This delightful colloquialism was introduced to me by my friend and fellow blogger James, and I feel that it should be spread to those who are unaware of it's existence. For those of you that have been previously introduced to this term, please refrain from muttering "geeez Toby, get with it", I'm here now and that's all that matters.
side note: James is a talented writer with a very entertaining blogspot with many videos in which to pass the time with. Check out Star Wars over SF. http://brainrageblog.blogspot.com/
Back to matters at hand. "Jumping the Shark" is a term that refers to a television show that has just bled the creative tanks dry and are scraping the bottom hoping to hold onto the once cash cow that now produces no milk.
The best part about this widely understood metaphor is the origin. This refers to the September 20th 1977 episode of Happy Days where the writers had Aurthur Fonzarelli donning powder blue swim trunks, a bright yellow life belt, and of course his trademark leather jacket, water ski jump over a caged shark. With Richie behind the wheel, and nare a hair out of place, The Fonz successfully jumped into television terminology lore and shortly thereafter the Happy Days were no more.
As sad as it was to say goodbye to all of the gang from Al's, the legacy continues as benchmark for doomed television shows.
It should be noted that in light of the latest Indiana Jones debacle, the term "Jumping the Shark" can be comfortably interchanged with "Nuking the Fridge".
Knowledge is power!
7 comments:
You can tell the right wing bloggers are almost at the end of their rope with Bush leaving office. Just like Happy Days got silly at the end of it's run with "Jumping the Shark" the right wingers get silly with never ending posts about either Israel. As I call their posts, "Jumping the Jews." or posts about gays. Of course these are 'Jumping the Gays." The last hours of the Bush nightmare we'll see right wing bloggers inundating us with "Jumping the Gay Jew" posts.
Good luck with oyur blog Toby...
"Nuking the Fridge" - I'm totally using that!
Oh Tobes, I forgot to tell you: if you start contributing to the conversation at my place you may experience some spillover from some of my political junkie friends.
T101's a good guy, just don't tell Sandy what he said about him. Thanks for the link, amigo.
No prob james! Im just glad other people are reading! Blogger Toby is different than Work Toby no matter how inertwined they are.
Submitted to Digg for the phrase "Nuking the Fridge".
That's priceless, right there.
I like all the "toby's".. work Toby, blogger toby, friend toby... :) Another good post my friend, Toby!
xo LP
We can talk about a huge amounts of series that have this problem. It is very hard to come out with a great story for a new Show but thank to the Internet and their digital distribution you can learn more about Shows from others countries.
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