Jabberjaw

Producing the Jabberjaw series in 1976, Hanna-Barbera Productions looked ahead to the year 2076, where they envisioned a world in which mankind expands its frontier to towns and cities beneath the sea encased within protective bio-domes. What better way to explore this world than by following the adventures of a teenage rock band called The Neptunes who have a 15 ft Great White Shark for a drummer? As a bonus, traveling from one gig to the next afforded the group plenty of opportunities to cross paths with the sea’s criminal element.

Level-headed Biff played lead guitar and led the band. Ditzy, blond-haired Bubbles played keyboard and had a knack for making a bad situation even worse by doing stupid things. Clamhead played bass. In dangerous circumstances, or when he got excited about something, his favorite phrase was, “Wowee, Wow Wow.” Raven haired tambourine player Shelly was vain and easily annoyed; most especially so with the band’s drummer Jabberjaw. She was full of not-so endearing terms for the shark, like Blubberhead, Dum-Dum, Jabbernose, overgrown guppy and Jabber-blubber, to name a few. It’s small wonder that Jabberjaw complained of getting “No respect!”

The series included things one might expect to find in an underwater world. For starters, the names of most things began with “aqua,” like aquamobile, Plaza Aquapulco and Aquamo (Eskimo). Sharks must have been a common problem, because “shark ejectors” (robots programmed to remove a shark from the premises) were standard in many establishments. Apparently not all sharks were of the friendly sort like Jabberjaw, who was repeatedly tossed out by the shark ejectors, prompting his inevitable complaint of, “No respect!”

Each episode ended with a musical chase scene where the teens and Jabberjaw ran from that week’s villain, performing zany cartoon antics in order to escape while a groovy tune played in the background. As a prelude to confronting the bad guys, Jabberjaw liked to demonstrate his fighting prowess by proclaiming, “I’ll give ’em one of these… then I give ’em one of those…” while carrying out pseudo martial arts moves. His bravado wasn’t merely bragging however, because in the end the band mates always caught the criminals, thanks in large part to the exploits of Jabberjaw.

The show ran for one season of original episodes, followed by a second season consisting entirely of repeats. Afterwards, Jabberjaw appeared as a regular on Yogi’s Space Race (1978) and as an occasional guest announcer on Scooby’s All Star Laff-A-Lympics (1977) and Scooby’s All-Stars (1978).