He's the latest, greatest shark you ever saw

[austin_dern]

[ 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.

Comments

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

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.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I see what you're saying. I still think there's a stronger inheritance and derivation, but I'll accept them as modestly different groups; I think calling 'Speed Buggy' an 'Action-adventure' requires the most broad possible definition of the genre.

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_.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

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.