Speaker 1: First you will come to the sirens, who enchant all
Speaker 1: who come near them. If anyone unwarily draws in too
Speaker 1: close and hears the singing of the sirens, his wife
Speaker 1: and children will never welcome him home again, for they
Speaker 1: sit in a green field and wabble him to death
Speaker 1: with the sweetness of their song. There is a great
Speaker 1: heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the
Speaker 1: flesh still rotting off them. They meant the things on
Speaker 1: the little island with the queer ruins, and it seems
Speaker 1: them awful pictures of frog fish monsters were supposed to
Speaker 1: be pictures of these things. Maybe they was the kind
Speaker 1: of critters has got all the mermaids stories and such started.
Speaker 1: They had all kinds of cities on the sea bottom,
Speaker 1: and this island was heaved up from thar of my
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from How Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And if you recognize what those sources were, you probably
Speaker 1: can tell we're gonna be talking about some mirror creatures,
Speaker 1: some sea folks something like that today. That's right. The
Speaker 1: first was from Homer's the Odyssey the Samuel Butler translation.
Speaker 1: The second was from HP. Lovecraft The Shadow Over Ins
Speaker 1: andet Now, there is always an alluring quality to the
Speaker 1: idea that there's stuff happening down at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the ocean that has more than just an animal quality,
Speaker 1: but some kind of intelligence or organizing principle to it.
Speaker 1: I think of in the George R. Martin books, there's
Speaker 1: this character. Do you remember this guy Robert, who's like
Speaker 1: a court jester and the in stanis Bathians court who's
Speaker 1: always singing about what happens under the bottom of the sea. No,
Speaker 1: I've forgotten about this. Well, he like falls in the
Speaker 1: water at some point and gets rescued, and after that
Speaker 1: he's always saying, like under the sea that I don't
Speaker 1: remember what he says, but it's like they have feet,
Speaker 1: you know, people people walk upside down on their hands.
Speaker 1: And then he always says, I know, I know, ho
Speaker 1: ho ho, And it's kind of mysterious. Oh yeah, this
Speaker 1: does ring a bell. Now. Well, you know, before even
Speaker 1: before we had proper mirrors, the uh, the ocean was
Speaker 1: kind of the looking glass, right, it was kind of
Speaker 1: the mirror world. Yeah, so any of those stories where
Speaker 1: you wonder if there's actually some kind of creature living
Speaker 1: on the other side of the mirror, if that's another
Speaker 1: universe we're peering through into. All of that applies to
Speaker 1: the water as well. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting when
Speaker 1: you think of all the various specimens, the Mermaids, the Gilman,
Speaker 1: the sirens. It's fascinating the humans have seemingly always dreamt
Speaker 1: up humanoids from the deep, not just monsters, but humanoids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, because you can certainly expand it and get
Speaker 1: into the whole realm of sea monsters and various animal
Speaker 1: fish hybrids. But there's something particular cular about those humanoid
Speaker 1: or partially humanoid creatures that a mirror world beneath the waves,
Speaker 1: and people of some sort that occupied to depths. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, even before you had somebody like Giordano Bruno
Speaker 1: imagining that there could be other planets with surfaces like
Speaker 1: our planet that could have creatures dwelling on them, you know,
Speaker 1: when people didn't really have that conception of the sky,
Speaker 1: you could still definitely wonder about something like that under
Speaker 1: the ocean. That was like sort of the first outer space.
Speaker 1: It was the original alien world. Yeah, indeed, and without
Speaker 1: a real means of exploring it or understanding it. You
Speaker 1: were just left with whatever happened to swim up with
Speaker 1: within view, whatever happened to wash up dead and you know,
Speaker 1: partially rotted away on the shoreline, whatever you were able
Speaker 1: to pull up with with line or net. Dude, the
Speaker 1: stuff that washes up dead on the beaches of the
Speaker 1: Earth is terrifying and crazy now, even though we have
Speaker 1: like photos and modern science. Can you imagine that happening
Speaker 1: in a world where you know, the New Jersey beach
Speaker 1: monster washes up, but it's in the Middle Ages in
Speaker 1: China or something. Yeah, it's actually really fascinating to look back,
Speaker 1: particularly at a lot of the sea monster illustrations and
Speaker 1: old maps. There's a book by chet van Duzer Sea
Speaker 1: Monsters of Medieval and Renaissance Maps and and he he.
Speaker 1: It's filled with wonderful illustrations. But you get to look
Speaker 1: at at all these various creatures. You know, that's some
Speaker 1: fairly realistic. You can look at and say, well, that's
Speaker 1: clearly supposed to be a walrus, that's supposed to be
Speaker 1: a whale. It just has too many blowholes, and some
Speaker 1: of them you look at and you realize, well, this
Speaker 1: is essentially what you might see if you saw the
Speaker 1: put partially decomposed body of a whale, something enormous, but
Speaker 1: a little more beaked looking. Now. In that book, Van
Speaker 1: Duzer points out that few maps survive from antiquity, but
Speaker 1: there are map like mentions and map like artifacts, such
Speaker 1: as there's an Assyrian freeze from the palace of King
Speaker 1: Sargon the second early eighth century BC that clearly depicts
Speaker 1: to Assyrian morment. And it's great because if you've ever
Speaker 1: seen Assyrian reliefs or carvings before, they've they've all got
Speaker 1: the same head, you know, it's all that same guy
Speaker 1: with the same curly beard and the hat. And these
Speaker 1: mermaids are like that too. Yeah, And then you you
Speaker 1: look at other ancient writing. I mean, they're mentioned in
Speaker 1: ovid Ovid's writing The Metamorphosis. Ovid lived forty three b
Speaker 1: c E To seventeen or eighteen CE, and he described
Speaker 1: the gates of the Palace of the Sun is containing
Speaker 1: all of these images of mirror people. The dark blue
Speaker 1: Sea contains the gods melodious triton shifting Proteus uh Aegean
Speaker 1: crushing two huge whales, together his arms across their backs,
Speaker 1: and Doris with her daughters, some seen swimming, some sitting
Speaker 1: on rocks drying their sea green hair, some writing the
Speaker 1: backs of fish. And you can you can keep going
Speaker 1: back in time too. I mean, as Nancy Easterland pointed
Speaker 1: out in her two thousand one paper Hans Christian Andersen's
Speaker 1: Fish out of Water, the Babylonians recognized God's with fish
Speaker 1: features or fish hybridity. Yeah, you can sort of see
Speaker 1: this as an extension of the way that early creation
Speaker 1: myths and ancient gods often had water aspects, like like
Speaker 1: Tiamatta Nabsu, you know, the fresh water and the salt water,
Speaker 1: or the idea of the creation stories which almost always
Speaker 1: involve waters, right, you know, the chaos hover or the
Speaker 1: being hovering out over the waters. Yeah, calling back to
Speaker 1: our order out of Chaos episode. And we've talked about
Speaker 1: inky as well before. The Sumerian water god, which is
Speaker 1: sometimes described it's sometimes described as having a cloak of
Speaker 1: a fish or scaled skin. Wait, a cloak of a
Speaker 1: fish or a cloak made out of multiple fish or
Speaker 1: one of the images I saw it looked like a
Speaker 1: cloak of little fish icons like it like the cloak
Speaker 1: was made out of fish emoticons. That's pretty great, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: And get this, the ziggurat where people would worship Inky
Speaker 1: was known as House of the Subterranean Waters. Well, that
Speaker 1: seems to sort of complete the ziggurat trinity because we
Speaker 1: we've talked about zigarattes before the Ziggurata Etemenanki, which was
Speaker 1: sometimes believed to be associated with the historical idea of
Speaker 1: the Tower of babel I think that name means something
Speaker 1: like the house of the foundation of heaven and Earth,
Speaker 1: very regal sounding zigguratte as if there's another kind of
Speaker 1: zigguratte right now, additionally we have this is just kind
Speaker 1: of a humble zigguratte. Yeah, there's no such thing. If
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a zigguratte, it's gonna be a zigaratte. Now.
Speaker 1: Additionally we have we have fish tailed gods and water
Speaker 1: dragons found throughout the cultures of India, China, and Japan
Speaker 1: and uh Nancy Nancy Easterland sums up a lot of
Speaker 1: this nicely. She says, quote, some of the mythological sea
Speaker 1: beings and deities such as Poseidon and the Sirens were
Speaker 1: not originally associated with water and piicine anatomy, the sirens
Speaker 1: were originally birds, indicating that divine power and womanly allure
Speaker 1: became combined with the power and promise of the sea
Speaker 1: when ancient cultures undertook maritime war and trade. So she
Speaker 1: argues that the that mur folk and mermaids, all these creatures,
Speaker 1: they're ultimately the descendants or in her words, the scale
Speaker 1: down descendants, which I like because of scales. Uh, these
Speaker 1: are just the scale down descendants of anciency gods. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like one example of the principle that displaced
Speaker 1: gods or or fading gods of older theologies often appear
Speaker 1: in sort of lower status or demoted roles in newer
Speaker 1: versions of religions. Yeah, the old trope of the former
Speaker 1: pagan god becomes a demon in medieval Christian traditions. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So obviously we're talking about mr Folk water dwelling humanoids
Speaker 1: of various kinds today, and this is going to be
Speaker 1: the first part of a two part episode. The first
Speaker 1: one here we want to discuss the sort of global
Speaker 1: mr Folk mythology and all of the different ideas of
Speaker 1: humanoids living in the deep and what that says about
Speaker 1: us culturally and where where these ideas come from. And
Speaker 1: then in the next stepisode, we're gonna focus more on
Speaker 1: the science of aquatic humanoids. Yeah, so this is gonna
Speaker 1: be the mythology and fiction episode and the next one
Speaker 1: will be the science and speculative science episode. Now, Robert,
Speaker 1: one of the first ones you mentioned was the sirens,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, and when we we had the reading
Speaker 1: from the Odyssey at the start of the episode that
Speaker 1: refers to them. But one thing you'll notice is that
Speaker 1: there was no description of the sirens. Yeah, what do
Speaker 1: they look like? Well, we don't know, because Homer never
Speaker 1: actually describes them. Uh. They were later described though, as
Speaker 1: being half bird, much like the Harpie, and later periods
Speaker 1: of development merged them with the Northern mermaid in Christian Europe,
Speaker 1: but medieval best Area's stuck to the bird hybridity though
Speaker 1: up through at least twelve twenty and then you had
Speaker 1: this gentleman Isidore of Seville who lived of five sixty
Speaker 1: through six thirty six CE, and he attributed them with
Speaker 1: scales and webbed feet and sometimes tales and wings as well.
Speaker 1: But from the Middle Ages onward, that's where the sirens
Speaker 1: really took on the mermaid look, and it's stuck. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to think of depictions of them I've seen in movies,
Speaker 1: but I don't think I have. The only thing that
Speaker 1: comes to mind is, oh, brother, where art thou? But
Speaker 1: in that they're not hybrids. They're just humans that are,
Speaker 1: but they are in a creek bed, that's right. I
Speaker 1: feel like a lot of the depictions that that I'm
Speaker 1: accustomed to, mainly through the Time Life book series of
Speaker 1: myths and monsters and myths and legends, and there was
Speaker 1: there were some siren images in there, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them were just basically beautiful women out on rocks,
Speaker 1: luring the the the wide eyed Greek sailors to their doom. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, if you're not familiar with the story, it's
Speaker 1: that the sirens would sing, right, and that they're singing
Speaker 1: was so lovely that it would drive men mad, and
Speaker 1: it would and they would want to come ashore to
Speaker 1: meet the sirens, I guess, or be drawn to the singing,
Speaker 1: but instead their vessels would be dashed upon the rocks, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And various accounts of the sirens that they vary, like
Speaker 1: maybe you'd starve to death, or you perhaps drowned. I
Speaker 1: guess the basic underlying reality of the myth is the
Speaker 1: ocean is a dangerous place, right and if you go
Speaker 1: out upon the ocean, you might meet your do I
Speaker 1: always thought that what Odysseus does in the story of
Speaker 1: his encounter with the sirens was an interesting sort of
Speaker 1: metaphor for the ways some people experiment with mind altering substances,
Speaker 1: which is that he has his men lash him to
Speaker 1: the ship's mast so that he can't control you know,
Speaker 1: he can't drive the ship into the rocks. But all
Speaker 1: the other men plugged their ears, and he wants to
Speaker 1: hear it. They're all the designated drivers. Yes, though in
Speaker 1: a sense he's the designated driver because he is the
Speaker 1: only one who can tell them when they're out of
Speaker 1: the sirens range. But but but yeah, they're they're all
Speaker 1: plugged up. He's the one that's a that's their rope
Speaker 1: to the mast, begging to be let free, and their
Speaker 1: under strict orders that the more I begged, the more
Speaker 1: you need to wrote me to the mast. Now another
Speaker 1: interesting uh, individual or race, depending on how you look
Speaker 1: at it, from Greek mythology, the Triton so Triton was
Speaker 1: originally a specific murr person. But Ariel's father, right is
Speaker 1: Was that his name in the cartoon in the Disney movie,
Speaker 1: wasn't it? I thought you just saw a little mermaid
Speaker 1: themed show, and I did, but it was at Wiki Watchie,
Speaker 1: which is the long running Mermaid show there, and the
Speaker 1: underwater dancing is a very limited storytelling medium, and I
Speaker 1: don't think her father ever showed up in it. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's his name. I remember this from childhood,
Speaker 1: the guy with the big beard and the trident, the
Speaker 1: mayor man king. He's King Triton. Okay, I definitely remember him,
Speaker 1: but I didn't remember his name. Well. Uh. The Triton's
Speaker 1: eventually became seen as just a class of murr people
Speaker 1: in Greek myth. They were the sons of Poseidon and Amphathrite.
Speaker 1: They had humanoid bodies covered in scales, and then they
Speaker 1: had dolphin tales maddi green or yellow hair. They had
Speaker 1: gills as well as pointed kind of elf ears, wide
Speaker 1: mouths things, and then they typically would serve as escorts
Speaker 1: for the Nereid sea nymphs as well as general attendants
Speaker 1: for seed Avinity. And our old friend Hestiodd said that
Speaker 1: they inhabited Golden palaces under the sea. Now it sounds
Speaker 1: like King Triton, Yeah, exactly. It's it's that this is
Speaker 1: key to so many of our our myths and legends
Speaker 1: of my people. Now I'm wondering this is kind of
Speaker 1: interesting that it's combining features of the House of ick Thos. Right,
Speaker 1: it's got the scales and the fish like characteristics, but
Speaker 1: then they've also got dolphin tales, So there's this melding
Speaker 1: of aquatic mammals and fish. Well, of course you have
Speaker 1: to remember that for the longest time this was not
Speaker 1: a clear distinction, the idea that the dolphins were not fish.
Speaker 1: So it makes sense that we just mesh it all
Speaker 1: up under miscellaneous sea beasts. And also in medieval times,
Speaker 1: Triton's were made the male counterparts of sirens, the male counterparts,
Speaker 1: as in like they were the same species, or like
Speaker 1: they were just friends or what My understanding is that
Speaker 1: it's like they were of the same species of one
Speaker 1: dares to get too technical with your your mythological people's
Speaker 1: under the waves, and I think this will be very
Speaker 1: interesting later on when we discuss modern treatments of mermaids
Speaker 1: and fish people. Okay, so fangs, scales, dolphin tales, humanoid characteristics.
Speaker 1: That's not enough hybridity for me. I want you to
Speaker 1: mash in some more stuff. Well, you're in luck, Joe,
Speaker 1: because there there's another creature to consider here, the atho centaur. Yes,
Speaker 1: so you had something called a centauro triton, which is
Speaker 1: basically what occurs when you have a triton that's depicted
Speaker 1: with like like a definite dolphin esque hind quarters of ocation.
Speaker 1: But then the ichio centaur takes the hybridity to a
Speaker 1: whole another level. So we see this and around the
Speaker 1: third century Common Era, and this is found in the
Speaker 1: Natural history text Physiologists. Uh, and this each year the
Speaker 1: ichthio centaur was said to have the torso and head
Speaker 1: of a man, the four legs of a horse or
Speaker 1: lion are the hind quarters of a dolphin, and unlike
Speaker 1: the centaur o triton, they had scale. Now I'm so
Speaker 1: imagining what kind of habitat this creature dwells in. When
Speaker 1: would it be useful to have the four legs of
Speaker 1: a horse and the tail of a dolphin. H Well,
Speaker 1: I mean you could really tease that apart and get
Speaker 1: into I guess the symbolic meaning of the things or
Speaker 1: you you end up coming back to your idea of like,
Speaker 1: here's something washed up on the beach, makes sense of it,
Speaker 1: and well, this is kind of the story that ends
Speaker 1: up spreading about it. There are no classical accounts of
Speaker 1: the Ichthio centaur according to the resources I was looking at,
Speaker 1: but that they remained a decorative motif, which is kind
Speaker 1: of the ultimate fate of a lot of these, like
Speaker 1: the mermaid and the uh and the triton and the
Speaker 1: Ichthyo centaur, they become just part of medieval likenography going forward,
Speaker 1: and they come to symbolize other things, the Mermaid particular
Speaker 1: becoming to symbolize to sort of the the the evil
Speaker 1: and monstrous nature of the female Uh sometimes depicted Uh,
Speaker 1: I believe with a with a fish to show that
Speaker 1: she is entrapping the Christian soul. Yeah. I often think
Speaker 1: of the tradition of the mermaid as being one of temptation,
Speaker 1: like that it it establishes kind of like a foolish
Speaker 1: and weak willed sailor that will give in to the
Speaker 1: temptation of the mermaid because he has not properly disciplined
Speaker 1: his spirit to resist sin. It reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: of the incubi and succubi legends we've discussed in the
Speaker 1: podcast before, where the feet would be a giveaway, the
Speaker 1: feet would be the feet of a beast, and therefore
Speaker 1: any any rational believer would notice the feet of the
Speaker 1: creature and just and cease to pursue this foolish pairing.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's an interesting parallel, like that they both
Speaker 1: go back to this idea of the sinner as someone
Speaker 1: who's oblivious to difference. Yeah, like they can't see all
Speaker 1: the warning signs here, the main warning sign of course,
Speaker 1: being that the individualist part fish. All right, well, maybe
Speaker 1: we should take a quick break and then we come back.
Speaker 1: We will discuss more aquatic humanoid legends from around the world. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So not every mirror person in mythology and
Speaker 1: legend is a villain. Uh. Sometimes you see some that
Speaker 1: that have beneficial aspects as well. There's, for instance, the
Speaker 1: the the Neno of Japanese legend. This is essentially less
Speaker 1: of a mermaid and more of just a fish with
Speaker 1: a beautiful woman's face, and it's protective and warns of
Speaker 1: misfortune on land and sea. And then there's also an
Speaker 1: interesting one from the Micmac people of eastern Canada. They
Speaker 1: were known as the halfway people. Uh, these particular mr
Speaker 1: folk they had the upper bodies of a body of
Speaker 1: a human and the lower body of a fish, and
Speaker 1: they'd warn fishermen of coming storms or invoke storms if
Speaker 1: they were distrest spected. Now I have to add another
Speaker 1: North American or Canadian entry, a less fulkloric and more
Speaker 1: of a one off. But I'm adding it because I've
Speaker 1: seen this in person, Robert the Bant from Merman. You've
Speaker 1: looked up images, right, I did. I was not familiar
Speaker 1: with this, and I had, of course heard of the
Speaker 1: Fiji Mermaid. And I've never been to Bath, but I'm
Speaker 1: familiar with it. You know, you've talked about your adventures there,
Speaker 1: and it does not seem like a likely mermaid destination. No,
Speaker 1: not really. I mean, so this is Inland, Canada. This
Speaker 1: is in Alberta and Bant National Park. So this is
Speaker 1: a mountainous region, not a not a coastal region, but
Speaker 1: it has lakes, and so in these lakes, I guess
Speaker 1: one might expect to find some kind of hybrid humanoid
Speaker 1: aquatic creature. And so inside this business in Banff in Alberta.
Speaker 1: There is a little store called the Indian Trading Company,
Speaker 1: and in the back of the store there is a
Speaker 1: taxidermy creature that's half fish, half humanoid gremlin and it
Speaker 1: looks like, I don't know how would you describe it.
Speaker 1: Like the back of it just looks straight up like
Speaker 1: a fish. It's a fish with the head cut off,
Speaker 1: and then that fish just goes straight into some ribs
Speaker 1: with with like human baby arms but with claws on them,
Speaker 1: and a scary looking head that has hair. I mean
Speaker 1: it looks like a taxidermine creation. I mean that is
Speaker 1: what it is. Yes, it is a fish and probably
Speaker 1: some sort of a small monkey that the remains of
Speaker 1: which we're we're sewn together, yeah, or the I think
Speaker 1: it's also possible that the top half of it could
Speaker 1: just be artificial. I think it could be a crafted artifact.
Speaker 1: According to a write up on Atlas Obscurity, it was
Speaker 1: probably bought by a man named Norman Luxton, who is
Speaker 1: the proprietor of the shop around nineteen fifteen, when it
Speaker 1: was when it first showed up there. It's very much
Speaker 1: in the traditional of like the P. T. Barnum kind
Speaker 1: of thing that the Fiji mermaid. Yes, so some kind
Speaker 1: of a side shoeoddity sort of thing. Yeah, except it
Speaker 1: stays right here in this uh, in this store or
Speaker 1: I don't know how long it's been totally stationary there.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you go to Bamp and you go
Speaker 1: to the store and you go into the back room,
Speaker 1: you will see lots of oddities. There is like a
Speaker 1: giant taxidermy bear I think, and some moose heads and
Speaker 1: other local stuff. But yeah, this thing is in a
Speaker 1: glass case. It's got a mirror behind it, and they
Speaker 1: sell postcards. It's like I saw them from Herman. Interesting.
Speaker 1: Well that's this. I've got to check that out when
Speaker 1: I finally get up to ban. Now, speaking of Canadian
Speaker 1: we can sort of extend that and think of French
Speaker 1: traditions as well. Uh, there is a mermaid in French
Speaker 1: traditions known as Melo scene and much like a kidna,
Speaker 1: the mother of monsters in Greek myth, the French mermaid
Speaker 1: here boasts a two pronged tale. Oh you know what
Speaker 1: that reminds me of Dagon? Well yeah, I thought you're
Speaker 1: gonna say Starbucks, but yes, also the movie, the Stewart
Speaker 1: Gordon movie Dagon that came out in two thousand and one.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a mixed bag. Not not a great movie,
Speaker 1: but there's some things to like about it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a love crafty in like it's basically an adaptation of
Speaker 1: Shadow over in Smith, but they lean into the Mermaids
Speaker 1: a little more. They lean into the sex and violence
Speaker 1: a little more. Uh, it's worth checking out if you
Speaker 1: like violent fish people movies. But what about Starbucks Starbucks, Well,
Speaker 1: it just coffee basically, But but that that logo with
Speaker 1: the mermaid with the two pronged tail, uh, with going
Speaker 1: up on each side of the creature, Like that's basically
Speaker 1: melocene or a kid not, depending on how you want
Speaker 1: to look at Robert. I hate to say it, but
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody ever pays attention to that logo
Speaker 1: unless they're trying to get mad about it or not
Speaker 1: having a Sanda hat or something. It would be interesting
Speaker 1: if people started getting mad over that, is, Like, why
Speaker 1: does this mermaid have two tales instead of one? We
Speaker 1: want an American Mermaid, not a French Mermaid. One tale,
Speaker 1: one country, one tale. Well, they're probably you know, pining
Speaker 1: for the classic Mermaid, the have for the Danish Mermaid.
Speaker 1: Why is this the classic Well, you know, because when
Speaker 1: you when you really think about mermaids, you think of
Speaker 1: like Hans Christian Anderson, you think of Northern Europe. Oh, so,
Speaker 1: to be clear, Hans Christian Anderson is the author of
Speaker 1: the Little Mermaids story that the Disney movie is loosely
Speaker 1: based on, very loosely because in his version there's a
Speaker 1: lot more like blood and cutting off feed and stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, it's a bit a bit more violent. But
Speaker 1: but over in Denmark they did have to have frou
Speaker 1: and uh. This is a that's that's a pretty helpful
Speaker 1: mermaid because it can also tell the future and it
Speaker 1: allegedly foretold the birth of Danish King Christian the fourth
Speaker 1: of Denmark. So that's a that's a beneficial mermaid for you.
Speaker 1: And of course I have to mention the monk fish.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with the monk fish or perhaps it's
Speaker 1: kin the bishop fish. Well, I know of the monkfish,
Speaker 1: like the monkfish, but you're not thinking of like the
Speaker 1: monkfish that you would eat, right. This is this was
Speaker 1: a creature widely reported marine creature in Northern European waters,
Speaker 1: described in Ambrose Pare's sixteenth century work on monsters. It
Speaker 1: had the head of a human, the tonstered air style
Speaker 1: of a monk, monks cow and cape, and two extremely
Speaker 1: long flippers. It's it's a ridiculous looking creature. It looks
Speaker 1: like you drew a monk as a fish, you know
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. It sounds I've seen the medieval drawings.
Speaker 1: But the cool thing is that there's a very strong
Speaker 1: case to be made that these were based on descriptions
Speaker 1: of dead giant squid, because you have this kind of
Speaker 1: you know, thick, lumpy body that kind of tapers off
Speaker 1: on one end and then has what a number of
Speaker 1: tentacles and then two very long additional arms. Uh. That
Speaker 1: would have been the two extremely long flippers of the
Speaker 1: monk fish. Yeah, I'm looking at the comparisons right now.
Speaker 1: I can see why that would have been the case.
Speaker 1: And there was also a Chinese variant of this, the
Speaker 1: Hi Ho Shun, which was the sea Buddhist priest. So uh, again,
Speaker 1: we're getting back to the idea of when when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a mythical sea creature, there are a number
Speaker 1: of different ways to look at it. You know, is
Speaker 1: it a former god that's been demoted, is it a
Speaker 1: dead sea animal that that someone has misinterpreted, and then
Speaker 1: someone else has heard about that, and then that person
Speaker 1: told another individual who illustrated and wrote it in in
Speaker 1: a medieval baster area. It. Uh. These are just a
Speaker 1: few of the possible excuses for many of these fantastic creatures.
Speaker 1: So is there anything that seems to unite all of
Speaker 1: the legends we've looked at so far? Or are aquatic
Speaker 1: humanoids as diverse as real humans or as diverse as
Speaker 1: other gods and monsters? Well, there's always the sense of
Speaker 1: the familiar yet alien. Yeah, and the sense that it's uh, well,
Speaker 1: lots of lots of monsters are familiar yet alien, but
Speaker 1: that they come from another world. The aquatic humanoids do. Yes,
Speaker 1: they are familiar yet yet foreign. They are something there.
Speaker 1: There are people from the other side of the mirror. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've got another one. Maybe. Let me know what you
Speaker 1: think about this. When I think of ocean dwelling humanoids
Speaker 1: in mythology in fiction, they don't usually seem to be
Speaker 1: like party hard kind of gods or party hard monsters
Speaker 1: or humanoids. They usually seem kind of sad. Ye, there's
Speaker 1: a kind of melancholy that we associate with the underwater
Speaker 1: life and the ocean that may them from the sad
Speaker 1: faces of fish is. I don't know if that's too
Speaker 1: crazy of a stretch. When I look at fish faces,
Speaker 1: I tend to project emotions on them, and those emotions
Speaker 1: are never like happiness. Fish faces always look a little
Speaker 1: bit sad, like they're disappointed in something, like they wish
Speaker 1: things were going better. Well, it comes back to the
Speaker 1: old saying a fish out of water as well, Right,
Speaker 1: there's nothing more awkward than a creature that has been
Speaker 1: taken from its natural habitat and thrown into another. The
Speaker 1: fish out of water is a thing that is vulnerable,
Speaker 1: perhaps doomed. Uh, it is in shock and uh. And
Speaker 1: therefore I think we we do see that a lot
Speaker 1: with our mur folk of various designs, in our our
Speaker 1: myths and our fictions. Yeah, sad fish faces and also
Speaker 1: also kind of a shadowy realm. Right. The the the
Speaker 1: underwater world for these underwater humanoids is another world. But
Speaker 1: it's the world that the sun is on the opposite
Speaker 1: side of the barrier from, Like the sun is all ours,
Speaker 1: and the sun they get is just what filters down
Speaker 1: through the through the membrane of the water surface. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then sometimes there are depictures again the golden cities
Speaker 1: of the Triton's. Yeah, I guess that's true. So there
Speaker 1: is a sense of of the glorious, but also this
Speaker 1: sense of just sort of alien hard work as well. Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe I'm projecting more about what what we
Speaker 1: know from covering aquatic biology and just the the aquatic habitat,
Speaker 1: knowing that it is such a place of of intense competition.
Speaker 1: You know, when I think of the the ultimate melancholy
Speaker 1: underwater humanoids, like I go to the Universal Monster movies,
Speaker 1: it's the gil Man. Yeah, the gil Man. I mean,
Speaker 1: I imagine most of the people listening to this podcast
Speaker 1: grew up with the gil Man, right, creature from the
Speaker 1: Black Lagoon nine fifty four, part of the classic Universal
Speaker 1: Monster movie canon. Except the gil Man was different from
Speaker 1: a lot of the others in that unlike Dracula or Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: which had been the subject of novels of horror and
Speaker 1: science fiction at the time, the gil Man was the
Speaker 1: synthesis of many of these human mr fult kind of traditions,
Speaker 1: was not from like a novel that existed. It's uh,
Speaker 1: there are other interesting talks about it too, like, for instance,
Speaker 1: unlike Frankenstein or Dracula or the Money, the gil Man
Speaker 1: was a was a product of the natural world. It's
Speaker 1: just a product of the natural world that no longer
Speaker 1: had a place in the modern world. And that's why
Speaker 1: it often gets classed as a science fiction movie instead
Speaker 1: of a horror movie. Yeah, that the science discusses is
Speaker 1: rather rather sketchy. Oh they this is even better in
Speaker 1: the sequel, Revenge of the Creature. We should get to
Speaker 1: that in a few minutes. Yeah. I grew up with
Speaker 1: it with this monster, like I'm sure you did. I
Speaker 1: remember having I had the little glow in the Dark
Speaker 1: figurine of it. As a kid, I had these Universal
Speaker 1: trading cards that had been my dad's that had all
Speaker 1: these universal monsters and some horrible jokes on them. You
Speaker 1: people at home, Robert has brought these cards in. I
Speaker 1: think we should read a couple of the jokes on
Speaker 1: the back of them. Okay, you go for it, Joe,
Speaker 1: I'll play along. Okay, joke on the first one. So
Speaker 1: the first one shows the gil Man. On the front
Speaker 1: it said, did you say fish for dinner? Anyone I know?
Speaker 1: And then on the back it's got this first ghost Colin,
Speaker 1: we just had a baby. Second ghost colon, congratulations, Was
Speaker 1: it a ghoul or a boy? See? That's that's some
Speaker 1: that's some straight up crypt keeper humor right there. That's
Speaker 1: that's pretty good. I got an even better one. So
Speaker 1: the front is the creature, but that's from the third movie.
Speaker 1: The creature walks among us when he sort of gets
Speaker 1: turned into a regular human, and the back has a
Speaker 1: joke that says, what's a cowardly skeleton? I don't know, Joe,
Speaker 1: what's the cowardly skeleton? A boned chicken? That's probably a
Speaker 1: joke that we would get if this were the early
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, but I do not get it. But chicken,
Speaker 1: oh man. That there's this whole world of butchery jokes
Speaker 1: that we just said don't have access to. But it's great,
Speaker 1: you know, because this is a joke that no longer
Speaker 1: fits into our time. And that's basically the idea of
Speaker 1: the creature, and I think one of the it's telling
Speaker 1: that the creature continues to be celebrated despite the fact
Speaker 1: that there has not really been a creature from the
Speaker 1: Black Liogoon movie since the original trilogy. But he's taken
Speaker 1: on this sort of outsider icon status. Yeah, I'm really
Speaker 1: mortified for the time when they come into remake Creature
Speaker 1: from the Black Lagoon. I don't want it. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't think we're ready. Yeah, that really. I mean
Speaker 1: Gamma del Toro's The Shape of Water, which just came
Speaker 1: out Christmas. That's really the best possible creature from the
Speaker 1: Black Lagoon remake, even though it's not officially Creature from
Speaker 1: the Black log Right. No, I'm talking about like the
Speaker 1: Tom Cruise Mummy Universe remakes where it would be like
Speaker 1: what Benedict's cumber Batch as the Gilman and then take
Speaker 1: a good go man who would play the lugs who
Speaker 1: show up in the Lagoon and start poking and with stuff. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Just you can just point a scatter
Speaker 1: gun at an IMDb page. I guess you get some candidates.
Speaker 1: So when did you first see the Gillman on screen? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, I think before I saw any of the movies.
Speaker 1: I was introduced to it in two. It came from Hollywood.
Speaker 1: That's a great one. Yeah. So basically just a bunch
Speaker 1: of old movie trailers, uh, stitched together with some at
Speaker 1: times delightful jokes at times cringeworthy jokes and very as
Speaker 1: a celebrity guest spots from like Cheech and Chong, Dan Ackroyd,
Speaker 1: John Candy, they were principles on this project. They highlight
Speaker 1: a great brain attack scenes. Yes, yeah, there's a whole
Speaker 1: section on guerilla movies. It's it's, it's, it's. It's a
Speaker 1: wonderful film. It's hard to find these days because I
Speaker 1: think that some of the rights issues prevented from being
Speaker 1: properly distributed. Yeah, but you don't see the gil Man
Speaker 1: showing up in repeated uses throughout other films the same
Speaker 1: way you do like Bell of the Ghostias version of
Speaker 1: Dracula or the Frankenstein Monster exactly. Now. One of the
Speaker 1: things though about the Gilman, to really to bring it
Speaker 1: back to some of these themes we're discussing here, though,
Speaker 1: is that that outsider aspect, you know, the the idea
Speaker 1: that there's something sympathetic and yet other, or depending on
Speaker 1: how you're looking at it, threatening and yet other. And
Speaker 1: when you start teasing the gil Man apart, there's some
Speaker 1: really unsettling dimensions to the creature. The same can certainly
Speaker 1: said of HP Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over in Smith
Speaker 1: which which is which of course was published before The
Speaker 1: Creature came to our cinemas. Uh. And it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a proto creature short story. It's got a quatic humanoids, right,
Speaker 1: it does. It has a whole race of aquatic humanoids
Speaker 1: that end up interbreeding with this rural uh fishing and
Speaker 1: trade community. Uh. And and that is like the horror
Speaker 1: of the piece. It's the idea that they're fish people
Speaker 1: and humans are breeding with them. And you know, I
Speaker 1: I first read this story, I read it in n
Speaker 1: for the first time, and uh and I remember being like, really, um,
Speaker 1: just blown over by it. I thought it was just
Speaker 1: such a creepy, um atmospheric tale. And uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: a little more disturbing the more one reads about it,
Speaker 1: and the one the more one knows about Lovecraft and
Speaker 1: his his uh sentiments towards other people's and other races. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Lovecraft was very imaginative, but he was not a nice person. No. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes excuses are made from this is a
Speaker 1: guy that lived nineteen thirty seven, and some people defended
Speaker 1: by saying, oh, you know, he was a product of
Speaker 1: his time, as as we all are. But he was
Speaker 1: definitely a man with some very problematic views on race,
Speaker 1: especially from modern modern readers. Absolutely, I mean, even if
Speaker 1: we're to leave out his personal letters and so forth,
Speaker 1: his fiction often falls back on the trend of championing
Speaker 1: a white English culture over everything else, and we see
Speaker 1: the other races sometimes depicted as is just outright monstrous.
Speaker 1: You often get the sense for him that any non
Speaker 1: Anglo ethnic groups are sort of allied with the monsters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's something like threatening and debilitative about them in his work. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot to unpack in in Smith
Speaker 1: and again, in many ways, it is a tremendous short story.
Speaker 1: It was highly influential. But as Evan Lampi discusses in
Speaker 1: his paper in praise of the In Smith, look Nautical
Speaker 1: Terror and the Specter of Atlantic History and HP Lovecrafts fiction,
Speaker 1: you can compare it to Lovecraft's earlier story The Dunwich Horror,
Speaker 1: which presents a town with a quote degraded population of ignorant, backward,
Speaker 1: physically stunted villagers. This again en capsuling his Lovecrafts uh
Speaker 1: anxieties concerning not only other races, but even just like
Speaker 1: other like classes of people within the United states. But
Speaker 1: Lampy points out the quote the fall of Dunwich is
Speaker 1: a result of racial decline brought on by isolation, which
Speaker 1: is a source of terror in the narrative, but in
Speaker 1: in Smith, it's not isolation, but contact with distant lands
Speaker 1: via Atlantic commerce that serves as their undoing. So Lampey says,
Speaker 1: quote in Smith's degradation is a result of its worldliness,
Speaker 1: not its isolation. Even if the city became a backwater,
Speaker 1: it looked out to the Atlantic for much of its history,
Speaker 1: open to the world, it's ideas and its people. So
Speaker 1: in some ways the creatures from the sea here are
Speaker 1: standing in for contact and intercourse with other cultures, right yeah.
Speaker 1: And and that sort of works for the sea because
Speaker 1: the sea is traditionally like a way for cultures to
Speaker 1: come together. It's the you know, the trade routes through
Speaker 1: the sea. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then that's what what
Speaker 1: makes the story so so ikey, if you read it
Speaker 1: with all of this in mind, is that it's a
Speaker 1: tale that's describing the adoption of of of other cultures,
Speaker 1: and certainly with the the the interbreeding with other cultures
Speaker 1: as being something that is inherently monstrous, that the white
Speaker 1: Anglo Saxon people should not venture out, either you know,
Speaker 1: mentally or certainly physically or sexually. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: really troubling strain and Lovecraft's work, especially since Lovecraft is
Speaker 1: so pop peeler with so many people today like for
Speaker 1: his monsters and his settings and stuff, that I feel
Speaker 1: like this is sort of like the part of him
Speaker 1: that nobody really wants to think about. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it can be difficult because, like I said, I grew
Speaker 1: up loving Lovecraft's work and I still have have a
Speaker 1: strong affinity for for for the love crafting and vibe,
Speaker 1: but you know, for the weird fiction world and many
Speaker 1: of the older writers from the day. But I mean,
Speaker 1: you can't stick your hand in the sand regarding the
Speaker 1: sensibilities that are they're not only president in the individual
Speaker 1: behind the stories, but in the works themselves. And so
Speaker 1: we got here from Creature from the Black Lagoon. I'm
Speaker 1: wondering if this is leading to to you thinking that
Speaker 1: some of the same themes can be poured it over
Speaker 1: to Creature from the Black Lagoon. Well, you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't used to think so. I used to think that
Speaker 1: the Creature from the Black Lagoon was was somehow separate
Speaker 1: from from any real world concerns. You know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of this, I mean, he's ready to g for for goodness,
Speaker 1: say the first one anyway, maybe the other two as well,
Speaker 1: but I distinctly remember seeing the g rating on the
Speaker 1: first film. It's essentially a Disney movie, just with a
Speaker 1: murderous monster in it. Well, but before we get into
Speaker 1: any racial aspects of the Creature from the Black Wood,
Speaker 1: and we should probably just take a moment to enjoy
Speaker 1: the existence of the film on its own. Narrits quote
Speaker 1: from Q magazine about Creature from the Black Lagoon. This
Speaker 1: horrendous pseudoscience fiction melodrama revolves wildly in three dimensions and
Speaker 1: with considerable excitement around a poor ancestral fish that never
Speaker 1: quite made the grade to man. All right, Well, that's
Speaker 1: that's pretty accurate, I guess. I mean it's it's generally
Speaker 1: it's often looked, it looked at is one of the
Speaker 1: lesser of the universal movies, though, even though the monster
Speaker 1: itself is pretty great. Yeah, it might be the best
Speaker 1: universal monster in terms of makeup and stuff. Uh, well,
Speaker 1: I don't. I mean, it's that's debatable. I guess it's
Speaker 1: certainly is more ambitious makeup wise than I mean, Harlow's
Speaker 1: Frankenstein is a pretty amazing makeup creation, it's true. But
Speaker 1: does Frankenstein begin with the Big Bang? No, it doesn't,
Speaker 1: and Creature from the Black Lagoon sure does. It starts
Speaker 1: with a big explosion. It's sort of the inverse of
Speaker 1: Bride of the Monster. Uh, starts with the big explosion.
Speaker 1: And their idea of what the big Bang is is
Speaker 1: that it involved literally exploding chunks of rock. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like a like a like a mining detonation.
Speaker 1: And they get into this whole narrative about how the
Speaker 1: creature is a product of the Devonian period from sixty
Speaker 1: million years ago. Okay, that's pretty old, the age of
Speaker 1: the trilobytes. Yeah, that's when they went extinct, I think, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and of course you get the dunk least
Speaker 1: as back then, that's right. And then they spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time talking about the long fish. Uh. They
Speaker 1: sort of throw a lot of science at the screen
Speaker 1: early on to try and trick you into thinking that
Speaker 1: this is a like a scientifically accurate picture. Now, it
Speaker 1: was really released in three D? Did you ever see
Speaker 1: it in three D? Robert I never did, but the fight.
Speaker 1: They filmed the first two of these films in three days.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people, even when it very first
Speaker 1: came out, saw it flat because it was at the
Speaker 1: very end of the early fifties three D craze that
Speaker 1: it was released, so it was already becoming pass a
Speaker 1: I actually rewatched this movie last night, and if you
Speaker 1: ever get a chance to check out the Universal Monster
Speaker 1: Movies set the remaster of Creature, it's got a great
Speaker 1: commentary track by horror scholar Tom Weaver, and I just
Speaker 1: wanted to mention a few things I learned from it,
Speaker 1: some really interesting highlights. Um one of them was where
Speaker 1: did this story come from? Like? What what is the
Speaker 1: origin of the creature? So the producer of Creature from
Speaker 1: the Black Lagoon was this guy named William Aland who
Speaker 1: was the He was the producer of the film. He
Speaker 1: was a Universal producer at the time, and he made
Speaker 1: his start as an actor working with Orson Wells in
Speaker 1: the Orson Wells Theater Group, and he was part of
Speaker 1: the infamous War the World's radio broadcast. But he was
Speaker 1: also friends with Wells and so sometimes sometime in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forty during the filming of Citizen Kane. Aland was
Speaker 1: an actor in Citizen Kane as well. He was he
Speaker 1: was the reporter who was hunting down the meaning of
Speaker 1: the word rosebud and so Aland was over at Wells
Speaker 1: House for a dinner party. Also in attendance was Dolores
Speaker 1: del Rio, who was a Mexican actress who was Orson
Speaker 1: Welles partner at the time, and a Mexican cinematographer named
Speaker 1: Gabrielle figaroa who would go on to a really stellar career.
Speaker 1: He was the cinematographer of things like The Pearl and
Speaker 1: John Houston's Night of the Iguana. And during this dinner
Speaker 1: party the story goes. Figaro starts in on this bizarre
Speaker 1: story about a half man, half fish creature that lived
Speaker 1: in the Amazon River near a certain village, and, according
Speaker 1: to Figaro is telling, once a year the fishman would
Speaker 1: come up out of the river and claim one maiden
Speaker 1: from the village as its victim, and then it would
Speaker 1: retreat into the water and the village would be safe
Speaker 1: again until it emerged the next year. Apparently, at first
Speaker 1: the other guests thought Figaro was kidding, but he insisted
Speaker 1: and he started getting worked up because he wasn't being
Speaker 1: taken seriously, and he claimed the story was absolutely true
Speaker 1: and that he'd seen a photo of the Amazon fishman.
Speaker 1: So this was early forties, and despite how awkward of
Speaker 1: a dinner it must have been, apparently the story must
Speaker 1: have stuck in the deep inside the mind of William Alland.
Speaker 1: And about ten years later, when he was a producer
Speaker 1: at Universal, he decided to make a version of the
Speaker 1: Amazon Fishman story into a new entry in the Universal
Speaker 1: Monster movie canon. So he wrote up this three page
Speaker 1: treatment of the film, which was supposed to start not
Speaker 1: with the big bang, but with a reenactment of his
Speaker 1: dinner conversation with Figaroa, followed by an expedition to the
Speaker 1: Amazon with a fishman creature, and of course he wanted
Speaker 1: to have a gorgeous blonde that would get kidnapped by
Speaker 1: the fishman. Uh. And then the rest of the story
Speaker 1: was basically just a rip off of the plot of
Speaker 1: King Kong, but with a fishman instead of a giant ape.
Speaker 1: So they'd capture him, bring him back to civilization, he'd
Speaker 1: escape and you know, run him up in the at
Speaker 1: ease and it's this basically the territory they explore in
Speaker 1: the three Creature of movies. Yeah, if you put together
Speaker 1: the first Creature from the Black Lagoon and the second movie,
Speaker 1: Revenge of the Creature that came out in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: five the following year, together, they are the plot of
Speaker 1: King Kong. Now. One of the other things I love
Speaker 1: about the Creature from the Black Lagoon is that you
Speaker 1: had this is a product of Florida. Yeah, and I've
Speaker 1: I've now been to some of these locations in Florida
Speaker 1: that they are tied to it, such as Wakoula Springs,
Speaker 1: which I mentioned on the show before of a fabulous destination.
Speaker 1: That's where they shot a lot of the underwater stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think maybe all of the underwater stuff. Well, if
Speaker 1: I'm if memory serves, they certainly did all of the
Speaker 1: underwater stuff in the third movie there. I'm not as
Speaker 1: sure about the first one because there are a number
Speaker 1: of different spring locations that are used in some of
Speaker 1: these these films. Uh. And then they're tied into other
Speaker 1: like weird Florida places like the wiki Watchie uh Mermaid Show. Uh.
Speaker 1: Julie Adams stunt double from the first film was a
Speaker 1: mermaid swimmer at the wiki watchy Mermaid Show. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great fact about the movie is that anytime
Speaker 1: you see the characters above water, they're played by different
Speaker 1: actors than the people who played them below water. So
Speaker 1: like the Gilman above water was one actor they had
Speaker 1: in in I guess in Hollywood, and then below the water,
Speaker 1: the Gilman was always this other guy, Rico Browning. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: a fascinating figure who's also come up on the on
Speaker 1: the podcast before because he worked briefly with John C. Lily.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was a crazy story there. I go
Speaker 1: back and listen to that episode if you want the
Speaker 1: details on that. But he was also tied to Wiki
Speaker 1: Watchee and I really had quite a career outside of
Speaker 1: of the Creature from the Black Cagoon. Yeah. Did you
Speaker 1: know that Rico Browning directed the underwater scenes that go
Speaker 1: on for thirty seven hours in Thunderball? I I read
Speaker 1: that the other day, but I wasn't aware of it previously. No,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, when was the last time you saw Thunderball?
Speaker 1: I was a child watching on TVs. Okay, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: one of those Sean Connery on so it has parts
Speaker 1: that are kind of fun, but the underwater fight scenes
Speaker 1: are just in termn uh bull go on forever. But there.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they're very well choreographed, especially for the time.
Speaker 1: I mean, shooting underwater back in the fifties and sixties
Speaker 1: was not easy. Yeah, I mean, if you accept them
Speaker 1: on their own terms, they're they're kind of marvelous. It's
Speaker 1: just they don't necessarily match up to to modern cinematic
Speaker 1: pacing standards. I guess another thing that's kind of interesting
Speaker 1: to me about the Creature from the Black Calagoon that
Speaker 1: Weaver mentioned in his commentary is that creature has a
Speaker 1: lot of monsters I view shots, and this is contrasted
Speaker 1: to some of the earlier Universal Monster movies and some
Speaker 1: of the other movies that Alan and Jack Arnold had done.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if that says anything interesting about how
Speaker 1: they thought of the creature, but there is a lot
Speaker 1: in how the story was created and in how it's
Speaker 1: filmed that does to me make the creature kind of
Speaker 1: a sad, melancholy, sympathetic sort of character, unlike say Dracula,
Speaker 1: who is a predatory demon who arrives to you know,
Speaker 1: to to consume people's souls and kill them and turn
Speaker 1: them into his servants. The Creature from the Black Lagoon
Speaker 1: is a is a sad creature who who never really
Speaker 1: I mean, like he lives in the Black Lagoon. People
Speaker 1: come and invade his territory and then they start messing
Speaker 1: with him and attacking him, and and he fights back. Now,
Speaker 1: of course he does try to kidnap Julie Adams, the
Speaker 1: leading lady in the movie, presumably because he's wowed by
Speaker 1: her beauty. Um, and so it's a King Kong kind
Speaker 1: of thing. You know, he falls in love and wants
Speaker 1: to carry her off to his cave. But you often
Speaker 1: get the sense in the Creature from the Black Lagoon
Speaker 1: movies that the real villains are like the human heroes.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think this is something
Speaker 1: I picked up on as a kid, especially the more
Speaker 1: I learned about and unultimately when I saw the third film, Uh,
Speaker 1: the creature walks among us because in this one they've
Speaker 1: captured the creature horror really burned it in the process,
Speaker 1: and then they treat the creature and there's this there's
Speaker 1: this hokey scientific explanation basically Lamarckian evolution where the creatures
Speaker 1: scales fall away and it has human flesh underneath, and
Speaker 1: it's becoming more man like. And they're all these just
Speaker 1: sad scenes of the this now land creature standing in
Speaker 1: this little enclosed area surrounded by barbed wire, longing for
Speaker 1: the sea, but it can't even go back to the
Speaker 1: sea because it will drown, and it does. And uh.
Speaker 1: In all these films, it's like the especially the white
Speaker 1: leads in the film, like they're never really in peril,
Speaker 1: like they're always in control. The creature just lumbers about
Speaker 1: and uh. And the only reason it's able to grab
Speaker 1: the lady is because she just stands there and screams
Speaker 1: instead of like walking away from it. Yeah, generally the
Speaker 1: human lead characters in these films are just not very
Speaker 1: sympathetic that they're usually just coming into this monster's domain
Speaker 1: or not. I mean, it's a creature. They're coming into
Speaker 1: the creature's domain. And they're in the second movie, they
Speaker 1: even they fish for the creature with dynamite. They throw
Speaker 1: dynamite into the black lagoon. It blows him up and
Speaker 1: he floats to the surface, stunned, and then they take
Speaker 1: him and they put him in a tank at Sea
Speaker 1: World and chain him to the bottom. And there's a
Speaker 1: great scene where somebody goes, I hope that chain holds,
Speaker 1: and the other guy goes, I wouldn't worry about that chain.
Speaker 1: So you see him like suffering and struggling and pulling
Speaker 1: at his chain, and eventually he gets free and this
Speaker 1: is and then runs around and yet again it's like
Speaker 1: the heroes of the movie or the real villains. It
Speaker 1: reminds me a lot of the late great Gil Scott
Speaker 1: Heron had a bit kind of a stand up bit,
Speaker 1: like a spoken word bit that he did talking about Jaws,
Speaker 1: and he was saying, like, why why are you upset
Speaker 1: about Jaws attacking people? You're going where Jaws is, like
Speaker 1: you should you should only be upset if Jaws is
Speaker 1: attacking people in the city where where you are, Like
Speaker 1: you've gone where you're not supposed to be. So of
Speaker 1: course there's Jaws. All right. I think we need to
Speaker 1: take a quick break and then when we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll discuss more about aquatic humanoid legends and the creature
Speaker 1: from the Black Lagoon. Thank alright, we're back, al right.
Speaker 1: So I mentioned earlier that I used to to think
Speaker 1: of the creature as being this mostly pure thing that
Speaker 1: was untouched by the concerns of the real world. But
Speaker 1: then I was turned onto the commentary of Robin R.
Speaker 1: Means Coleman, particularly in particular, there was an episode of
Speaker 1: the NPR podcast Code Switch about the movie get Out,
Speaker 1: and they talked about some of the history of of
Speaker 1: African Americans and horror movies. So I ended up looking
Speaker 1: up Coleman's book. It's titled a Horror Noir Blacks in
Speaker 1: American Horror Film from an eighteen nineties to the present
Speaker 1: and uh and she she shares the following read on
Speaker 1: the creature quote. The gil Man is cal long and
Speaker 1: Gus from the Birth of the Nation rolled into one
Speaker 1: impossible body. Bodily, the monster resembled a racist caricature. Its
Speaker 1: lips are large and exaggerated, Its skin is dark. It
Speaker 1: is seemingly feeble minded. Its movements are shambling, except for
Speaker 1: a swift, adept move it displays when stealing away with
Speaker 1: a white woman in side note, if anyone's not familiar Gus,
Speaker 1: who she mentions here, is the antagonist from the nineteen
Speaker 1: fift movie The Birth of the Nation. Uh. The film
Speaker 1: attributed to the revival of the klu Klux Klan terrorist
Speaker 1: organization in the United states. In it, the clan served
Speaker 1: as heroes as they lynch an African American named Gus
Speaker 1: portrayed by a white actor in black face, who chases
Speaker 1: a white woman off of a bridge. Coleman refers to
Speaker 1: this as the first real racial horror movie, and, as
Speaker 1: Coleman points out, the Creature from the Black Cogoon, the
Speaker 1: film features a white female researcher who is only there
Speaker 1: to scream and serve as the object of desire, a
Speaker 1: team of local Brazilians who only serve to p irish,
Speaker 1: and the first portion of the film, yeah, uh, only
Speaker 1: and then only the white scientific elite are able to
Speaker 1: best the creature. And uh, and certainly best that they
Speaker 1: do that. These guys are supposed to be scientists, but
Speaker 1: instead of studying it, they just destroy it. Uh, for
Speaker 1: the crime of making eyes at this white woman. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: that's what we've been saying. I mean that they just
Speaker 1: show up in its lagoon and then they start attacking
Speaker 1: it essentially, and we're it's like we're supposed to feel
Speaker 1: bad for them. I don't know, I mean, there's always
Speaker 1: this ambiguity in the monster movies of old, like King Kong,
Speaker 1: creature from the Black Calagoon, where you get the sense
Speaker 1: that maybe you're supposed to feel some sympathy for the creature,
Speaker 1: it's not quite clear how much. Yeah, and then I
Speaker 1: mean this additional um like racial read on everything just
Speaker 1: makes everything all the more problematic. She argues that the
Speaker 1: film presents the world in which the white race alone
Speaker 1: has evolved and the rest are static. She points to
Speaker 1: the work of Patrick Gonder, who argues that the film
Speaker 1: isn't just about reinforcing white superiority and non white inferiority.
Speaker 1: It's a film that taps into racist fears of desegregation.
Speaker 1: Quote as the Black Monster, in leaving its proper place
Speaker 1: in the water and attempting to integrate among those on land,
Speaker 1: is a Darwinian reminder of why segregation is necessary. So
Speaker 1: and I would argue that this is all the more
Speaker 1: unsettling if you go into the third Creature movie and
Speaker 1: watch it with these scenes of this, this even more
Speaker 1: human looking creature, like just behind barbed wire, just trapped,
Speaker 1: treated treated like an animal, even as you have these
Speaker 1: two characters that are engaging in these monologues about the
Speaker 1: it's the jungle versus the Stars, about how how we
Speaker 1: need to be kinder to the creature instead of violent
Speaker 1: towards it. It's it's it's a very flawed and mishandled
Speaker 1: film in my opinion. But it's interesting how that this
Speaker 1: this read of this racial read of the creature um
Speaker 1: which some of you might not care for, but I
Speaker 1: think on one hand, it meshes with with with what
Speaker 1: was going on in the Shadow of Rin Smith. I
Speaker 1: think it also echoes a lot of these ideas that
Speaker 1: we've already discussed of the the aquatic humanoid as being
Speaker 1: this this other, this uh, this uh, this creature that
Speaker 1: I mean, think to the Triton and the siren, Like
Speaker 1: the siren is beautiful and desirable. The triton, though the
Speaker 1: masculine version is to be feared, is more more brutal.
Speaker 1: And that that lines up with with various racist depictions
Speaker 1: in which the female of another race is is an
Speaker 1: exotic object of desire and then the male counterpart part
Speaker 1: is depicted as something brutish. I'm not trying to ruin
Speaker 1: a classic film for anybody, but I do think this,
Speaker 1: this read is really worth considering. We need to start
Speaker 1: thinking about about the era that the film came from,
Speaker 1: and uh, the attitudes of the of the time. Uh,
Speaker 1: and and and what that the film is supposed to
Speaker 1: say to a modern viewer. Yeah, I think that is
Speaker 1: a totally valid interpretive lens. I. I don't know of
Speaker 1: any of ths that this is what the filmmakers consciously
Speaker 1: had in mind. I think it's probably not, but that
Speaker 1: you can certainly see how these sorts of themes come
Speaker 1: out from, you know, the unconscious forces that guide our creativity, right,
Speaker 1: very much so, So as we begin to close out
Speaker 1: this episode, let's let's return to just some of the
Speaker 1: trends that we've identified and skirted around. Uh, were concerning
Speaker 1: the various myths and fictions of aquatic humanoidse like what
Speaker 1: do they what do they represent? What do they convey?
Speaker 1: Obviously the mirror world, that's right, Yeah, Uh, the unknown
Speaker 1: depths as well as the dangers of the sea, the
Speaker 1: feature we so often see in Legends of Monsters, which
Speaker 1: is hybridity, you can bringing together different features of different
Speaker 1: animals and humans. Yeah, and just mysterious biology as well,
Speaker 1: animals again washing up on the beach, and also humans
Speaker 1: with birth defects such as uh siren o'melia, which is
Speaker 1: a birth effect that involves the fusing of the legs together.
Speaker 1: It's a really depressing topic. But I have I was,
Speaker 1: I have read a couple of papers making the argument
Speaker 1: that some mermaid legends might be based on these defects. Also,
Speaker 1: we've mentioned mermaids as harbingers of doom as well as
Speaker 1: sources of divine aid. There's the the idea that it's
Speaker 1: the erotic other, it's the monstrous other, that the evil
Speaker 1: or monstrous feminine. And uh, and just the idea too
Speaker 1: that it can be depicted as a racial other to
Speaker 1: that does not belong in our world. It's amazing that
Speaker 1: water has so much power, to carry so much symbolic
Speaker 1: weight and and to project so many different symbolic meanings.
Speaker 1: Like I'm thinking about the way it's this mirror world
Speaker 1: in the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but then also
Speaker 1: the way in shadow over in Smith that can represent
Speaker 1: the idea of commerce with the rest of the planet. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you see again, you can think of the Golden
Speaker 1: Cities and which Merrorpy Bowler said to live, or you
Speaker 1: can just think of dark, depressing depths. Um, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a it's it's it's just put a proof positive again
Speaker 1: that there there are no simple monsters, no matter how
Speaker 1: shallow you think a particular fictional or even mythological creature,
Speaker 1: maybe when you start teasing it apart, there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot going on there. There's a whole legacy that it's
Speaker 1: built upon. What's the name of the Cathulu city, the
Speaker 1: city under the under the ocean where he's where he
Speaker 1: hangs out. I believe it's really a or something to
Speaker 1: that effect. I wonder how that compares to the to
Speaker 1: the Golden Palace of Triton. I'm thinking it's might be
Speaker 1: a little darker, a little less less well lit, a
Speaker 1: little less golden. Totally random thought. Have you ever seen
Speaker 1: the coins that are the currency of Iceland? No? Do
Speaker 1: they have mermaids on them? Yeah? I haven't made it
Speaker 1: to the mermaid coins. Maybe it really high value they do.
Speaker 1: But the coins, I remember, they are great compared to
Speaker 1: our coins because our coins have like politicians on them,
Speaker 1: and their coins have all the children of Dagon, so
Speaker 1: they've got crab coins, they've got trout coins, like all
Speaker 1: of the sea creatures make it onto the currency, and
Speaker 1: that has to be better for teaching kids about money.
Speaker 1: Like my my son would would would be far more
Speaker 1: into coins if they each had a cool animal on them.
Speaker 1: So take note, uh, Nations of the World. Alright, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to close out this episode,
Speaker 1: but there is going to be a follow up episode
Speaker 1: in which we will discuss some of the science of
Speaker 1: aquatic humanoids. Uh. And if you don't think there's any
Speaker 1: science there, well, just tune in and you'll be surprised.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, check out all the previous episodes of
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