Even if he’d left the world of show business behind after hitting his twenties, Christian Jacobs would still deserve a certain amount of respect from pop-culture obsessives, having acted his way through his childhood and teenage years, serving as a regular on the “All in the Family” spin-off “Gloria” (he played Gloria Bunker Stivic’s son, Joey), making one-off appearances in episodes of “V,” “Married…with Children,” and “Roseanne,” and turning up in such films as “Gleaming the Cube” and, most notably, “Pretty in Pink,” where he plays the kid in the record store who Annie Potts’ character comes within half an inch of hitting in the eye with a staple. In the ’90s, however, Jacobs shifted careers, focusing on music and eventually helping to found a rather colorful band known as…The Aquabats!
Music alone couldn’t keep the coffers filled, alas, which forced the Aquabats into second position in favor of a gig that actually paid the bills with more regularity, so Jacobs returned to TV, this time working behind the scenes. In doing so, he was responsible for co-creating one of the most successful kids shows in recent years: “Yo Gabba Gabba!” Flush with the excitement that success brings, Jacobs and company have used a combination of creativity and show-biz connections to simultaneously kick-start a new series for the youth of today and fulfill a dream.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Aquabats! Super Show!
Bullz-Eye: Having seen the first two episodes of “The Aquabats! Super Show!,” it seems safe to suggest that Sid and Marty Krofft have been a major influence on you guys.
Christian Jacobs: [Laughs.] Definitely! I’m glad you caught that point of reference, for sure.
BE: So what are the origins of this “Super Show”? Was the idea of doing an Aquabats TV series always in the back of your mind, or was this a recent development?
CJ: No, it’s always been there, really. I mean, you know, it’s one of those things where…we started the band in ’94, and at the same time, I was doing video production, making music videos and skateboard videos, so I was in production already. And I grew up working in television as well, so we started the band, just for goofing around, but pretty much within a year I was, like, “This could be an amazing kids show! We could incorporate all those fun things we used to watch that were weird and trippy and action-packed…” We were influenced by shows from Japan, too. Those were there right away. So we started to incorporate them into the band, and from there we immediately set out to try and start a TV show…and this was, like, ’95 or ’96. [Laughs.] So it’s taken some time to finally happen, but it was one of those things where, right away, we were telling people, “We’re gonna make a TV show!” And it started to feel a little bit like that book The Carrot Seed, where there’s the little kid and no one believes the carrot’s gonna grow, but the kid does, and he knows the carrot’s gonna come up at some point. I feel like that was us a little bit. It was just up to us to stick it out and keep trying and keep trying and keep trying. But, yeah, it was definitely something that we always wanted to do.
BE: When did it first look like it was going to become a reality? Certainly the success of “Yo Gabba Gabba!” couldn’t have hurt.
CJ: Well, I think that’s what finally took us over the hill. But back in ’98, you know, we did a pilot for this studio, and then in ’99 or 2000, we did another development deal with a different studio, and…it was one setback and weird thing after another. And then we had pitched it to all of the networks by 2002 or 2003 – we pretty much ran the table, so to speak – and no one was biting, so it just seemed like a dead project. But in the back of our minds, we were, like, “I know this can still be a great kids show, but let’s focus on something else.” And that’s when we came up with a bunch of ideas, and one of those ideas was “Yo Gabba Gabba!” And just from pitching the Aquabats so much around the industry, we had some contacts, so we started pitching “Yo Gabba Gabba!,” and we immediately realized that we were going to run into the same problem unless we just took matters into our own hands and independently did it ourselves. And that’s really where the ball started rolling, and we realized, “Hey, if we’re going to do this, then we’re just going to need to go and make it on our own somehow.”
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