Blue Fox Shaman

Jason and the Argonauts get their comeuppance

Uh, oh! The Ancients have gotten here before us and done an admirable job of blowing this story to smithereens. Not much else for us to do here. Nonetheless, we will soldier on. Let’s start at the very end, shall we?!

The moral of the story is…

Nothing, nada, zero, zip.

Did you expect any less from a Hollywood blockbuster? Or, any more, we should say.

Why? Well, the story from ancient times became an accumulation of other small vignettes involving famous heroes fighting (in)famous monsters. So many, in fact, that it almost rivaled the modern Marvel Comics Hollywood movie franchise. Almost. (Nothing succeeds like success. Or, more properly, nothing exceeds like excess.) Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, really, but by Alexandrian times we get Apollonius’ magnum opus, with emphasis on “magnum”, where Jason’s parts are definitely overshadowed by the others. Then, in a failed attempt to redeem him with some “human interest”, he instead comes across as a hopeless wanker.

Before that, you would’ve thought Euripides had driven the final nail in Jason’s coffin with his play, in which Medea amply demonstrates the meaning of the saying “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. Suffice it to say that Euripides “moral” seems to boil down to “don’t marry a psychopath”. It’s hard to say whether Euripides or his audience would have gone for “don’t cheat on a woman who, after all, is the only reason you’ve gotten
as far as you have.” Nah, that couldn’t be it.

Maybe we can jettison (most of) the baggage and start over…

It started with a dispute between Jason’s father and uncle– his uncle led a hostile takeover of his father’s investment firm. Jason’s family was impoverished, but his mother pulled some strings and got him into the best school, Centaur Preparatory.

From there, it was a shoo-in to the Ivy Leagues on a full scholarship. After graduation, Jason applies for a position in the firm his father founded. Well, of course, his uncle was none too happy, but he thought he could get rid of this brash youngster with a carefully crafted challenge, one that Jason couldn’t help but accept (such is the confidence of youth), though it was doomed to failure. The task? Bring the old, established Golden Fleece investment fund in-house.

Jason teamed up with his Ivy League friends and established a hedge fund. Then, the plan was to, well… what was the plan anyway? Whatever! But at a mixer for investment types, Medea, daughter of the Golden Fleece CEO, falls for Jason and passes him some insider information. The rest is typical Wall Street shenanigans, with plenty of people losing their retirement accounts and life savings, but Jason ends up as CEO of his father’s firm and with a hefty bonus to boot. That whole mess that follows? Just a typical mid-life crisis and a messy divorce. A very messy divorce.

And the moral of that story is…

Nothing, nada, zero, zip.

Hey, not every story has to have a moral. There’s a place for mindless entertainment, especially the kind that gets the adrenaline flowing or the sense outrage raging. But now that we’ve demolished this one, let’s do a bit of archaeology, shall we?!

The original of the story of the Golden Fleece might very well be one of the same type with the Flying Ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Ship).
That’s one of our favorites. That, and The White Snake collected by the Grimm Brothers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Snake). Both are short, and well worth reading. (You do have a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales lying about somewhere, don’t you? No!? Tsk, tsk!)

And the moral of those stories is…

No, sorry, we’re going to make you do some homework. Figure it out for yourself. We’ll just give one hint-look at the way the young fool/hero of these stories treats others. Could it be that that is the key to his success in the face of seemingly impossible odds? Rather than monsters to be battled, are these others whom he meets actually powers of the Unconscious, or, if you prefer, denizens of Non-Ordinary Reality? But we’ve said too much. Read one or both and see what you think.

Then again, who are we to talk? All we’ve got to show for it is a funny little made-for-television stop motion-animated film released in the United Kingdom in 1990.

Remind us to invest in Marvel Comics stock; they don’t seem to have saturated the market quite yet.