I didn’t mean for that last post to be a poll, but it’s revealing how many individual Jump The Shark moments posters were able to identify in Funky Winkerbean. Here’s a compiled list, in roughly chronological order (because, as you know, Timemop).
Act I (1972-1992, ends with the original class’ graduation)
- Lisa’s pregnancy (1986)
- A high school girl has a genuine mutual, unreciprocated crush on Les (1988)
- Les’ valedictorian speech (1992)
Act II (1992-2007, ends with Lisa’s death)
- Lisa’s first detection of cancer (1998)
- Wally dies in the minesweeping simulator
- Becky loses her arm
- The first class reunion
- Susan Smith’s suicide attempt
- Wally’s first homecoming (2003)
- John Byrne’s guest stint permanently alters the artwork (2003)
- Sadie Summers – not because she was a bad character as Tom Batiuk thinks, but because she was under- and mis-utilized
- The post office bombing (USA!)
- Lisa’s cancer returns in 2006, because of a hospital error
- Lisa’s death (October 4, 2007)
Act III (2007-2022, ends when Funky Winkerbean ends and its characters move to Crankshaft)
- Tom Batiuk skips ten years after Lisa’s death, throwing away a gold mine of story ideas. Which also prevents Les Moore (and Batiuk) from ever moving past Lisa’s death, when that was the stated reason for the time jump
- Les screaming at Summer over a dress for the winter dance he was pushing her to attend
- Les saying “yes you did” and getting pissy with Funky over a mild joke about Les attracting two women at once
- Wally’s second homecoming, which destroyed the likeable Wally-Becky relationship, and needlessly added to Wally’s suffering
- Lisa’s Story becomes a thing
- Starbuck Jones become a thing
- The emergence of Cayla as a character
- Funky’s car crash and time-altering coma (2010)
- casting Susan Smith as the antagonist in the Les-Cayla-Susan love triangle
- the gay prom story where the gay teens never seen or talked about again
- Morton Winkerbean’s remarkable but never-addressed recovery from dementia
- Wally hooking up with Rachel and turning his life around
- Cayla’s appearance changes
- Lisa calls in a bomb threat from beyond the grave
- Darin and Pete become major characters
- The rise of Atomik Komix as a central location
- “Where’s father?” – the resolution of the Zanzibar The Talking Murder Chimp story
- The death of Bull Bushka, which was ultimately insurance fraud
- Les walking back his earlier forgiveness of Bull
- Darin makes a toy for his son, out of a handgun that was used to murder his grandfather
- The entire finale, featuring a long -forgotten janitor who is revealed to be a time-traveling agent, tasked with ensuring Summer’s book gets written
- “behavior-patterned algorithms that will let us define humanity as our nation” or whatever that drivel was
Act IV (Crankshaft, 2023-)
- The Funky Winkerbean characters invade Crankshaft
- The alleged Burnings
- The Batton Thomas interview arc
And must be a lot more candidates than that… because that list doesn’t mention Dinkle even once.
Son of Stuck Funky 
