Big Whoop
From Monkey Island wiki
- This article deals with the treasure of Big Whoop. For the amusement park see The Carnival of the Damned.
Big Whoop is the name for a supposed large, powerful treasure of an uncertain nature. Its exact meaning depends on the context used.
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Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
In the second game Big Whoop is described as a fabulous pirate treasure, located on the relatively unknown island of Dinky Island. Guybrush Threepwood is searching for it and after Largo LaGrande resurrects LeChuck he is encouraged by the Voodoo Lady to find Big Whoop before LeChuck finds him. To do this he has to collect the four map pieces left back by Captain Marley and his crew (Rum Rogers, Rapp Scallion and Young Lindy).
Through a number of events the player gets to Dinky Island and discovers a chest by digging at the great X of Dinky Island. Hitting concrete, Guybrush blows a hole with dynamite and finds a treasure chest which he believes is the treasure. However, falling down the chest breaks and merely reveals the mysterious E ticket.
Due to the ambiguous nature of the ending it is never actually learned what Big Whoop is. Original creator Ron Gilbert said that Big Whoop was actually unimportant in his idea for Monkey Island 3[1]. However, he was involved only in the first two Monkey Island games and had no involvement in the next two games.
The Curse of Monkey Island
In the third game we learn that Big Whoop is the name of an amusement park LeChuck has created to increase his army of the damned. In Part 5 of the game LeChuck also goes into a lengthy explanation of the fact that the treasure of Big Whoop was actually a Gate to Hell which is what turned him into a ghost (in the first game LeChuck was said to have died in a shipwreck, but the story explains that he survived to make it to Dinky Island).
Conflicting information
Big Whoop is a puzzling item within the Monkey Island series. It is quite possible that the Carnival was intended to signify Big Whoop, as the ending of Monkey Island 2 seemed to indicate that the first two games were merely the imaginings of a small child (Guybrush). However, as this plot revelation is retconned in later games it adds a more problematic aspect to the definition of what Big Whoop actually is.
The Voodoo Lady herself appears to scold Guybrush (very mildly) in the third game for going out to look for Big Whoop while in the second game she is the one who told Guybrush to seek it out. Additionally she says that Big Whoop is the source of much of LeChuck's power which doesn't explain whether she means in the sense that LeChuck actually draws power from the Big Whoop portal or whether she refers to the fact that the Big Whoop amusement park is a recruitment plan for the killing and resurrection of pirates as undead skeletons. It is never explained why she thought Guybrush's quest to survive LeChuck would be helped by a portal to Hell. It can be assumed, however, that the Voodoo Lady foresaw that it was Guybrush's destiny to seek out Big Whoop and therefore told him to proceed with his quest—after all, there is never any indication that she knows its true nature.
The geography of Dinky and Monkey Islands is also problematic; the third game shows a map where Dinky is located southeast from Monkey, but Monkey is shown to be southeast from the rest of the Tri-Island area. In the fourth game Dinky is seen northwest of Lucre Island with Monkey Island nowhere in sight, further complicating the location of Dinky Island.
LeChuck claims in the third game that, since Marley and his crew vowed to take the secret of Big Whoop to their graves, he made sure they did. However, in Monkey Island 2, Elaine is able to find Dinky Island on her own and later suspects that Guybrush has fallen into LeChuck's clutches without having any obvious hint, indicating that maybe she knew more about Big Whoop than she let on.
The name
Big Whoop is a sarcastic term used to express disappointment. In the third game Guybrush describes Big Whoop by saying "that [he] was expecting so much more and felt so let down."
