Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and it's just us. No Dave, no Jerry,
Speaker 1: no nothing. But we are here and being tourists walking
Speaker 1: through the Australian bush right now. We need to be
Speaker 1: careful of drop bears.
Speaker 2: That's right, because you know, if you're especially a tourist
Speaker 2: or maybe a foreign soldier you're walking around the outback,
Speaker 2: look up, because if you walk under a tree, a
Speaker 2: drop bear might drop down, knock you on the head
Speaker 2: and each each.
Speaker 1: Your head, yeah, might bite your skull open with its molars,
Speaker 1: might use its bangs to bite your neck, and you're dead.
Speaker 1: You're dead when a drop bear drops on you, because
Speaker 1: they can get fairly big. I saw about the size
Speaker 1: of leopards. Leopards average something like six feet long, seven
Speaker 1: feet long, laying between one hundred and two hundred pounds.
Speaker 1: This is a big animal. The thing that makes it
Speaker 1: so crazy is that it looks a lot like a koala,
Speaker 1: except with orange, wy, wiry hair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and luckily, you know, we toured Australia and did
Speaker 2: some great shows all over that wonderful country and we
Speaker 2: both checked in as safe at the end of it.
Speaker 3: From drop bears. Thank god it didn't happen.
Speaker 1: No, we made it out alive, basically, because if you
Speaker 1: get dropped on by a drop bear, who are They're
Speaker 1: very patient, they're very quiet. They'll wait for hours up
Speaker 1: in the treetop for someone to pass by, and then
Speaker 1: they drop out right on top of you. Like you said,
Speaker 1: you're dead, You're you're toast. So had we met a
Speaker 1: drop bear, one or both of us would not be
Speaker 1: sitting here today.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: I'm genuinely wondering how many Australians think that we're being
Speaker 2: serious right now.
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're like, don't these guys now.
Speaker 1: Man that you do the best New Zealand accent?
Speaker 3: That was it? Okay?
Speaker 1: Sure it all sounds like Murray Mary. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we should probably tell everybody who isn't from Australia that
Speaker 1: drop bears are made up. They're a myth. They're a joke, really,
Speaker 1: a long standing pranky joke that Australians play on newcomers
Speaker 1: and tourists and travelers and visiting military that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of people think it started in either
Speaker 2: Sydney or South Wales the early early settlers there, you know,
Speaker 2: playing pranks on people who came, probably because they didn't
Speaker 2: want them there, it would be my guess.
Speaker 1: Sure, or just to humiliate them out of boredom.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Apparently the Australian Museum over the years has kind of
Speaker 2: kept this joke going by fabricating sightings.
Speaker 3: It's sort of like a like here in America, like
Speaker 3: a jackalope.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you know, like creating these creatures, not like
Speaker 2: a bigfoot. It's not a cryptid, but I guess a
Speaker 2: jacolobe probably technically is. But you know, just sort of
Speaker 2: a humorous thing to keep going, and the official government
Speaker 2: even gets involved and kind of plays along.
Speaker 1: Well. I saw one of the things that as part
Speaker 1: of this legend is that the Australian government does recognize
Speaker 1: the existence of drop bears in reality because they don't exist,
Speaker 1: but as part of the legend, it's because the Australian
Speaker 1: government is covering up their existence because they don't want
Speaker 1: to harm the tourist industry in Australia because again they
Speaker 1: jump on tourists basically people who don't have Australian accents.
Speaker 2: Well, and I'm sure they're also like there's all manner
Speaker 2: of things that'll kill you, like the last thing we
Speaker 2: need is a made.
Speaker 1: Up thing exactly, So we said. The Australian government is
Speaker 1: part of it. So a lot of other institutions have
Speaker 1: contributed to kind of keeping this idea alive. I saw
Speaker 1: an article in The Conversation about drop bears and surviving
Speaker 1: drop bear attacks and it was totally straight from starting
Speaker 1: to finish. There wasn't even a little disclaimer in italics
Speaker 1: at the end. And they've even been given a scientific
Speaker 1: name thy larctos plumatists. That's pretty funny, it is. It's great.
Speaker 2: There actually is like evidence that there could have been
Speaker 2: some sort of ancient animal in Australia during the last
Speaker 2: Ice Age that is similar to a drop bear that
Speaker 2: does have a real scientific name, Thyloclio carnifex, or a
Speaker 2: marsupial lion. Apparently the skull does resemble a koala or
Speaker 2: maybe a wombat, but instead of grinder teeth, they have.
Speaker 3: Shearing teeth and apparently at once belonged to a group of.
Speaker 2: Marsupials called the dipper toodonts, and with today's koalas, they're
Speaker 2: in that same group of marsupials. So possums, wombats, kangaroos
Speaker 2: and koalas. They were all part of this group back
Speaker 2: in ancient times. But whatever this more fearsome one was
Speaker 2: a It wasn't a drop bear, but it was similar
Speaker 2: enough for people to reference it at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and people were living at this time. This is
Speaker 1: during the last ice Age, so there were people in
Speaker 1: Australia at the time. Aborigines were there and they would
Speaker 1: have seen and possibly interacted with this marsupial lion. So
Speaker 1: it raises the question like, is this actually like an
Speaker 1: echo from the past, Like this is this drop bear
Speaker 1: prank is actually based on like a human knowledge of
Speaker 1: the fact that there was something similar years back into
Speaker 1: this got passed down all this time and then morphed
Speaker 1: into the prank. Some people say, no, I think there's
Speaker 1: a possibility. It just seems weird to have come up
Speaker 1: with that independently. I could also be overthinking it.
Speaker 2: Oh maybe, who knows. The first official mentions that people
Speaker 2: know about were in the beginning of beginnings of the
Speaker 2: nineteen hundreds, and it wasn't in a newspaper like the
Speaker 2: words drop bear until nineteen eighty two, apparently, when there
Speaker 2: was a message in the twenty first Birthday's column of
Speaker 2: the Canberra Times on thirty one July. You know it's
Speaker 2: from a different country if they say thirty one July, right,
Speaker 2: we say July thirty first over here and apparently, yeah,
Speaker 2: I say canber And.
Speaker 1: That's not right either, right, I think it's Canberra, Canberra, Okay,
Speaker 1: I think not even Borah bruh like bruh.
Speaker 3: What's up? Bro?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's up Canbra?
Speaker 3: Okay, I got you.
Speaker 2: But in this message, regardless of pronunciations, it was Tam tam,
Speaker 2: Beware of drop bears in the future for sure, totally
Speaker 2: love Clint. And no one knows who these people were.
Speaker 2: We'll never find out who this who these people were.
Speaker 2: But the words drop bear first time in print apparently.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But the year before a post punk band called
Speaker 1: the drop Bears had formed back in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: I went and looked up one of their videos for
Speaker 1: a song called fun Loving Good. Yeah it's not bad, okay,
Speaker 1: jump it out. But yes, so drop like drop bears
Speaker 1: somehow just came out of nowhere. That term did. But
Speaker 1: there had been this idea of a koala like animal
Speaker 1: dropping from trees and attacking people that had been around,
Speaker 1: at least in print since the nineteen twenties. It seems
Speaker 1: to have been a military prank like that's where it
Speaker 1: kind of was kept alive all of the decades, but
Speaker 1: it eventually made the leap to pop culture thanks to
Speaker 1: a guy known in Australia as Hogues. His name is
Speaker 1: Paul Hogan. Here in the United States, we know him
Speaker 1: as Crocodile Dundee.
Speaker 3: I say we take a break.
Speaker 2: That's quite a cliffhanger when you got Crocodile Dundee hanging
Speaker 2: out there. And we'll be right back after this, all right,
Speaker 2: we promised talk of Crocodile Dundee. In nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 2: on his show The Paul Hogan Show, he did skit
Speaker 2: where he starts talking about the untold horrors of the
Speaker 2: Australian bush and although he didn't use the word drop bear,
Speaker 2: he talked about killer koalas silently sitting and then dropping
Speaker 2: out of trees and killing people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so within a few years this thing crosses over
Speaker 1: to the mainstream. Drop bears are attached as the name,
Speaker 1: and it just becomes an institution in Australia.
Speaker 2: Apparently that's right, and we've gotten real tips because you know,
Speaker 2: they like to play along with this stuff, and so
Speaker 2: you can actually get real published tips on how to
Speaker 2: avoid being killed by these.
Speaker 1: Right apparently one so remember they're telling like soldiers in
Speaker 1: Australia are telling like some American detachment that's visiting or
Speaker 1: doing training exercises or something to do these things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and apparently they do. Sometimes One is to put dabs
Speaker 1: of toothpaste behind your ears, James, I mean toothpaste, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm surprised that's all it was, because why didn't
Speaker 2: they say like human feces or something they want to
Speaker 2: kick it up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, but I mean just the fact that you
Speaker 1: did something that they can demonstrate you did that. That's
Speaker 1: that's enough. When they tell you that this whole thing's
Speaker 1: a joke and you're a total moron.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2: I guess they got a little closer to human feces
Speaker 2: on the next but a little bit. Uh. They said
Speaker 2: that you got to smear your cheeks and forehead with vegemite. Boy,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna get killed for that one. You are, but
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3: Australia.
Speaker 1: Australia, you should know by now, no one outside of
Speaker 1: Australia likes vegemite. That's just your thing, that's.
Speaker 2: Right, And you've all got great senses of humor, so
Speaker 2: I know you'll take that with a plumb.
Speaker 1: That's right. So another one was putting forks in your hair,
Speaker 1: which I mean you'd have to have thick, curly hair
Speaker 1: to hold a fork in your hair.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fork would fall right out of my hair.
Speaker 1: Same here. Yeah. And then you could wear a neck guard.
Speaker 1: That would be the funniest one to me. That's what
Speaker 1: I would try to get people to do. Remember, like
Speaker 1: the old school neck guards that like in that episode
Speaker 1: of The Brady Bunch where there's the car accident, the
Speaker 1: person that Mike Brady hit was wearing like a neck
Speaker 1: protector to keep them from turning their head.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: And then he throws the briefcase and they look really
Speaker 1: quickly and Mike Brady Pruss's cave foiled. Yeah. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: I could get somebody to wear one of those to
Speaker 1: protect against a drop bear attack, I would feel pretty
Speaker 1: good about myself. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And if all these things fail, I believe so much
Speaker 2: of what you say. If you told me I needed
Speaker 2: to wear that for any reason, I probably would all right.
Speaker 1: Well, keep sharp, man, because I'm going to try it sometime.
Speaker 3: You know, if you want a podcast, better put on
Speaker 3: a neck break.
Speaker 2: Apparently, if none of those things work, though, and you
Speaker 2: were a visiting military soldier and you are attacked, to
Speaker 2: protect yourself, curl into a ball and protect all of
Speaker 2: your major internal organs and major arteries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty great stuff, chuck.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I mean that was kind of sad.
Speaker 2: If you look up drop Bear, there's some funny pictures
Speaker 2: of like just photoshopped qualas that looked super scary And mean.
Speaker 1: What do you mean what was sad?
Speaker 3: No? No, no, no, did I say sad?
Speaker 1: Yeah? You said it's kind of sad? Did I either
Speaker 1: that or I've just totally lost my mind?
Speaker 3: Finally, in my mind, I said funny.
Speaker 2: I guess only the listener will know the truth of
Speaker 2: which one of us just had a stroke.
Speaker 1: Maybe you guys can write in and tell us in
Speaker 1: the meantime, everybody short, Stuff is out.
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