with children, and would be for at least another decade. (Not only were there films regularly shown on television, but they were technically a going concern as recently as the previous year. The last of the original ones, Moe Howard and Larry Fine both died in 1975, and they were discussing new projects right up until the end). Also Jabberjaw is also given to using Rodney Dangerfield’s catchphrase “I don’t get no respect!” So now you know what the result would be if Curly Howard and Rodney Dangerfield mated and had a talking baby shark.

But wait! There’s more convolution. Like Irwin Allen’sCity Beneath the Sea (1971, a different show from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, also an Allen project) it is set in a futuristic underwater metropolis, and was full of aquatic puns a good quarter century before SpongeBob SquarePants. Wait! Still not done! Because Jabberjaw plays drums in a rock band that solves mysteries like the one in Josie and the Pussycats. The group is called The Neptunes (get it? Nep-TUNES?). And the fact that this underwater band is always battling supervillains inevitably calls to mind the adventures of Aquaman, who had been depicted in many animated Saturday morning cartoons by that point. The show’s obnoxious theme song is like a sugar-sweetened cereal fueled version of “The Alley Cat” as performed by children at summer camp. It was like the producers sat down and said, “What can we do to make this show more excessive?”

This unwieldy conceptual behemoth was the brainchild of Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, who’d also created Scooby Doo, Where Are You?and many similar shows, and that lineage is reflected in many ways. Jabberjaw was voiced by Frank Welker, who played Fred in Scooby Doo. And just as Scooby has a human partner in Shaggy, Jabberjaw has one named Clamhead, played by none other than Barry Gordon of Fish and A Thousand Clowns. Like Shaggy, Clamhead is given to exclaiming “zowie!” but also “Wowee-wow-wow-wow!” and  “Abba-abba-abba!” The other members of the Neptunes are played by former child star Tommy Cook,Julie McWhirter (best known as Baby Smurf), and, in her first screen credit, Patricia Parris.

Only 16 episodes of the show were produced, but like many Hanna-Barbera characters, Jabberjaw made guest appearances in other cartoons, and has continued to do so to the present day, and was also featured in comic books, coloring books, and on merchandise such as lunch boxes. As kids we were amused by it of course, but even then we were hip to the fact that it wasn’t a “real” show, i.e. something solid and original, but just a Frankensteinian hodgepodge of elements like Gilligan’s Planet, or the Laff-a-Lympics, or whatever.

As to whether Jabberjaw will make you more sympathetic to the existential plight of chondrichthyes in an increasingly hostile natural environment, that’s for YOU to decide…