(That shark in the featured image looks so happy)

Continuing my streak of doing very little work on these this year, this week’s topic is another one from Scotchnaut:  Something that has lost it’s way, whether that something be a band, a team, a politician, two kids in the woods who relied on bread crumbs to find their way out, because they were too goddamn dumb to either read map or figure that animals would eat all the crumbs.

I may be mixing my metaphors here, but the larger point is that Hansel and Gretel had it coming and the witch was just minding her business way out there in the middle of the woods before those two idiots came traipsing along.

Anyway, the prime example of this is also our commissioner:

For some reason the powers that be behind ratings juggernaut ‘Happy Days’ decided to film, and more importantly broadcast, an episode where Fonzi has to jump a shark while on water-skis.  Since then ‘jumping the shark’ has come to mean a point where a TV show, (and for purposes of our draft literally anything), ran out of creative ideas and did something monumentally stupid to make up for that.

Ironically the phrase really doesn’t work when applied to ‘Happy Days’, as the show was at the top of the ratings when they jumped the shark and it remained there for several seasons afterward.

The real issue with ‘Happy Days’, of course, is that Chuck Cunningham died from autoerotic asphyxiation and of course those cowards weren’t willing to address that issue so they just pretended that he never existed.

But we’re getting off-track.  Your draft this week is a person or organization that jumped the shark, or more importantly the point where they jumped the shark.  Scotchnaut has already given me his pick, the point where the band Chicago fired their brass section.  Apparently this happened in the early 80’s and led to some commercially disappointing sales.

For my pick I’ll go with one of my favorite bands from the early 80’s, The Clash, firing guitarist Mick Jones.

Doing a little research into the subject it seems like Jones actually had it coming, since he didn’t want to tour and was getting far more interested in hip-hop and synthesizers.  Not that there’s anything wrong with either, (Jones actually had a decent, and synthesizer-heavy, album with his new band, which was so successful that I’ve forgotten the name, and which I cared so much about I’m too lazy to look up.  Regardless, that sound wasn’t The Clash and was never going to fly with Joe Strummer, and you can’t have a band where the lead guitarist won’t show up for work.  Unfortunately The Clash just wasn’t the same band without Jones and for that, and a lot of other reasons, (the article I linked to up there is a pretty good read if you’re interested in the subject), Jones being fired killed The Clash.

Yours in the comments.