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[ It may have taken a while but we finally get to the Gold Rush episode. It's baffling in the ways you expect grafting a Klondike Gold Rush motif onto a far-future underwater setting. ]
Episode Number: JBJ-8
Title: "Claim-Jumped Jabber"
Original Airdate: 30 October 1976
Production Code: 84-8
Plot: On inheriting a gold mine Jabberjaw is pursued by claim jumper Coldfinger, who pursues Jabberjaw with femme fatale Francine La Fin and an ice ray.
Locations: Aqualaska, Kelp City.
Guest Characters: Two Prospectors, Coldfinger, Two Minions, Lawyer, Hotel clerk, Francine La Fin, Robot Emcee, Sheriff, Jabberclaw.
Songs: ``Cruising 2062'' (chase), ``Slip Through My Hands'' (performance, fragment)
Thoughts:
Aqualaska is frozen, even apparently underwater.
The deed card one of the miners has looks a lot like a metal stencil for miscellaneous line lengths.
The Aqualaska map Coldfinger holds looks a lot like a badly-drawn Montana.
Jabberjaw saved an old prospector from an octopus and so inherited a gold mine.
The Emergency Leak Plugger just shoves Jabberjaw in the leak. This mechanism seems to depend on the existence of abundant sharks in the vicinity of leaks or else on weak tort laws.
The lawyer says Coldfinger has stolen every gold mine in Aqualaska, but his first theft this episode was of a silver mine.
Jabberjaw's deed looks like a Hollerith card with way too many holes punched.
Jabberjaw avoids a shark ejector by using icicles to imitate a walrus; the hotel has a no-walrus policy.
The Kelp City hotel has bathrooms at the end of the sliding-sidewalk hallway.
Francine La Fin is billed as ``the first singing shark''. Jabberjaw tries to woo her with a hundred-pound box of anchovy bon-bons.
Francine La Fin's car has a dashboard button to produce enormous quantities of popcorn. It also has an eject button which Jabberjaw hits accidentally.
Coldfinger's minions allow the disguised Neptunes a chance to join his gang if they're rough and tough, something Jabberjaw tries to prove they are by eating fireplace gear and chewing it into nails.
Jabberjaw breaks into a spinning-dial type safe using stethoscope and sandpapered fins.
The Neptunes flee Coldfinger's lair for an ``Aquimo'' village complete with igloos. Bubbles speaks gibberish as ``Aquimo''; one of the Minions speaks ``Aquimo'' perfectly and she gives away the disguise.
Coldfinger has a power beam able to lift sub-aquatic igloos.
Shelly uses a hairpin to jam an elevator.
Everyone knows Coldfinger has been stealing claim deed cards, but the authorities apparently don't mind giving him the land as soon as he presents deed cards.
Jabberjaw's inheritance was a mistake and it rightly belongs to one Jabberclaw, a Wallace Wimple-like fellow with a giant-tentacle-knotter gadget.
Francine La Fin is interested in Jabberjaw even after he's lost his claim and Coldfinger has gone to jail. It must be true if odd love.
Trivia: Between 1803 and 1807 Great Britain seized 528 American ships; France seized 389. Source: An Empire Of Wealth: The Epic History Of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.
Currently Reading: Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan, Giles Milton.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-04 04:24 pm (UTC)So, with the subsea colonization, it's actually "seaQuest 2076"? Darwin and Jabberjaw would be natural enemies. But it's a strangely (cheaply) barren and brightly-lit world: given the complete lack of terrain, seaweed, crawlers or fish, the action may as well be in a swimming pool.
In the title sequence Jabberjaw flattens himself into a rug, and you refer to many other bodily contortions. So, he's actually the Plastic Man of sharks? Is he uniquely intelligent and super-powered? If so, why are all the habitats equipped with ejectors for errant amphibious carnivores? Okay, he's not: there's Francine La Fin, who similarly has a hovering fan-tail. Were sharks always intelligent, and are there other talking animals, or is this a new development? Were they uplifted by (foolish) humans (or passing aliens!), or was it a nanotech accident as with "Generator Rex" (CN, 2010) and its EVOs (exponentially variegated organisms)?
The characters show distinct personalities, much more so than HB's Superfriends, although they're hardly enticing or encouraging ones. Not quite Seinfeld Underwater, but... Jabberjaw would be less annoying if his comic tics weren't a pastiche of Shemp Stooge and Rodney Dangerfield, but perhaps kids of the era liked those tics; were the precedents not in circulation at the time? Even if they were, kids don't worry as much about "X stole Y's gag."
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-07 12:05 am (UTC)It's curious that Jabberjaw has got the reputation for being an unspeakably awful 1970s Hanna-Barbera themed product show; even that amusing little music video Cartoon Network made up for it --- ``Me and My Friends Get No Respect'' --- takes as its premise the attitude that everybody hates it, nobody loves it, going off to the aquagarden to eat sea worms.
A good part of this has to be the Internet Echo Chamber at work: Jabberjaw stayed familiar enough that people would have any idea what was being talked about, the way, say, The CB Bears did not, so start talking up how bad it is and you can get a runaway this-is-the-worst effect. I don't think it's even worst among the line of Josie and the Pussycats-derived shows (even if it gets incorrectly lumped in as a Scooby-Doo-derived show).
Jabberjaw himself definitely has powers to stretch and squash that ought to qualify him for Plastic-Man-style prowess (and loopiness; are Mister Fantastic and Elastigirl the only elastic superheroes who aren't a bit nutty?), but it's not explained just why Jabberjaw is so malleable, or why he walks and talks et cetera. From the plan to transform humans into sharks to provide a population of intelligent sharks and take over the world bwuh-hah-hah it seems like Jabberjaw must be an exceptional shark, but, if he's that exceptional why isn't he a bigger deal? On the other hand if there aren't a lot of sharks smart enough to get into the sub-oceanic cities why are there shark ejectors? I can't imagine Hanna-Barbera deliberately putting an aggressive racist element into their stories ... but accidentally, well, accidentally they had Superman murder every living being on Krypton and I know they couldn't have intended that.
Ultimately there's almost nothing of the backstory that gets explained, and the only attempts to explain it leave it more confusing and weird, the electro-genie being the perfect example of that. I suppose in some ways that's good for fans who get into the world, since it produces a world with a lot of stuff that may not seem superficially sensible and that's great for fans who want to work out elaborate and unbelievable rationalizations for how it got that way. On the other hand, rec.arts.jabberjaw.tech never did evolve, so instead it just leaves these odd baffling questions about why Jabberjaw.
As far as I remember there aren't other talking animal species other than sharks, and I think Francine La Fin might be the only other talking shark we see, although the dinosaur from one million BC seems to understand what he's told to do suspiciously well, and there's an excellent chance I'm overlooking animals who clearly understand conversation.
Jabberjaw himself, yeah, is a ripoff of Shemp and Rodney Dangerfield, which makes for an interesting fusion. It actually gives him his own personality. Bubbles is a worn-down copy of Gracie Allen, although there are a few other old-time radio Dumb Doras that I think go into it. But as Gracie played a Dumb Dora anyway that makes her a less distinct personality. But cartoons have always relied heavily on ripping off their higher-ranked media figures; it's shocking to learn how little of the Golden Age of Animation characters (particularly at Warner Brothers) was original to their work. (Ironically, Foghorn Leghorn is the rare case of this that isn't clearly character theft.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-07 08:31 pm (UTC)I'm not sure you can claim that Josie and The Pussycats *isn't* a Scooby-Doo derived show. And quite honestly Jabberjaw is an almost canonical melding of both: Four teens and their sidekick animal solve crimes, and hey they're in a band too! They're even in
spacean underwater future. I think that's why the show has kind of a bad rap: It's considered a cookie-cutter mashup of all the things that were working for Hanna-Barbera at the time.I agree though; across every genre far worse X gets made than widely-known Y, but no one's heard of the really bad X, but Y was just good enough to get well-known, and then savaged for not being as good as Z.
Heck, did they even get as far as rec.arts.hanna-barbera? I'd have figured even if there were a concerted cored of Jabberjaw fans, they'd be off in alt.tv.jabberjaw if anyplace.
--Chi
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-09 05:31 am (UTC)Josie and the Pussycats is really not much like Scooby-Doo; you're being distracted by the group-of-kids-with-a-nonhuman (who's critical in Scooby-Doo but a bit player in Josie and two bit players in Josie and the Pussycats In Outer Space) and the interludes of songs.
But if you try rewriting the script from one to the other the core different in shows turns up: Scooby-Doo is a mystery. Mysterious goings-on are teased early on, the gang wanders in, find them, investigates, you get to the big reveal of the crooked land developer who thinks pretending there's monsters will be less attention-getting than just beating up recalcitrant would-be sellers. Josie isn't a mystery at all: there's no attempt to conceal from the audience or from the kids just who's up to what, or what their agenda is. There may be some mysterious elements, often with things like discovering one of The Authorities is actually part of the criminal organization, but really the point of the gang's actions is to sneak into Evil Headquarters and capture their ray beam used to take over the world. They don't solve mysteries; they disrupt criminal organizations. In plot, and despite the strong comic elements, Josie is closer to Johnny Quest than it is to Scooby-Doo.
And the division follows in their derivative shows: The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan or Funky Phantom or Clue Club are mysteries; Jabberjaw and Speed Buggy and even further worn-down copies like Fangface are action-adventures.
As far as I can tell there wasn't a specific Hanna-Barbera newsgroup, although there was alt.tv.cartoon-network, which particularly in the 90s might as well have been alt.tv.hanna-barbera.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-09 09:48 am (UTC)However...
'Derivation' in the sense of origin of the show moreso than content of the show, I think Josie and The Pussycats is pretty clearly two parts _The Archies_, one part _Scooby-Doo_.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-12 12:32 am (UTC)I'm not happy with ``action-adventure'' as a name for this sort of cartoon since, well, there isn't really all that much adventure and the action is pretty limited to animated-radio styles. But what would you call it? It's really not mystery, as there aren't mystery elements; it's just a bunch of people stumbling across a scheme to do evil, and foiling it, through varied mishaps and ... well, adventures. It's comical in tone, but then you can make a deliberately comic James Bond-type movie too.
Anyway, I'd love a better name for the genre but just can't think of one.
The Archies obviously had plenty to do with Josie and the Pussycats, although they're more suburbia sitcom than anything else. As far as I remember; I was never a big Archie fan --- though I see the cartoon is on hulu now --- although I would be happy with any of the spinoff comic books that varied them in nearly any way, be they little, spies, superheroes, or robots.