WEEK FOUR BONUS - ANSWER

It is, of course, Sebastian the Crab from Disney's The Little Mermaid!

However, Curt posed an interesting theory to me, which gave him double points. Enjoy.
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According to cursory research and personal accounts, there appears to be only one clear choice of crustacean famous enough to consider for this bonus question. Jiminy Cricket, a fellow arthropod, is certainly close, but wrong subphylum. And god only knows what Fizzgig from The Dark Crystal was, but since he/she seemed to avoid the sea and had no antennae, a crustacean he/she probably was not. The obvious choice is Sebastian from The Little Mermaid. Aware of his personal struggle to avoid a certain death by boiling, I could certainly imagine his sympathy to his fellow crustaceans' cruel vivisection.

However, since Disney's 2004 purchase of Jim Henson's Muppet empire lock, stock and Fraggle (actually, the Fraggles were excluded from that purchase, but I needed something that sounded close to "barrel"), the spectrum of characters to consider is even more vast. For instance, many of our friends from the series Dinosaurs may have been evolutionary precursors to our modern crustaceans ("Trilobite On Board!"); however, that show having fallen into obscurity, I feel safe eliminating its characters from my scope of investigation.

Muppet Treasure Island may have featured numerous uncredited crustacean cameos, but the Muppet Crustacean Crown obviously goes to Pepe the King Prawn, with starring roles in Muppet productions from the early '90s "Muppets Tonight" series to the more recent "Muppets In Space" and "The Muppet Wizard of Oz". His appeal to "the youth of today" and his dedication to diversity in broadcasting have garnered Pepe numerous accolades, including a guest host spot on ESPN2's coverage of the X Games, co-hosting with pro-skateboarder Bucky Lasek, and Animal.

Pepe has claimed to be native to the southern coast of Spain; however, even to a lay observer, it is clear that his accent is more closely related to Creole French. According to the Public Library System of Beaufort, South Carolina, there is a Creole pidgin dialect indigenous to the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia (the area extending from Georgetown, SC to the Golden Isles of Georgia above Florida) whose aural inflections are essentially an identical match to sample voice recordings of Pepe.

For whatever reasons, possibly criminal, Pepe appears to be hiding his true origins. The Spanish cover story is quite flimsy, and no witnesses have stepped forward to actually place Pepe in the region; however, at the time of this publication, his green card status has not yet been confirmed nor denied by the United States Departments of Immigration or Homeland Security. If our hypothesis proves true, his geneological proximity to South Carolina would certainly foster a sense of familial relationship to the pictured delicious South Carolinan Atlantic shrimp. And even if the hypothesis proves false, Pepe's record of public servitude attests to his compassion and concern for civil rights, especially for those who cannot speak for themselves. Such as shrimp.

This is frankly too close to call. As my research indicates, either crustacean would have a great sympathy for the plight of the pictured shrimp.

But either way, I'm obviously stretching for mega bonus points for researching the entire Disney crustacean family tree.

Respectfully submitted,
Curt Lund
2005 Lund Fellow in Crustacean Research at the Lund Institute