Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamman. This is the Monster Fact,
Speaker 2: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 2: focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. Every
Speaker 2: Halloween season, my family and I invariably pull up some
Speaker 2: old favorite animated shorts. Some of these are clips like
Speaker 2: the This is Halloween number from nineteen ninety three's The
Speaker 2: Nightmare Before Christmas or the excellent Wizard Battle from Disney's
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine film The Sword in the Stone. But
Speaker 2: we also carefully dig a little deeper in the animation
Speaker 2: graveyard to unearth, say the classic nineteen twenty nine Silly
Speaker 2: Symphony Skeleton Dance, or the nineteen thirty two Fleisher Studios
Speaker 2: Betty Boop short mini The Moocher. If you haven't seen
Speaker 2: this string Jim, look it up. I'm gonna summarize the
Speaker 2: plot briefly here, but it's gonna sound really weird, okay,
Speaker 2: jazz Age Flappergal Betty Boop has an argument with her parents,
Speaker 2: with whom she lives, and runs away with her boyfriend,
Speaker 2: a dog human hybrid named Bimbo. After a brief encounter
Speaker 2: with Coco of the Clown from an earlier short. They
Speaker 2: encounter a number of strange and terrifying creatures in a cavern,
Speaker 2: dancing skeletons, ghosts, devils, a witch, and what we might
Speaker 2: loosely describe as a dancing, singing octopus armed ghost Walrus,
Speaker 2: voiced by American jazz great Cab Calloway. Note I realized
Speaker 2: those might be front flippers, but they sure do look
Speaker 2: like octopus arms to me. Walrus front flippers have digits.
Speaker 2: The ghost Walrus's front limbs in this cartoon do not.
Speaker 2: Cab Calloway also provided the ghost Walrus' sweet dance moves
Speaker 2: via rodoscoping. Boop and Bimbo eventually flee home in terror
Speaker 2: from all of these sights and sounds in the cavern,
Speaker 2: and true to the shorts title, the ghost Walrus performs
Speaker 2: Callaway's big hit mini, The Moucher, a song that he
Speaker 2: would go on to perform in the nineteen eighty film
Speaker 2: The Blues Brothers. The nineteen thirty two short is low
Speaker 2: on plot and message, high on spooky, animated weirdness, and,
Speaker 2: of course, the stylings of Cab Callaway and his orchestra.
Speaker 2: But why a ghost walrus. Why does it seem to
Speaker 2: have octopus arms? I'm to understand it all comes down
Speaker 2: to animator whimsy, but it got me thinking, is there
Speaker 2: anything remotely similar to this creature in global myth and
Speaker 2: folk traditions? Well as far as supernatural walruses go, there
Speaker 2: are certainly examples to draw on from the various traditions
Speaker 2: of different Arctic peoples who knew the creature and invoked
Speaker 2: it in their belief systems. Likewise, medieval European folklore exaggerated
Speaker 2: the walrus as a sea monster, but the only thing
Speaker 2: even close to a walrus octopus hybrid I've come across
Speaker 2: is the ursus or maritursus or eco turso of Finnish
Speaker 2: folklore and literature. Creature is predominantly associated with the walrus
Speaker 2: and often described as a kind of walrus human hybrid,
Speaker 2: or even a walrus centaur of sorts, and it's thought
Speaker 2: to have inspired the sea giant Rosemarine in Edmund Spencer's
Speaker 2: fifteen ninety work The Fairy Queen. The Terusus also factors
Speaker 2: into the Finnish national epic The Kalevala, which concerns the
Speaker 2: mythical Sampo, but then the tersus also takes on many
Speaker 2: octopus and even Cuthulhu sque qualities in modern visual interpretations,
Speaker 2: in part due to the word meritsus referring to the
Speaker 2: common octopus in contemporary finish. I realize it's a stretch
Speaker 2: to connect the Finnish Sea Monster to a nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: two Cabcalloway Betty Boot cartoon, but many the moucher certainly
Speaker 2: invites speculation. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Factor,
Speaker 2: The Artifact or Animalius Dupendium each week. As always, you
Speaker 2: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 2: Mind dot com.
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