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You Can Say What You Want...

Started by SAGG, March 25, 2017, 06:27:56 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

SAGG


... But Shazzan the cartoon has something in common with Archie. Can you guess what it is? No Googling! 😎


Hint: It's two in common. Answer by 3 p.m. today, unless someone here guesses beforehand....


PS: Yeah, I changed the message. Some of you might not be up right now at this time, so I'll expand the deadline...  ;D

SAGG


Okay, do you know what the cartoon Shazzan's about? I suspect most of you don't (though DeCarlo Rules probably does  8)  ), so I'll explain: The toon, created by Hanna Barbarra in 1967, was about two sibling teens (a boy and a girl) who discovered a treasure chest in a cave near their home. They opened the chest and found two halves of a ring that formed the word "Shazzan". They put the rings on, and when they put it together, they were sent back to time to the Arabian Nights. There, they found a genie named Shazzan, who informed them that they had to find his master to deliver the rings before he could return them home. Thus, the two would have many adventures in the interim while searching for Shazzan's master. The two could summon Shazzan by putting together the rings and saying his name, thus he would protect them, and take care of them. They would meet many bad guys who either wanted to destroy them, get their rings for themselves, or both.


The answer is that the two sibling teens have the same name as two characters in Archie: Chuck and Nancy. And now you know.  :D  I wonder if someone from ACP saw the cartoon and wondered if the two names would be good to use for their two new African-American characters they were about to create. Since Archie's Chuck and Nancy were created in the late 60's/early 70's, it's not that much of a stretch to actually consider this...


I thank any of you who read this thread for not Googling to get the answer, or if you did Google, you didn't answer it here after using a search engine....  ;)




DeCarlo Rules

#2

SAGG


Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 25, 2017, 04:07:00 PM



For Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty was consulted by you, so that's not fair...  8) 

DeCarlo Rules

#4
Quote from: SAGG on March 25, 2017, 06:32:31 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 25, 2017, 04:07:00 PM



For Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty was consulted by you, so that's not fair...  8)

Have you ever noticed that nobody ever calls him just plain "Charlie"? It's always his full first and last name, "Charlie Brown". What's up with that? How weird would it be if anytime someone addressed you by name, they always used your full given and family name? Peppermint Patty is the only character that talks to him like he was a normal person.

Can you imagine if Chuck Clayton was never referred to by any of the other characters as anything but "Chuck Clayton"?

"Hey, there's Chuck Clayton! How's it going, Chuck Clayton? We're all meeting down at Pop's later on - me, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, Dilton, Moose, and Midge. Would you and Nancy like to join us, Chuck Clayton?"



You might try searching images for "Chuck and Nancy", and while you will find both images of the Shazzan and Archie Comics characters in there somewhere, it's amazing how few of those show up, compared to the main volume of completely unrelated "Chuck and Nancy" images.

Archie (Archibald), Veronica,  Midge, and Reggie (Reginald) are all fairly uncommon names, to say nothing of Dilton, Jughead (or Forsythe), and Moose (whether his given name is Merton Matowski or Marmaduke Mason). Josie, Melody, and Pepper are all pretty uncommon, and Valerie only semi-common. Only Betty is (or was) a very common name (one of the many possible diminutives of Elizabeth). Chuck and Nancy are names both so common as to be generic, which makes you think that when they were originally introduced in Archie Comics, there wasn't much thought expended by way of making them unique or memorable in some way. That makes them token characters, but I'm undecided on whether that's better or worse than having chosen some more 'obvious' name for Chuck like "Fast Willie Jackson" or "Tyrone Washington". At least maybe if they'd given him some atypical name, it might have seemed like it was necessary to attach some distinguishing personality traits, talents or interests along with the name. Those early Chuck stories were all over the place, experimenting with who he was and what his defining traits were. For years, really the closest they get to defining him as a person is "sports guy". Well, Reggie and Moose are both sports guys, too, so I guess that's common enough, but it just seems like a bit of lazy writing to say "oh, he's into sports" and let it go at that. How much more interesting would he be if he had turned out to be a chess champion or a serious history buff or jazz musician or an early computer tech hobbyist? Or maybe a serious motorhead auto buff, or into woodworking or scale modeling or something. What's all the more puzzling about that is that the lack of distinguishing character traits wasn't a result of his only appearing in minor supporting roles in what was essentially someone else's story -- for years he was the virtual co-star of ARCHIE AT RIVERDALE HIGH, so the failure to define him much isn't a result of a lack of room to do it in the stories. I'm not sure if this was the result of fear on the part of Archie Comics. They could point to Chuck and say, look, we have a black person living in Riverdale, and he's exactly indistinguishable from the average Riverdale teen in every way, so in that way he's representative of all black people. The only problem with that idea is that by being so relentlessly dead average, he sticks out as not like the other characters. None of the other continuing characters in Archie Comics can be described as average, so why should Chuck be? They finally settled, sometime in the early 1990s (more than 20 years after his introduction) on an interest in comics and art. Nancy remains vaguely defined in characterization, talents and interests to this day (even more true for Midge, who's been around even longer), while continuing or reoccurring characters created later are generally easier to identify in terms of their individuality.

SHAZZAN's Chuck and Nancy were brother and sister, like SPACE GHOST's Jan and Jace. The SUPER FRIENDS' Zan and Jayna have names and identical costumes (and a pet space monkey) suspiciously similar to Jan and Jace, and like them, are young superheroes-in-training -- but just like Chuck and Nancy had to touch the two halves of their magic ring together and invoke the name "Shazzan!" in unison to summon their magical genie, Zan and Jayna had to bump fists and shout "Wonder Twin powers, activate!" together, to access their respective super-abilities to transmute into any form or water/any form of animal. (In my avatar icon, I had Dan Parent draw Superteen and Powerteen bumping their fists together with a magical glow as an homage to the Wonder Twins.) I doubt the Archie creators were paying much attention to SHAZZAN, and ACP's Chuck and Nancy weren't introduced at the same time. In the earliest stories Chuck had no regular girlfriend. They're just common names, and were probably chosen from a group of names that you might find among any typical school classroom of students. A closer connection would be that Nancy (from Shazzan) was portrayed by the same actress who was also Josie's voice in Josie and the Pussycats -- Janet Waldo.

The Archie character names and likenesses are covered by the registered trademarks/copyrights of Archie Comic Publications, Inc. and are used with permission by this site. The Official Archie Comics website can be visited at www.archiecomics.com.