Hey, buddy, your parade float's pointed the wrong way.
Production Code: 224
Jake accidentally curses his grandfather's shop with bad luck on Chinese New Year.
Tropes
- All Part of the Show: What the parade attendees think Jake and Haley fighting the demons in their dragon forms is.
- Brain Freeze: Spud continually gets these from drinking his Freezy Slurp too fast.
- Breather Episode: Sandwiched between "The Love Cruise" and "Homecoming", this is a much lighter and inconsequential Holiday Episode.
- Chekhov's Gun: This episode has two:
- Spud’s orthopedic clogs, which he ultimately uses to hit the release lever of a moving garbage truck so he and Trixie can retrieve the pieces of Lao-Shi's broken vase to reverse the bad luck curse on the shop.Spud: Lightweight, yet sturdy. I knew they’d come in handy. (Beat) Or footy.
- The fire trigger Jonathan installs in their dragon costume for the parade’s Dragon Dance. A well-placed shot from it propels the last of the three demons back into the Fengdu Vault.
- Spud’s orthopedic clogs, which he ultimately uses to hit the release lever of a moving garbage truck so he and Trixie can retrieve the pieces of Lao-Shi's broken vase to reverse the bad luck curse on the shop.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: The three demons kick Jake's dragon butt HARD, leaving him a smoldering mess in a crash-landed crater. Even after he get's one of them back in the box, the other two are still too much for him to handle until Haley comes to his aid.
- Foreign Culture Fetish/Occidental Otaku: While Susan's family is Chinese rather than Japanese, Jonathan is still so interested in their culture that he comes off as believing he's actually Chinese at points. He does at least attempt to argue that he's one-sixteenth Navajo, which originated from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge, and he could therefore possibly be Chinese.
- Hand Gagging: Susan does this when Haley, who has become increasingly frustrated with her father due to him telling her that she needs to "be more dragon-y" for their Dragon Dance at the parade, comes this close to telling him their family secret.
- Holiday Episode: For Chinese New Year.
- Hypocritical Humor: Haley is in the middle of saying she isn't greedy like Jake before she opens her Chinese New Year envelope to find less money in it than she expected.Haley: 'Cause money's the root of all evil, and... I was hopin' for a little more evil than this.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The promo
for this episode suggests that this could be a Wham Episode where Jake's father learns the truth about Jake being a dragon. As it turns out, the scene immediately resolves itself with Jake utilizing a Last-Second Word Swap, and the episode ends up being a simple standalone episode. - Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: A plot point of the episode. Due to his ignorance, Jake cleans out the shop on Chinese New Year, which brings bad luck, and speads the rest of the episode struggling to get all the stuff he threw out back in order to reverse it. Needless to say, Jake is put through the wringer in this episode.
- Potty Dance: Haley does this at the beginning as her mother’s sewing their costume for the Dragon Dance for the Chinese New Year parade.Susan: Stand still, Haley. I have to see how these scales go.
Haley: I’m trying to, but either I’m too excited about the parade, or I drank way too much juice this morning. - Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When Susan tries to get it through Jonathan's skull that he is not Chinese like he believes he is.Susan: Honey, there’s really no way to put this gently… YOU’RE NOT. CHINESE!
- Running Gag: Jonathan erroneously believing himself to be Chinese, to the confusion and annoyance of Susan and Haley.
- The Stinger: Jake tries talking to his grandfather about Chinese New Year facts he's learned, but Lao-Shi is too busy listening to music to hear him.
- The Swarm: What finally convinces Jake that he accidentally cursed the shop with bad luck.Jake: It’s just a coincidence!
Fu Dog: Yeah, a vase that lasted 600 years suddenly breaks, a drain that gushes like Old Faithful, and that cricket on the windowsill? Coincidence? (chuckles) I don’t think so.
Jake: What? Now you’re buggin’ over a harmless bug?
Trixie: Yeah, I thought a cricket meant good luck!
Fu Dog: Yes, a cricket means good luck, but ONE cricket!
(Cue the swarm)
Jake, Trixie and Spud: CRICKETS! - Tempting Fate: Jake succeeds in saving the cursed box from falling only to continue holding it upside-down to gloat about how he's removed his bad luck, resulting in the top falling off and the demons being released.
- Trickster Mentor/Troll: Lao-Shi has a rare instance of being one by revealing at the end that he knew what was going on the whole time, but didn’t help out because, as he put it, "Some lessons are more fun to watch than to teach."Trixie: So I dug through trash…
Spud: And I licked slime…
Fu Dog: And I had my crippling fear of crickets exposed!
Trixie: Just so Jakey could learn a lesson about his culture?
Lao-Shi: I only said it was fun for Grandpa. - Vertigo Effect: Fu experiences this when he re-enters the shop to see Jake has thrown away half the inventory.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: It’s revealed in this episode that Fu Dog has a fear of crickets.
- Your Costume Needs Work: Subverted. When Jonathan first sees Jake in his dragon form while he’s fighting the demons, he comments that it looks “Fakey McFakerson”, then later retracts that, saying that “The costumes don’t look that bad, but you can totally see the wires!” Then it’s surprisingly averted when he sees Haley in hers when she joins the fight, saying “Now that is a convincing dragon”.
