As I have already said, almost no information came with the picture.
I suspect that Fred Rice was reasonably influential. He had produced a number of television specials and a lot of records. While at Capitol he suggested to two guys called Mike Dormer and Lee Teacher that they think up some cute monster characters for merchandising, and when he saw the Shrimpenstein prototype, he thought it would make a TV show. The idea was sold to KHJ Television, where Dormer and Teacher were already doing some promotional work, so had contacts. Rice had previously worked with Gene Moss (Dr Von Schtick) and Jim Thurman, who did the voice for the puppet, and recruited them as actors.
They had a certain pedigree, as they had written the scripts for all 156 episodes of Roger Ramjet, which was phenomenally successful, and syndicated all over the place (it was shown on BBC television in the UK for about 15 years from 1979 on, when it was already around 15 years old).
So maybe Rice convinced the KHJ bosses that Shrimpenstein would be more successful than it eventually turned out to be. Maybe it was too anarchic. Maybe the sponsors and producers of the cartoons that were shown didn't like their creations being ridiculed on the show, which was usually the case. I have read that Moss and Thurman were taken off the show and replaced by a KHJ announcer, but that didn't really work, and the show folded soon after.
