The Airship

The Airship
Cuphead successfully parrying Jelly.
Boss	Jelly The Octopus The Clam The Crab The Stork
Location	Unknown
Overworld Icon	Airship
Enemies	Barnacles Stork Babies

The Airship is an unused set of stages of which Jelly The Octopus was to be part of. It was represented on the map by a colorful airship floating above the ground. It seems The Airship was to be a group of bosses that can be fought at different times similar to The King's Leap. Based on the unfinished code of the other bosses (a clam, a crab and a stork), the fights would've heavily feature parrying. This is a gauntlet of bosses for the player to defeat and get coins. This mechanic was replaced with the Run 'n Guns, while the gameplay idea might have eventually become the Mausoleums.

These levels were scrapped due to a lack of resources and time constraints, as there needed to be 20 airship bosses at most to get all 40 coins in the game. Footage of the one of the boss fights was shown at E3 2015, which can be viewed here.

One of the fights took place on the ship's deck.

Strategy

• Evade
• Parrying

Battle

Jelly idly smiles at the player(s) and proceeds to move around the battlefield. He can only be damaged if his antenna is parried. This causes him to gradually move faster and faster until he takes enough damage and is eventually defeated.

The Clam would damage the player(s) with these attacks:

• A spit attack that was not fully coded.
• An attack that spawns barnacles. The barnacles were programmed to arc down to the ground and start a spinning animation, which could mean it could roll off-screen, bounce like the Bouncin' Beetles or roll for a while and become an obstacle like the Toothy Terrors in Floral Fury. There is a version of the barnacle that can be parried, and it seems to disappear when it hits the ground.

The Clam would only be vulnerable when it is attacking.

The Crab has at least three known attacks, both of which are unfinished:

• It shoots a gem out at an angle, which bounced around the screen and eventually turned pink after a delay.
• A bubble beam attack which has a sine wave pattern.
• An unspecified barnacle attack not unlike the Clam's. All code referring to this misspell it as "barnicle."

The Crab is defeated upon taking enough damage from the gem being parried back at it.

Just like Jelly, the Stork could only be damaged by parrying a certain part of its body as it bows. It's unclear as to where you had to parry it, as the name provided, the "knob", is ambiguous. It has two known attacks:

• Spawning babies that jump onto the player(s) and attack them.
• A "spiral shot" which had parryable projectiles that were aimed directly at the player(s)

Soundtrack

Version	Soundtrack
Original soundtrack	File:Cuphead OST - The Airship Music

Trivia

• Despite being listed as a level in the debug level select menu as "Airship_Jelly" and "Airship_Stork", all the files have been removed, and clicking on them will softlock the game.
• A similarly themed Run 'n Gun level, Perilous Piers, was possibly inspired by concepts explored in these fights as the known Airship bosses are all animals living on or near the coast.
• The music for these stages was used for the initial teaser trailer of The Delicious Last Course. This lead some to believe the airship would return in the DLC. Although this didn't happen, a spiritual successor of sorts, The King's Leap, was included.
• Most of the champions in The King's Leap reused codes from this fight, and can been seen as the spiritual successor of it.
  • The Pawns likely reused codes from the baby birds for the Stork.
  • The Knight is similar to Jelly The Octopus.
  • One of the unused Bishop fight requires the player to hit some "birdie" back at him.
  • The Rook reused some of the codes from the Crab and the Stork, most likely projectiles being reflected back at them.

External Link

• Crab, Clam, and Stork's existence