Moby Schtick

If you think Ahab is mis-cast, wait until you see the white whale.

"I hate metaphors. That's why my favorite book is Moby-Dick. No frou-frou symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who hates an animal."

— Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation

Moby-Dick is considered one of the timeless classics of literature, yet many people today are more likely to have seen homages to its central Determinator vs. Animal Nemesis conflict than to have actually read the novel. A number of works, particularly animated ones, have paid tribute to this book and its cinematic incarnations, setting a tremendous, pale-colored whale or whale-analog against an obsessive opponent who'll stop at nothing to bring it down.

As not many works utilize a maritime setting, this trope is often Recycled In Space.^note In which case, they may be hunting a Space Whale. Or deserts.^note Where they'll be hunting a Land Shark or possibly a Sand Worm. Or freshwater. Or the sky. Subverting the original ending so that both antagonists survive, with the pursuer coming to respect the pursued, is likewise common.

Sometimes a Whole-Plot Reference, other times a Shout-Out or Homage. Actual adaptations of Moby-Dick, character names and all, are more remake than Moby Schtick, even if they happen to be Recycled In Space.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In an ad for the Audi Quattro, an elderly tow-truck driver obsessively muses about how he's tried for years to "hook" one particular quarry: a white Quattro shown driving stealthily through the snowy forest.
• Jack in the Box used to call its fish sandwich the Moby Jack.

Anime & Manga

• Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters: Replace "Moby Dick" with "Godzilla" and add the Trauma Conga Line of a Homeworld Evacuation that was botched in the long run and you have Haruo's mentality in a nutshell. This is a pretty regular mindset in the Godzilla franchise but this anime film trilogy goes the extra mile by having science fiction harpoons being used against the titular monster because of justifying Technobabble. The trilogy ends with Haruo accepting the fact that as long as he lives he will always be obsessed with killing Godzilla and he will constantly drag everybody (hell, has dragged everybody) down a path of apocalyptic destruction for the sake of his hatred, and this (among other facts that trigger a Sudden Downer Ending) makes him decide to pull a Suicide-By-Godzilla.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Misato Katsuragi's obsession with destroying the Angels at any cost, courtesy of being the Sole Survivor of being at ground zero of Second Impact. Like many other things in this series, it becomes deconstructed when the cost looks too damn high and Misato doesn't knows what to do with herself, and that is before finding out how much of an Unwitting Pawn she is to the Ancient Conspiracy that caused Second Impact. Rebuild of Evangelion gives her an additional degree of Adaptational Villainy when she forms WILLE and becomes almost as heartless as Gendo as a result.

Comic Books

• From the pages of Marvel's Epic Illustrated Magazine comes "Abraxas and the Earthman," which is Moby-Dick in space with added Mind Screw.
• Black Lightning's archenemy, Tobias Whale, is a four-hundred-pound albino who wears a Moby-Dick-inspired ring, favours a harpoon as his weapon of choice, and is nicknamed "The Great White Whale" by his enemies and allies alike.
• Bone: Main character Fone Bone's favorite book is Moby-Dick, and his first dream in the Valley casts him as Ishmael, Phoney Bone as Captain Ahab, and Smiley Bone as Moby. It happens again when they pass through the hallucination-inducing Rat Temple.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: The Italian Disney comics did their own version of Moby-Dick◊ with Scrooge McDuck as Captain Ahab.
• Godzilla: The Half-Century War revolves around the story of a soldier's 50-year grudge with the King of the Monsters.
• The Incredible Hulk:
  • In a couple of story arcs, the Hulk encounters a space-faring ship with an Ahab-like character, Captain Cybor, hunting a beast named Klaatu with electro-harpoons. At some point in the past, an encounter with Klaatu burned away the entirety of Cybor's right side, which was replaced with cyborg parts. In his first seen encounter, Cybor is dragged into a sun by Klaatu, burning away his human half. When we see him again, he has had himself welded to the prow of the ship, acting as a Living Figurehead (if you can call that living). During both appearances, they shanghai the Hulk to pull the "oars" on the ship.
  • This is the relationship between Hulk and General Ross in a nutshell.
• Legion of Super-Heroes: Early on, Lightning Lad had his arm destroyed by an ill-timed attack on a Space Whale, and became obsessed with revenge upon it. He got better.
• In one issue of the Pinky and the Brain comic, one ingredient for the Brain's world-domination formula can only be found on the teeth of whales. Brain hears about a tiny white whale called Moby Dinky and decides to study it to build a ship based on it, thinking that other whales won't mind a smaller one approaching them. It turns out that Dinky is actually a submarine built by Brain's rival Snowball, for exactly the same reasons.
• The Simpsons: One of the Treehouse of Horror issues does a spoof on this, where it's a story Abe tells the family. Only here, it's an ancestor of his named Homer, and he's not after the whale for vengeance, he just really likes the taste of whale blubber.
• The Transformers (Marvel) did a Whole-Plot Reference to Moby-Dick at one point. The Transformer in question, a fellow named Longtooth, was on a quest for the missing Matrix which had taken him and his team to an ocean planet, where a large cybernetic whale, the last of its kind, bit his leg off, and then he went kind of mad and tried hunting it down. He finally incapacitated the beast but was talked out of finishing it off by his teammate.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side:
  • The white whale is driving a car and rear-ends one with Captain Ahab in it.
  • From the masthead on a sailing ship, a lookout yells: "Thar she blows! The white whale! The whiiiiiiite wh— no, my mistake. A black whale! An ordinary blaaaaaaack whale!"
  • Another cartoon features a boy at a pet store looking into the goldfish tank with his eyes locked on an albino specimen. His mother asks "So which one will it be, Ahab?"
• Parodied in Red and Rover with the recurring Moby Tadpole, a giant tadpole who Red and Rover try to catch (but not kill) every summer. Somehow he never turns into a frog, but then this is Comic-Book Time (and it's implied that Moby Tadpole may not even exist).
• A recurring character in Sherman's Lagoon is Captain Quigley, a grizzled old fisherman whose leg was eaten by Sherman. Practically all of Quigley's appearances feature his attempts to catch Sherman. Apparently, this feud goes back farther than most:
  Sherman: Heck...my mother ate his mother!

Fan Works

• The Bolt Chronicles: In "The Rings," Mittens compares Bolt's intensely focused post-ceremony attempt to find the lost wedding rings to Captain Ahab's quest to find Moby Dick.
  Mittens: Hey, Captain Ahab! Let's head inside and have a munch. Then you can hightail it back out and harpoon the white whale. Those rings won't be going anywhere for a while yet. Don't worry so much.
• Tarkin's Fist: While not explicitly mentioned, parrallels exist between Loi Cas's obsessive desire to "take the head of a dragon" (ie, destroy an AT-AT walker) and Ahab's obsession with the white whale. The AT-AT, like the white whale, comes to personify everything that Loi Cas hates. Like Ahab, Loi Cas is killed in his pursuit of vengeance. Unlike Ahab, he takes his target with him.

Films — Animation

• In Brave, Fergus has an intense grudge against bears, hunting them relentlessly, because he lost a leg to Mor'du: an enormous bear covered in broken-off Annoying Arrows and battle scars.
• In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Rudy the giant albino Baryonyx plays the Moby Dick role to Buck the Weasel's Captain Ahab. In flashback, Rudy's humped back is seen looming up from a fogbank to menace Buck, who wields a stick in lieu of a harpoon.
• The Sea Beast: Captain Crow starts out as a Reasonable Authority Figure, but over the course of the movie he becomes more and more obsessed with getting revenge against the Red Bluster who took his eye, to the point of threatening his crew, his ship, and even attempting to kill Maisie when she cuts it loose to prevent the ship from sinking. Eventually he gets better and gives up on his revenge.

Films — Live-Action

• Manon, the groundskeeper from The Alligator People, lost his left hand to an alligator attack, and bears a festering grudge against all such reptiles, not just the one that bit him.
• In the 2011 horror film Creature, the account of "Lockjaw"'s origin features a bayou-born man seeking revenge upon the huge white alligator that killed his pregnant bride and dragged her away into the swamp.
• Godzilla vs. Megaguirus: After Kiriko Tsujimori's superior officer dies in the prologue (saving her from falling debris during a Godzilla rampage), she goes full Ahab on Godzilla, becoming the leader of the "G-Graspers" special anti-Godzilla force and having the bright idea of authorizing the creation of a black hole launcher to try to get rid of Godzilla once and for all (non-spoilers: it doesn't work). The titular contending Kaiju of the film appears in Japan as a direct result of the cannon's test fire, and at one point she even rides on Godzilla's back like Ahab to tag him with a tracker dart.
• The Hobbit:
  • Thorin against Smaug. But unlike most examples, the Dwarves have something to gain from Smaug's death besides vengeance and personal gratification: their former home, Erebor.
  • Played with in Azog, a giant albino orc who lost his hand in battle with Thorin. He looks like Moby Dick in his size and albinism, yet shares Ahab's obsessive grudge for the dwarf who maimed him, effectively fusing both facets of this trope in a single character. Borne out by events of the third film, in which Thorin and Azog battle on a frozen lake, each mortally wounding the other. Azog even falls through the ice, lurking under the surface to arise like Moby Dick, and their final clash embodies Ahab's parting "from Hell's heart, I stab at thee" lines magnificently.
• The real-life events depicted in In the Heart of the Sea inspired Neville's novel. In the film, Herman Neville is told the story by a survivor, making it a partial example in that he learns about the first contact with the leviathan and the Essex is unable to put up a fight. The ending narrates that Pollard went out again looking for the white whale but he never found it.
• The influence of Moby-Dick on Jaws is evident, particularly in the character of Quint, whose dogged, fanatical pursuit of the great white shark has many similarities with Captain Ahab's hunt of the great white whale.
• Though the main plot is more based on Apocalypse Now, Kong: Skull Island has this trope as the character arc of Colonel Packard, who develops an Ahab-like obsession with vanquishing Kong after the giant ape kills seven men in Packard's platoon during their initial foray into the island.
• The Last Dinosaur: A grizzled, hard-living, hard-loving oil tycoon hunts the last Tyrannosaurus rex.
• In Razorback, Cullen is a half-mad old man obsessed with killing the giant wild boar that killed his baby grandson. His obsession leads to the deaths of his hunting dogs and himself.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan wears the influence on its sleeve, to the point of having Khan directly quote Captain Ahab: "from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!" The Enterprise itself is pale in color compared to vengeance-obsessed Khan's Reliant, and the scene of starships stalking one another through a nebula is reminiscent of the novel's scenes of Moby Dick lurking beneath the Pequod to ambush its whaleboats and wreck it.
  • Star Trek: First Contact was also partly inspired by Moby-Dick, with Picard as the obsessive Ahab-esque captain and the Borg as the white whale. It's even lampshaded by Lily, who then admits she'd never read the book herself, which suggests she learned about it from either a movie adaptation or this trope.
    Lily: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your little quest. Captain Ahab has to go hunt his whale!^note Made Hilarious in Hindsight by Patrick Stewart's subsequent turn as Ahab in a TV-movie.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness, is largely a Alternate History revision of Wrath of Khan's plot, but in a reversal of the original film's plot, this time it is Khan who is the whale, with revenge-blinded Kirk putting Enterprise and the Federation in danger as he seeks to find Khan and punish him for Christopher Pike's death. In the film's climax, he also becomes Spock's whale, after his actions result in James Kirk's death.
• El Blanco, the albino Graboid from the third Tremors film and TV series, is something of a Moby Dick Expy, with Burt Gummer as a hunter-nemesis turned Worthy Opponent.
• White Space is blatantly Moby-Dick IN SPACE. Plot: a space captain hunts down a giant not-a-whale that killed his father. There is a small plaque of a white sperm whale above his desk. Moby-Dick was inspired by a real life ship called the Essex. Our man's ship is the Essex. One of Captain Ahab's crew is called Stubb, one of the Essex's crew is called Stubbs. You can probably guess how many people survive.
• White Tiger is about a WWII Soviet tank driver who becomes obsessed with destroying a mysterious white Tiger tank after he is severely burned in a battle against it.

Literature

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea plays almost like a sequel to Moby-Dick in its opening chapters, with narrator Professor Aronnax making reference to Melville's novel and theorizing that the devastating sea attacks are being committed by a giant narwhal. Verne subverts this, of course, when what looks like a narwhal is revealed to be the Nautilus, not hunted by an obsessive seaman but piloted by one.
• In The Bedford Incident an American captain becomes obsessed with confronting a Soviet sub in American waters leading to mutual destruction. In the novel the sub is nicknamed "Moby Dick". When it was made into a movie the name was changed.
• Jaws: Okay it's a great white shark, not whale, but the weird old captain gets more and more crazy about killing it, even at the cost of his own life. He even dies the same way as Ahab, by getting snared on a rope attached to a harpoon that the shark had been stuck with and drowning, in contrast to the movie where he got eaten by it.
• In an early example that became as famous as Moby-Dick itself, Word of God confirms that Captain Hook from Peter Pan was inspired by Ahab, both in his vendetta against Peter and in having his own Animal Nemesis. This trope is inverted in some respects, as it's the crocodile that's obsessed with pursuing him instead of vice versa.
• China Miéville's Railsea deliberately incorporates elements of Moby-Dick, but ON LAND... WITH TRAINS... IN THE FAR FUTURE... WITH MOLE MONSTERS! Specifically, about one-third of the plot concerns Captain Abacat Naphi’s hunt for the gigantic white (pale yellow) mole, Mocker-Jack, that bit off her arm at the elbow (since replaced with a cybernetic limb). Exaggerated by the setting, though: where Naphi comes from, every respectable moler captain is expected to have an animal nemesis that’s maimed them once and which they consider a symbol of something greater. In Naphi’s case, Mocker-Jack literally means everything to her, and her arm is unharmed — the “prosthetic” is just a high-tech gauntlet. She only pretends to have lost it so that others will respect her obsession.
• Granny Aching's story of the Jolly Sailor and the whale from The Wee Free Men is a non-comedic example. When Tiffany visits the realm of the elves, this trope is enforced on the Queen when she assumes the whale's form, as she's compelled to abandon her pursuit of Tiffany and chase the Jolly Sailor's ship.

Live-Action TV

• The first season of Farscape does this, with Moya as the Space Whale in question and Crais as Captain Ahab.
• On NCIS, DiNozzo makes the Moby-Dick reference when Gibbs starts obsessing over his hunt for Ari Haswari.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • "The Doomsday Machine" also had this element with Commodore Decker's obsessive pursuit of the titular (almost indestructible) weapon.
  • And in "Obsession", Captain Kirk himself is developing an, well, obsession with killing a deadly cloud creature he has encountered once before during his first assignment on a starship. However, this version of the story has the crew getting all the evidence needed to convince them that creature has to be stopped immediately and do everything they can to help Kirk.
• The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Bliss" has an alien humanoid with a Seadog Beard in constant battle with a bioelectric lifeform that entices starships into its maw with illusions. The Doctor specifically compares him to Captain Ahab. Even after he and Voyager escape from the creature, he's shown at the end of the episode flying back for one more attempt to destroy it.
• The X-Files: It's mentioned several times that Moby-Dick has been Agent Scully's favourite book since she was a little girl. Her father with whom she was close used to read to her from it. His nickname for her was Starbuck, and likewise she called him Ahab. Scully's dog is named after the harpooninst Queequeg. In "Quagmire", she compares Mulder and his life warped by personal vengeance to Ahab:
  Scully: It's the truth or a white whale. What difference does it make? I mean, both obsessions are impossible to capture, and trying to do so will only leave you dead along with everyone else you bring with you. You know, Mulder, you are Ahab.

Radio

• Bleak Expectations parodies it with Captain Ahab Grimpunch, who has sworn vengeance on Moby Delicious, a sea bass he blames for the loss of his arm. As it turns out, Moby isn't even responsible — he and crewmates were once sunk (in a parody of Quinn from Jaws), and while they were stuck in the water, one of his crew mistook Ahab's arm for a sea bass and ate it. Eventually, Ahab's obsession with revenge (and lunch) gets him killed.

Theatre

• IN SPACE! with Ishmael by Australian theatre company Dead Puppet Society. Captain Ahab chases asteroids instead of Space Whales, but one turns out to be a case of That's No Moon.

Video Games

• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: You can get an achievement/trophy for successfully harpooning a white sperm whale.
• Borderlands: T.K. Baha's grudge against the skag Scar (ate his wife, took off his leg, and blinded him). His name is even an anagram of Ahab. Somewhat subverted in that T.K. himself doesn't go after Scar, but has the player do it for him. Since, you know, blind and crippled.
• Civilization: Beyond Earth has an early-to-mid-game quest that appears the first time you encounter a Siege Worm after landing. The description of the quest is from a survivor of a worm attack who has indeed lost their leg to it and now hunts it down in the hopes of killing it in revenge.
• Doctor Who: Worlds in Time: In the section set on Starship UK, there's a plot line involving an alien captain learning of the Star Whale and coming to hunt it; an early attempt causes him to lose a leg, which only makes him more determined.
• Endless Ocean: Blue World has a legendary albino sperm whale called the Leviathan which can be found in the Zahhab region off the coast of Egypt. Its description and trivia make frequent comparisons to Moby-Dick, describing the whale's penchant for capsizing boats and how an old fisherman became obsessed with hunting it in revenge for getting his son killed, and the title gained for encountering Leviathan is "Fanatical Captain".
• Evolve has Torvald. Like Ahab, he lost his crew, his (space)ship, and part of his body to one particular member of a species of massive predators. Also like Ahab he had the missing parts replaced and sought out others who hunted the creatures in hopes of one day reuniting with his foe and slaying it. Unlike Ahab, he has not yet found his enemy. Someday perhaps.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: One of the DLC trials involves hunting down a unique Molduga — a species of giant, desert-dwelling sand whales — known as the Molduking, which attacks by aggressively swimming towards anything in its territory and breaching (like all moldugas do), and which is distinguished by its extreme resilience, a number of lances and weapons stuck in its hide from previous attempts to kill it, and a white coloration as opposed to the usual dark brown.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain contains numerous Moby-Dick references as part of its larger theme of Big Boss' descent into Revenge Before Reason. In particular, Big Boss uses the codename Ahab and is seeking vengeance over his missing arm, he's helped out after awakening from his coma by a man named Ishmael, and his two main support helicopters use the callsigns Pequod and Queequeg. Furthermore, one of the more surreal sequences of the game involves a flaming whale falling from the sky and swallowing an attack helicopter.
• Octopath Traveler II: In Ochette's chapter 2 she meets a man who tried to hunt down a Creature of Legend, Glacis, and got all of his comrades killed. Now he's trying to avenge them, and has spent ten years trying to do it. At the end of the chapter he confronts Glacis once more and nearly gets himslf killed, but in the end Ochette talks him out of it.
• Poptropica: S.O.S. Island is a Whole-Plot Reference to the story, where you must save the members of the sinking S.S. Peaquod. Every member aboard the ship has the same name as their book counterparts. The last crew member you save is the captain. When the whale finally does show up, though, it ends up getting you and him to safety.
• In Portal 2, there's one test chamber where GLaDOS says she needs to leave, then stops herself and admits that this test requires some explanation. She says something fast and jumbled and tells Chell to remember it in slow motion. When you slow it down to listen, you'll find that it's a quote from Moby-Dick, possibly as a reference to how GLaDOS finds Chell so hard to kill.
• Skies of Arcadia features an old fisherman named Drachma who chases the giant flying whale Rhaknam for killing his son decades ago. He eventually forgives the whale after it saves his life and suffers a fatal injury in the process, caring for it in its last days.

Webcomics

• Homestuck: Eridan's proper introduction begins with him harpooning down a giant flying white whale lusus. Additionally, he uses his signature weapon, which is a harpoon-gun-shaped beam rifle called Ahab's Crosshairs.
• Ménage à 3 is an amiable Sex Comedy, but it manages to invoke this trope briefly when Kiley suffers a rather strange dream (strip #914, July 31, 2014, NSFW).

Western Animation

• The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers episode "Space Moby" had a grizzled space captain who had dedicated his life to hunting the titular Space Whale... and a Greenpeace-like organisation dedicated to stopping him.
• There is a character in Disney's Aladdin: The Series who is obsessed with hunting down some sort of desert whale/shark. His quest is actually quite practical, as the belly of the sand shark is covered in precious jewels, but when he does catch it, he has no idea what he will do now, so he decides to cut the shark free and hunt it again.
• There's an episode of Arthur where Binky takes up collecting butterflies (live ones he keeps in a tent) and ends up obsessed with a particular blue one that he can't catch. Several of the characters describe this as being "like Captain Ahab and Moby Dick!" When confronted, Binky responds that it can't be because "Moby Dick was a fish."
• In the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Zuko is a scarred, weathered Determinator sailing the seas in endless pursuit of one powerful foe — namely, Avatar Aang, the Moby Dick to Zuko's Ahab. Zuko's Character Arc, though, diverges from the typical Moby Schtick in several important ways. First, Aang is an innocent 12-year-old boy, not an Animal Nemesis. Second, unlike Moby Dick (whom only Ahab views as a god to be defeated), Aang actually is a God in Human Form. Third, Zuko doesn't have a personal grudge against Aang — he was sent on this chase to "restore his honor," and if he'd been told to hunt down the leader of the Northern Water Tribe or the Kyoshi Warriors or something, he'd be hell-bent on doing that instead. And finally, the Moby Schtick kind of ends by the second season, when Zuko moves his hunt to dry land. Eventually, during the third season, Zuko even abandons the chase to make amends with Aang.
• An episode of Beetlejuice has them doing a Played for Laughs reenactment of Moby-Dick, with B.J. himself in the role of Ahab, eventually nearly being taken over by the character (in a quite literal sense). Notable as it contains many references to the actual book and some of the jokes only make sense if you've actually read it.
• Bounty Hamster. In "Gone Fishin", a white Sand Worm is pursued by mad cyborg Captain Rehab. It not only bit off his leg, but his head as well!
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • "Operation D.U.C.K.Y." features a giant rubber-duck robot that menaces a shipload of kids unwilling to take baths. The robot, of course, is called Moby Duck.
  • In "Operation: A.F.L.O.A.T.", the same trope is used, this time with a giant white asparagus that confronts Sector V and is killed, whaling-style, by Stickybeard.
• Parodied in the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Ocean Commotion" with an actual (though friendly) white whale as well as a captain named Ahab. But this Ahab is prone to change the subject of his obsession when something new comes along...
  Cap'n Ahab: Arh, the great big... crab-like thing... I been searchin' all my life for...
  Sailor: Excuse me? Cap'n, no you haven't.
  Cap'n Ahab: [glares] Harpoon it anyway!
• One episode of Dragon Tales has the main characters help a sky pirate hunt down a giant flying whale for eating his ship. At the end of the episode, they successfully capture the whale, and it turns out that the ship said whale ate was a toy ship.
• Droners has character Wyatt Whale, whose character design (and Punny Name) evokes a white whale, and flies a white whale-shaped drone called Moby.
• In "Shelf Life" from The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy has to start and finish his summer book report the day before school starts. He decides to animate Tom Sawyer to summarize his story, but Tom instead decides to steal a wand and escape into other books all the while vandalizing the books' stories. Eventually they wander into Moby-Dick, but the title is changed to Moby-Duck. The result is Captain Ahab effortlessly defeating his greatest enemy, a giant, yellow, and floating rubber duckie.
• Futurama:
  • "Möbius Dick" gave this trope a Space Whale twist. It lampshades this trope, as the Space Whale Leela becomes obsessed with hunting feeds on obsession, so it naturally antagonizes ship captains. Leela eventually overwhelms the whale's will with a bigger obsession than revenge: finishing her delivery!
  • In "The Day The Earth Stood Stupid", the Giant Brain traps Fry and Leela into the book itself, where Ahab mistakes the Brain for Moby.
• The Johnny Bravo episode "Moby Jerk" had Johnny win a cruise, only to board the wrong boat and get shanghaied into helping the mad Captain Spleen in his Ahab-like pursuit of a heckling mer-man.
• Hanna-Barbera had a peculiar take on Moby Dick in 1967, turning the beast into the heroic protector of two boys who were lost at sea in a raft.
• Phineas and Ferb had an entire episode called "The Belly of the Beast" referencing Moby-Dick.
• An Al Brodax Popeye has the Sea Hag getting Popeye to help destroy a white whale named Moby Hick that's anything but dangerous (the Sea Hag's motives are ulterior).
• Buttercup goes on an obsessive search for the legendary crawdad One Claw McCraw in the The Powerpuff Girls episode "Clawdad".
• A story arc in Rocky and Bullwinkle starts off like this with Maybe Dick, before we learn that the whale is actually a submersible which Boris Badenov uses to steal treasure.
  Narrator: For many years, all the men who go down to the sea in ships—sailors, fishermen, garbage scout captains—have heard and repeated the story of the Legendary wailing Whale, Maybe Dick. Maybe Dick was supposed to be big enough to swallow a whole ship—maybe. He could swim faster than any vessel in the sea—maybe. And he had been seen by sailors whose reputations for sobriety were beyond reproach—maybe.
• This was done in four episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • The episode "Clams" has Mr. Krabs take Spongebob and Squidward on a fishing trip, in celebration of earning his millionth dollar. Unfortunately, the dollar gets eaten by a huge clam during the trip while he was showing it off, leading to this trope.
  • In the episode "Sleepy Time", Spongebob's dream self enters Mr. Krabs's dream, where he finds Mr. Krabs trying to catch a huge dollar bill named Moby Dollar for his wallet.
  • "Sandy, SpongeBob and the Worm" has Sandy going after the Alaskan Bull Worm that is threatening Bikini Bottom because it bit off her tail. A downplayed example, as the focus isn't on her obsession so much as her refusing to listen to SpongeBob's warnings that the worm is bigger and more dangerous than Sandy thinks.
  • "Dopey Dick" is a Whole-Plot Reference of the book, with Squidward as "Fishmael" and SpongeBob as "Captain SpongeHab" hunting the white jellyfish Dopey Dick.
• In the Storm Hawks episode "Leviathan", Stork turns into a Captain Ahab expy and becomes obsessed with hunting down the eponymous Leviathan after it swallows the Condor and Radarr.
• ThunderCats used this trope for the episode "Ramlak Rising". Ahab-Homage Captain Koinelius Tunar, a Fishman who sails the sand sea, has sworn vengeance on the creature who destroyed his home and took his eye and leg. His nemesis the Ramlak is a giant Planimal, a Man-Eating Plant that's hybridized with the ambulatory capabilities of a Giant Squid. Like Captain Ahab, Tunar has degenerated into prizing Revenge Before Reason and shares Ahab's fate almost exactly, while quoting his dialogue.
• There's a Tom and Jerry short called "Dicky Moe" where Tom is on a ship trying to catch Jerry while the captain is trying to catch his white whale.
• Touché Turtle and Dum Dum: In "Whale of a Tale," Captain Ahab calls on the heroic turtle and sheepdog to try and help him capture Moby Dick.
• In the Wild Kratts episode "Last Largest Lobster", the titular lobster wanders onto the reverse-set Miniaturizer and grows to the size of a house. Gourmand, driven into a lobster-craving lunacy by the sight, tries to tie up the huge lobster, but he only succeeds in lashing himself to it, death-of-Ahab-style. He has to be rescued, still ranting, by Chris before it can haul him away to drown.
• In the Woody Woodpecker short "Dopey Dick the Pink Whale", Woody is press-ganged into helping a cowardly captain hunt down the whale that repeatedly tore his trousers.

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