Jerry and Friends (August 27, 1975 - November 7, 1981)

Jerry and Friends chronicled the comedic adventures of Jerry Jarandizo and his underwater friends. Bookish Tammy Tiko provided the brains of the bunch with her vast knowledge and her multitude of inventions that would inevitably fall apart or fail. The jockish turtle, Chris Shellbert, was all bravado and bluster until things get dicey where he would often be the cowardly one of the bunch. Last was laidback Jamie Jelly happy to follow along wherever the day took her and was typically the stand in for the "'lazy stoner" that was a popular archetype during this time. Fighting against them was the evil octopus, Victor Podus and his army of evil squids. The series was episodic and had no overarching story and merely ran on the flow of an “event of the week” style of series. While the show never made any continuation after its cancelation in 1981, the characters have made several appearances in media throughout the 80s and towards the end of the 2000s. Various comic book issues, novels, a short lived spin-off series has kept the franchise alive until their final spotlight appearance being in the 2003 film, “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” in which Jerry and Chris are briefly seen dining in a cafeteria with several other classic Hanna-Barbera characters. Jerry and Chris had a brief line of dialogue in which Jerry’s original voice actress, Lucille Bliss, reprised her role and Chris’s original voice actor, Frank Welker, also reprised his role.

A Retrospective

Since its popularity to old generations and newer ones, Jerry and Friends has become one of the most successful and most recognisable shows being only rivalled in the Hannah-Barbera cartoons by Scooby Doo. Jerry and Friends has inspired modern shows like Spongebob Squarepants, with Stephen Hillenburg himself growing up on the show and being inspired by it to become a marine biologist. Many other children who grew up with the show have likewise been inspired to learn more about marine life. The massive success of the show also spawned one of the largest and most expansive merchandising empires in the world with some articles of merch being priced at over a million dollars.

Many people today speak fondly of the show either from nostalgia or from the countless myriad of memes that have stemmed from the show. Right next to Scooby Doo and Spongebob, Jerry and Friends have countless screencaps and edits of the original show that the modern meme culture adores. And throughout the decades since its release, a strong and hefty fandom has been cultivating and is still cultivating to this day. There is even an upcoming reboot of the show that will be for older fans of the show. Little is known about the details, except that the show is slated to release on August 27 of 2025 for the show's 50 year anniversary, and the strong opinions of the Jerry and Friends fandom have made clear how important this new reboot has to be.

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