Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Artifact,
Speaker 2: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 2: focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. The
Speaker 2: a Nightmare on Elm Street film franchise gave us an
Speaker 2: iconic but at times perplexing horror icon in the form
Speaker 2: of Freddy Krueger. He's a disfigured phantom of the opera
Speaker 2: esque character with a taste for fedoras and red and
Speaker 2: green striped sweaters. He does not wear a mask, and
Speaker 2: he attacks his victims in their dreams, making frequent use
Speaker 2: of his signature weapon, a clod leather right hand glove.
Speaker 2: Freddy's glove. While iconic, has only a few real world analogs.
Speaker 2: Throughout in history, weapons like the sword have proven to
Speaker 2: be more than effective as a means of slashing adversaries
Speaker 2: with a forged blade. When we do find weapons more
Speaker 2: in line with Freddy's claw, they tend to either still
Speaker 2: require the use of a handle or hilt, such as
Speaker 2: with various punch daggers, or they function in a way
Speaker 2: comparable to, say, brass knuckles in Japanese martial arts. The
Speaker 2: Tikokagi claw weapon perhaps serves as one of the best
Speaker 2: parallels to Freddy's claw. I was reading about this weapon
Speaker 2: in Classical Weaponry of Japan, Special Weapons and Tactics of
Speaker 2: the Martial Arts from two thousand and three by Sergei mo.
Speaker 2: Mull draws special attention to the shuko and ashiko weapons
Speaker 2: hand and foot hooks, respectively, which are thought to have
Speaker 2: been used as quote unquote ninja weapons for scaling walls, trees,
Speaker 2: or other obstacles. Their main function was climbing, not combat,
Speaker 2: but Mole points out that they could still have proven
Speaker 2: fierce in close corners combat, and it certainly would have
Speaker 2: given the user a certain psychological advantage. The ticocaggi, however,
Speaker 2: which means iron backhand claw, was unlikely to have been
Speaker 2: used for climbing, he writes, and its elongated blades were
Speaker 2: seemingly designed to slash and rip up skin. Still, it
Speaker 2: should be noted that the tickocaggi was not a glove.
Speaker 2: The human hand, after all, has evolved for fine manipulation,
Speaker 2: it can also be used for bare handed violence, and
Speaker 2: it has even been hypothesized that the hand evolved to
Speaker 2: form an effective fist for punching, but it certainly didn't
Speaker 2: evolve to slash. Oh. Certainly, human fingernails can dig and tear,
Speaker 2: but your fingers simply are not suited for the broad
Speaker 2: slashes and of course occasional torpedo style stabbing through the
Speaker 2: torso that a Krueger glove seems designed to administer. Freddy's
Speaker 2: creator Wes Craven cited the housecat as if inspiration for
Speaker 2: Freddy's claw, and certainly cats are pretty skilled slashers, but
Speaker 2: even their amazing retractable claws are multipurpose, and as Douglas
Speaker 2: j Emlin points out in the excellent book Animal Weapons,
Speaker 2: the primary purpose of the claus during a kill are
Speaker 2: to catch and hold the prey in place in order
Speaker 2: for the cat to deliver a powerful killing bite. Not
Speaker 2: only does this latching on with the claws enable the
Speaker 2: teeth to sink home in the prey animal, they also
Speaker 2: hold the prey animal in place through the death throws,
Speaker 2: and this prevents these movements from snapping the cat's long
Speaker 2: canines off in the body. Freddy Krueger, of course, is
Speaker 2: a fictional monster. He can do whatever he pleases, while
Speaker 2: an actual human might well break their own fingers, using
Speaker 2: such a glove as a weapon. All Freddy has to
Speaker 2: do his dream. Tune in for additional editions of the
Speaker 2: Artifact or the Monster Fact each week. As always, you
Speaker 2: can email us at contact at stuffdblow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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