Aquatic Humanoids, Part 1

flesh still rotting off them. They meant the things on the little island with the queer ruins, and it seems them awful pictures of frog fish monsters were supposed to be pictures of these things. Maybe they was the kind of critters has got all the mermaids stories and such started. They had all kinds of cities on the sea bottom, and this island was heaved up from thar of my Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from How Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow

your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And if you recognize what those sources were, you probably can tell we're gonna be talking about some mirror creatures, some sea folks something like that today. That's right. The first was from Homer's the Odyssey the Samuel Butler translation.

The second was from HP. Lovecraft The Shadow Over Ins andet Now, there is always an alluring quality to the idea that there's stuff happening down at the bottom of the ocean that has more than just an animal quality, but some kind of intelligence or organizing principle to it. I think of in the George R. Martin books, there's this character. Do you remember this guy Robert, who's like a court jester and the in stanis Bathians court who's

always singing about what happens under the bottom of the sea. No, I've forgotten about this. Well, he like falls in the water at some point and gets rescued, and after that he's always saying, like under the sea that I don't remember what he says, but it's like they have feet, you know, people people walk upside down on their hands. And then he always says, I know, I know, ho ho ho, And it's kind of mysterious. Oh yeah, this

does ring a bell. Now. Well, you know, before even before we had proper mirrors, the uh, the ocean was kind of the looking glass, right, it was kind of the mirror world. Yeah, so any of those stories where you wonder if there's actually some kind of creature living on the other side of the mirror, if that's another universe we're peering through into. All of that applies to the water as well. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting when you think of all the various specimens, the Mermaids, the Gilman,

the sirens. It's fascinating the humans have seemingly always dreamt up humanoids from the deep, not just monsters, but humanoids. Yeah, I mean, because you can certainly expand it and get into the whole realm of sea monsters and various animal fish hybrids. But there's something particular cular about those humanoid or partially humanoid creatures that a mirror world beneath the waves,

and people of some sort that occupied to depths. Yeah, I mean, even before you had somebody like Giordano Bruno imagining that there could be other planets with surfaces like our planet that could have creatures dwelling on them, you know, when people didn't really have that conception of the sky, you could still definitely wonder about something like that under the ocean. That was like sort of the first outer space. It was the original alien world. Yeah, indeed, and without

a real means of exploring it or understanding it. You were just left with whatever happened to swim up with within view, whatever happened to wash up dead and you know, partially rotted away on the shoreline, whatever you were able to pull up with with line or net. Dude, the stuff that washes up dead on the beaches of the Earth is terrifying and crazy now, even though we have

like photos and modern science. Can you imagine that happening in a world where you know, the New Jersey beach monster washes up, but it's in the Middle Ages in China or something. Yeah, it's actually really fascinating to look back, particularly at a lot of the sea monster illustrations and old maps. There's a book by chet van Duzer Sea Monsters of Medieval and Renaissance Maps and and he he. It's filled with wonderful illustrations. But you get to look

at at all these various creatures. You know, that's some fairly realistic. You can look at and say, well, that's clearly supposed to be a walrus, that's supposed to be a whale. It just has too many blowholes, and some of them you look at and you realize, well, this is essentially what you might see if you saw the put partially decomposed body of a whale, something enormous, but

a little more beaked looking. Now. In that book, Van Duzer points out that few maps survive from antiquity, but there are map like mentions and map like artifacts, such as there's an Assyrian freeze from the palace of King Sargon the second early eighth century BC that clearly depicts to Assyrian morment. And it's great because if you've ever seen Assyrian reliefs or carvings before, they've they've all got the same head, you know, it's all that same guy

with the same curly beard and the hat. And these mermaids are like that too. Yeah, And then you you look at other ancient writing. I mean, they're mentioned in ovid Ovid's writing The Metamorphosis. Ovid lived forty three b c E To seventeen or eighteen CE, and he described the gates of the Palace of the Sun is containing

all of these images of mirror people. The dark blue Sea contains the gods melodious triton shifting Proteus uh Aegean crushing two huge whales, together his arms across their backs, and Doris with her daughters, some seen swimming, some sitting on rocks drying their sea green hair, some writing the backs of fish. And you can you can keep going

back in time too. I mean, as Nancy Easterland pointed out in her two thousand one paper Hans Christian Andersen's Fish out of Water, the Babylonians recognized God's with fish

features or fish hybridity. Yeah, you can sort of see this as an extension of the way that early creation myths and ancient gods often had water aspects, like like Tiamatta Nabsu, you know, the fresh water and the salt water, or the idea of the creation stories which almost always involve waters, right, you know, the chaos hover or the being hovering out over the waters. Yeah, calling back to our order out of Chaos episode. And we've talked about

inky as well before. The Sumerian water god, which is sometimes described it's sometimes described as having a cloak of a fish or scaled skin. Wait, a cloak of a fish or a cloak made out of multiple fish or one of the images I saw it looked like a cloak of little fish icons like it like the cloak was made out of fish emoticons. That's pretty great, that's amazing. And get this, the ziggurat where people would worship Inky

was known as House of the Subterranean Waters. Well, that seems to sort of complete the ziggurat trinity because we we've talked about zigarattes before the Ziggurata Etemenanki, which was sometimes believed to be associated with the historical idea of the Tower of babel I think that name means something like the house of the foundation of heaven and Earth, very regal sounding zigguratte as if there's another kind of zigguratte right now, additionally we have this is just kind

of a humble zigguratte. Yeah, there's no such thing. If it's gonna be a zigguratte, it's gonna be a zigaratte. Now. Additionally we have we have fish tailed gods and water dragons found throughout the cultures of India, China, and Japan and uh Nancy Nancy Easterland sums up a lot of

this nicely. She says, quote, some of the mythological sea beings and deities such as Poseidon and the Sirens were not originally associated with water and piicine anatomy, the sirens were originally birds, indicating that divine power and womanly allure became combined with the power and promise of the sea when ancient cultures undertook maritime war and trade. So she argues that the that mur folk and mermaids, all these creatures, they're ultimately the descendants or in her words, the scale

down descendants, which I like because of scales. Uh, these are just the scale down descendants of anciency gods. Yeah, that seems like one example of the principle that displaced gods or or fading gods of older theologies often appear in sort of lower status or demoted roles in newer versions of religions. Yeah, the old trope of the former pagan god becomes a demon in medieval Christian traditions. Yeah.

So obviously we're talking about mr Folk water dwelling humanoids of various kinds today, and this is going to be the first part of a two part episode. The first one here we want to discuss the sort of global mr Folk mythology and all of the different ideas of humanoids living in the deep and what that says about us culturally and where where these ideas come from. And then in the next stepisode, we're gonna focus more on

the science of aquatic humanoids. Yeah, so this is gonna be the mythology and fiction episode and the next one will be the science and speculative science episode. Now, Robert, one of the first ones you mentioned was the sirens, that's right. Yeah, and when we we had the reading from the Odyssey at the start of the episode that refers to them. But one thing you'll notice is that there was no description of the sirens. Yeah, what do they look like? Well, we don't know, because Homer never

actually describes them. Uh. They were later described though, as being half bird, much like the Harpie, and later periods of development merged them with the Northern mermaid in Christian Europe, but medieval best Area's stuck to the bird hybridity though up through at least twelve twenty and then you had this gentleman Isidore of Seville who lived of five sixty through six thirty six CE, and he attributed them with scales and webbed feet and sometimes tales and wings as well.

But from the Middle Ages onward, that's where the sirens really took on the mermaid look, and it's stuck. I'm trying to think of depictions of them I've seen in movies, but I don't think I have. The only thing that comes to mind is, oh, brother, where art thou? But in that they're not hybrids. They're just humans that are,

but they are in a creek bed, that's right. I feel like a lot of the depictions that that I'm accustomed to, mainly through the Time Life book series of myths and monsters and myths and legends, and there was there were some siren images in there, and a lot of them were just basically beautiful women out on rocks,

luring the the the wide eyed Greek sailors to their doom. Now, of course, if you're not familiar with the story, it's that the sirens would sing, right, and that they're singing was so lovely that it would drive men mad, and it would and they would want to come ashore to meet the sirens, I guess, or be drawn to the singing, but instead their vessels would be dashed upon the rocks, right, Yeah. And various accounts of the sirens that they vary, like

maybe you'd starve to death, or you perhaps drowned. I guess the basic underlying reality of the myth is the ocean is a dangerous place, right and if you go out upon the ocean, you might meet your do I always thought that what Odysseus does in the story of his encounter with the sirens was an interesting sort of metaphor for the ways some people experiment with mind altering substances, which is that he has his men lash him to the ship's mast so that he can't control you know,

he can't drive the ship into the rocks. But all the other men plugged their ears, and he wants to hear it. They're all the designated drivers. Yes, though in a sense he's the designated driver because he is the only one who can tell them when they're out of the sirens range. But but but yeah, they're they're all plugged up. He's the one that's a that's their rope to the mast, begging to be let free, and their under strict orders that the more I begged, the more

you need to wrote me to the mast. Now another interesting uh, individual or race, depending on how you look at it, from Greek mythology, the Triton so Triton was originally a specific murr person. But Ariel's father, right is Was that his name in the cartoon in the Disney movie, wasn't it? I thought you just saw a little mermaid themed show, and I did, but it was at Wiki Watchie, which is the long running Mermaid show there, and the underwater dancing is a very limited storytelling medium, and I

don't think her father ever showed up in it. Okay, yeah, I think that's his name. I remember this from childhood, the guy with the big beard and the trident, the mayor man king. He's King Triton. Okay, I definitely remember him, but I didn't remember his name. Well. Uh. The Triton's eventually became seen as just a class of murr people in Greek myth. They were the sons of Poseidon and Amphathrite. They had humanoid bodies covered in scales, and then they

had dolphin tales maddi green or yellow hair. They had gills as well as pointed kind of elf ears, wide mouths things, and then they typically would serve as escorts for the Nereid sea nymphs as well as general attendants for seed Avinity. And our old friend Hestiodd said that they inhabited Golden palaces under the sea. Now it sounds like King Triton, Yeah, exactly. It's it's that this is key to so many of our our myths and legends of my people. Now I'm wondering this is kind of

interesting that it's combining features of the House of ick Thos. Right, it's got the scales and the fish like characteristics, but then they've also got dolphin tales, So there's this melding of aquatic mammals and fish. Well, of course you have to remember that for the longest time this was not a clear distinction, the idea that the dolphins were not fish. So it makes sense that we just mesh it all

up under miscellaneous sea beasts. And also in medieval times, Triton's were made the male counterparts of sirens, the male counterparts, as in like they were the same species, or like they were just friends or what My understanding is that it's like they were of the same species of one dares to get too technical with your your mythological people's under the waves, and I think this will be very interesting later on when we discuss modern treatments of mermaids

and fish people. Okay, so fangs, scales, dolphin tales, humanoid characteristics. That's not enough hybridity for me. I want you to mash in some more stuff. Well, you're in luck, Joe, because there there's another creature to consider here, the atho centaur. Yes, so you had something called a centauro triton, which is basically what occurs when you have a triton that's depicted with like like a definite dolphin esque hind quarters of ocation. But then the ichio centaur takes the hybridity to a

whole another level. So we see this and around the third century Common Era, and this is found in the Natural history text Physiologists. Uh, and this each year the ichthio centaur was said to have the torso and head of a man, the four legs of a horse or lion are the hind quarters of a dolphin, and unlike the centaur o triton, they had scale. Now I'm so imagining what kind of habitat this creature dwells in. When would it be useful to have the four legs of

a horse and the tail of a dolphin. H Well, I mean you could really tease that apart and get into I guess the symbolic meaning of the things or you you end up coming back to your idea of like, here's something washed up on the beach, makes sense of it, and well, this is kind of the story that ends

up spreading about it. There are no classical accounts of the Ichthio centaur according to the resources I was looking at, but that they remained a decorative motif, which is kind of the ultimate fate of a lot of these, like the mermaid and the uh and the triton and the Ichthyo centaur, they become just part of medieval likenography going forward, and they come to symbolize other things, the Mermaid particular becoming to symbolize to sort of the the the evil

and monstrous nature of the female Uh sometimes depicted Uh, I believe with a with a fish to show that she is entrapping the Christian soul. Yeah. I often think of the tradition of the mermaid as being one of temptation, like that it it establishes kind of like a foolish and weak willed sailor that will give in to the temptation of the mermaid because he has not properly disciplined

his spirit to resist sin. It reminds me a lot of the incubi and succubi legends we've discussed in the podcast before, where the feet would be a giveaway, the feet would be the feet of a beast, and therefore any any rational believer would notice the feet of the creature and just and cease to pursue this foolish pairing. But yeah, that's an interesting parallel, like that they both go back to this idea of the sinner as someone

who's oblivious to difference. Yeah, like they can't see all the warning signs here, the main warning sign of course, being that the individualist part fish. All right, well, maybe we should take a quick break and then we come back. We will discuss more aquatic humanoid legends from around the world. Alright, we're back. So not every mirror person in mythology and legend is a villain. Uh. Sometimes you see some that that have beneficial aspects as well. There's, for instance, the

the the Neno of Japanese legend. This is essentially less of a mermaid and more of just a fish with a beautiful woman's face, and it's protective and warns of misfortune on land and sea. And then there's also an interesting one from the Micmac people of eastern Canada. They were known as the halfway people. Uh, these particular mr folk they had the upper bodies of a body of a human and the lower body of a fish, and they'd warn fishermen of coming storms or invoke storms if

they were distrest spected. Now I have to add another North American or Canadian entry, a less fulkloric and more of a one off. But I'm adding it because I've seen this in person, Robert the Bant from Merman. You've looked up images, right, I did. I was not familiar with this, and I had, of course heard of the Fiji Mermaid. And I've never been to Bath, but I'm familiar with it. You know, you've talked about your adventures there, and it does not seem like a likely mermaid destination. No,

not really. I mean, so this is Inland, Canada. This is in Alberta and Bant National Park. So this is a mountainous region, not a not a coastal region, but it has lakes, and so in these lakes, I guess one might expect to find some kind of hybrid humanoid aquatic creature. And so inside this business in Banff in Alberta.

There is a little store called the Indian Trading Company, and in the back of the store there is a taxidermy creature that's half fish, half humanoid gremlin and it looks like, I don't know how would you describe it. Like the back of it just looks straight up like a fish. It's a fish with the head cut off, and then that fish just goes straight into some ribs with with like human baby arms but with claws on them, and a scary looking head that has hair. I mean

it looks like a taxidermine creation. I mean that is what it is. Yes, it is a fish and probably some sort of a small monkey that the remains of which we're we're sewn together, yeah, or the I think it's also possible that the top half of it could just be artificial. I think it could be a crafted artifact. According to a write up on Atlas Obscurity, it was probably bought by a man named Norman Luxton, who is the proprietor of the shop around nineteen fifteen, when it

was when it first showed up there. It's very much in the traditional of like the P. T. Barnum kind of thing that the Fiji mermaid. Yes, so some kind of a side shoeoddity sort of thing. Yeah, except it stays right here in this uh, in this store or I don't know how long it's been totally stationary there. But yeah, if you go to Bamp and you go to the store and you go into the back room, you will see lots of oddities. There is like a giant taxidermy bear I think, and some moose heads and

other local stuff. But yeah, this thing is in a glass case. It's got a mirror behind it, and they sell postcards. It's like I saw them from Herman. Interesting. Well that's this. I've got to check that out when I finally get up to ban. Now, speaking of Canadian we can sort of extend that and think of French traditions as well. Uh, there is a mermaid in French traditions known as Melo scene and much like a kidna, the mother of monsters in Greek myth, the French mermaid

here boasts a two pronged tale. Oh you know what that reminds me of Dagon? Well yeah, I thought you're gonna say Starbucks, but yes, also the movie, the Stewart Gordon movie Dagon that came out in two thousand and one. It's kind of a mixed bag. Not not a great movie, but there's some things to like about it. Yeah, it's a love crafty in like it's basically an adaptation of Shadow over in Smith, but they lean into the Mermaids a little more. They lean into the sex and violence

a little more. Uh, it's worth checking out if you like violent fish people movies. But what about Starbucks Starbucks, Well, it just coffee basically, But but that that logo with the mermaid with the two pronged tail, uh, with going up on each side of the creature, Like that's basically melocene or a kid not, depending on how you want to look at Robert. I hate to say it, but I don't think anybody ever pays attention to that logo unless they're trying to get mad about it or not

having a Sanda hat or something. It would be interesting if people started getting mad over that, is, Like, why does this mermaid have two tales instead of one? We want an American Mermaid, not a French Mermaid. One tale, one country, one tale. Well, they're probably you know, pining for the classic Mermaid, the have for the Danish Mermaid. Why is this the classic Well, you know, because when you when you really think about mermaids, you think of

like Hans Christian Anderson, you think of Northern Europe. Oh, so, to be clear, Hans Christian Anderson is the author of the Little Mermaids story that the Disney movie is loosely based on, very loosely because in his version there's a lot more like blood and cutting off feed and stuff. Oh yes, it's a bit a bit more violent. But but over in Denmark they did have to have frou

and uh. This is a that's that's a pretty helpful mermaid because it can also tell the future and it allegedly foretold the birth of Danish King Christian the fourth of Denmark. So that's a that's a beneficial mermaid for you. And of course I have to mention the monk fish. Are you familiar with the monk fish or perhaps it's kin the bishop fish. Well, I know of the monkfish, like the monkfish, but you're not thinking of like the

monkfish that you would eat, right. This is this was a creature widely reported marine creature in Northern European waters, described in Ambrose Pare's sixteenth century work on monsters. It had the head of a human, the tonstered air style of a monk, monks cow and cape, and two extremely long flippers. It's it's a ridiculous looking creature. It looks like you drew a monk as a fish, you know what you're talking about. It sounds I've seen the medieval drawings.

But the cool thing is that there's a very strong case to be made that these were based on descriptions of dead giant squid, because you have this kind of you know, thick, lumpy body that kind of tapers off on one end and then has what a number of tentacles and then two very long additional arms. Uh. That would have been the two extremely long flippers of the monk fish. Yeah, I'm looking at the comparisons right now. I can see why that would have been the case.

And there was also a Chinese variant of this, the Hi Ho Shun, which was the sea Buddhist priest. So uh, again, we're getting back to the idea of when when you're talking about a mythical sea creature, there are a number of different ways to look at it. You know, is it a former god that's been demoted, is it a dead sea animal that that someone has misinterpreted, and then someone else has heard about that, and then that person told another individual who illustrated and wrote it in in

a medieval baster area. It. Uh. These are just a few of the possible excuses for many of these fantastic creatures. So is there anything that seems to unite all of the legends we've looked at so far? Or are aquatic humanoids as diverse as real humans or as diverse as other gods and monsters? Well, there's always the sense of the familiar yet alien. Yeah, and the sense that it's uh, well, lots of lots of monsters are familiar yet alien, but

that they come from another world. The aquatic humanoids do. Yes, they are familiar yet yet foreign. They are something there. There are people from the other side of the mirror. Yeah, I've got another one. Maybe. Let me know what you think about this. When I think of ocean dwelling humanoids in mythology in fiction, they don't usually seem to be like party hard kind of gods or party hard monsters

or humanoids. They usually seem kind of sad. Ye, there's a kind of melancholy that we associate with the underwater life and the ocean that may them from the sad faces of fish is. I don't know if that's too crazy of a stretch. When I look at fish faces, I tend to project emotions on them, and those emotions are never like happiness. Fish faces always look a little bit sad, like they're disappointed in something, like they wish

things were going better. Well, it comes back to the old saying a fish out of water as well, Right, there's nothing more awkward than a creature that has been taken from its natural habitat and thrown into another. The fish out of water is a thing that is vulnerable, perhaps doomed. Uh, it is in shock and uh. And therefore I think we we do see that a lot with our mur folk of various designs, in our our myths and our fictions. Yeah, sad fish faces and also

also kind of a shadowy realm. Right. The the the underwater world for these underwater humanoids is another world. But it's the world that the sun is on the opposite side of the barrier from, Like the sun is all ours, and the sun they get is just what filters down through the through the membrane of the water surface. Yeah, but then sometimes there are depictures again the golden cities of the Triton's. Yeah, I guess that's true. So there is a sense of of the glorious, but also this

sense of just sort of alien hard work as well. Like, I mean, maybe I'm projecting more about what what we know from covering aquatic biology and just the the aquatic habitat, knowing that it is such a place of of intense competition. You know, when I think of the the ultimate melancholy underwater humanoids, like I go to the Universal Monster movies,

it's the gil Man. Yeah, the gil Man. I mean, I imagine most of the people listening to this podcast grew up with the gil Man, right, creature from the Black Lagoon nine fifty four, part of the classic Universal Monster movie canon. Except the gil Man was different from a lot of the others in that unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, which had been the subject of novels of horror and science fiction at the time, the gil Man was the synthesis of many of these human mr fult kind of traditions,

was not from like a novel that existed. It's uh, there are other interesting talks about it too, like, for instance, unlike Frankenstein or Dracula or the Money, the gil Man was a was a product of the natural world. It's just a product of the natural world that no longer had a place in the modern world. And that's why it often gets classed as a science fiction movie instead of a horror movie. Yeah, that the science discusses is rather rather sketchy. Oh they this is even better in

the sequel, Revenge of the Creature. We should get to that in a few minutes. Yeah. I grew up with it with this monster, like I'm sure you did. I remember having I had the little glow in the Dark figurine of it. As a kid, I had these Universal trading cards that had been my dad's that had all these universal monsters and some horrible jokes on them. You people at home, Robert has brought these cards in. I think we should read a couple of the jokes on the back of them. Okay, you go for it, Joe,

I'll play along. Okay, joke on the first one. So the first one shows the gil Man. On the front it said, did you say fish for dinner? Anyone I know? And then on the back it's got this first ghost Colin, we just had a baby. Second ghost colon, congratulations, Was it a ghoul or a boy? See? That's that's some that's some straight up crypt keeper humor right there. That's that's pretty good. I got an even better one. So the front is the creature, but that's from the third movie.

The creature walks among us when he sort of gets turned into a regular human, and the back has a joke that says, what's a cowardly skeleton? I don't know, Joe, what's the cowardly skeleton? A boned chicken? That's probably a joke that we would get if this were the early nineteen sixties, but I do not get it. But chicken, oh man. That there's this whole world of butchery jokes that we just said don't have access to. But it's great, you know, because this is a joke that no longer

fits into our time. And that's basically the idea of the creature, and I think one of the it's telling that the creature continues to be celebrated despite the fact that there has not really been a creature from the Black Liogoon movie since the original trilogy. But he's taken on this sort of outsider icon status. Yeah, I'm really mortified for the time when they come into remake Creature from the Black Lagoon. I don't want it. I don't

I don't think we're ready. Yeah, that really. I mean Gamma del Toro's The Shape of Water, which just came out Christmas. That's really the best possible creature from the Black Lagoon remake, even though it's not officially Creature from the Black log Right. No, I'm talking about like the Tom Cruise Mummy Universe remakes where it would be like what Benedict's cumber Batch as the Gilman and then take a good go man who would play the lugs who

show up in the Lagoon and start poking and with stuff. Oh, I don't know. Just you can just point a scatter gun at an IMDb page. I guess you get some candidates. So when did you first see the Gillman on screen? Um? You know, I think before I saw any of the movies. I was introduced to it in two. It came from Hollywood.

That's a great one. Yeah. So basically just a bunch of old movie trailers, uh, stitched together with some at times delightful jokes at times cringeworthy jokes and very as a celebrity guest spots from like Cheech and Chong, Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, they were principles on this project. They highlight a great brain attack scenes. Yes, yeah, there's a whole section on guerilla movies. It's it's, it's, it's. It's a

wonderful film. It's hard to find these days because I think that some of the rights issues prevented from being properly distributed. Yeah, but you don't see the gil Man showing up in repeated uses throughout other films the same way you do like Bell of the Ghostias version of

Dracula or the Frankenstein Monster exactly. Now. One of the things though about the Gilman, to really to bring it back to some of these themes we're discussing here, though, is that that outsider aspect, you know, the the idea that there's something sympathetic and yet other, or depending on how you're looking at it, threatening and yet other. And when you start teasing the gil Man apart, there's some

really unsettling dimensions to the creature. The same can certainly said of HP Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over in Smith which which is which of course was published before The Creature came to our cinemas. Uh. And it's kind of like a proto creature short story. It's got a quatic humanoids, right, it does. It has a whole race of aquatic humanoids that end up interbreeding with this rural uh fishing and trade community. Uh. And and that is like the horror

of the piece. It's the idea that they're fish people and humans are breeding with them. And you know, I I first read this story, I read it in n for the first time, and uh and I remember being like, really, um, just blown over by it. I thought it was just such a creepy, um atmospheric tale. And uh, it's it's a little more disturbing the more one reads about it, and the one the more one knows about Lovecraft and his his uh sentiments towards other people's and other races. Yeah,

Lovecraft was very imaginative, but he was not a nice person. No. Uh. You know, sometimes excuses are made from this is a guy that lived nineteen thirty seven, and some people defended by saying, oh, you know, he was a product of his time, as as we all are. But he was definitely a man with some very problematic views on race,

especially from modern modern readers. Absolutely, I mean, even if we're to leave out his personal letters and so forth, his fiction often falls back on the trend of championing a white English culture over everything else, and we see the other races sometimes depicted as is just outright monstrous. You often get the sense for him that any non Anglo ethnic groups are sort of allied with the monsters. Yeah,

there's something like threatening and debilitative about them in his work. Um, you know, there's a lot to unpack in in Smith and again, in many ways, it is a tremendous short story.

It was highly influential. But as Evan Lampi discusses in his paper in praise of the In Smith, look Nautical Terror and the Specter of Atlantic History and HP Lovecrafts fiction, you can compare it to Lovecraft's earlier story The Dunwich Horror, which presents a town with a quote degraded population of ignorant, backward, physically stunted villagers. This again en capsuling his Lovecrafts uh anxieties concerning not only other races, but even just like

other like classes of people within the United states. But Lampy points out the quote the fall of Dunwich is a result of racial decline brought on by isolation, which is a source of terror in the narrative, but in in Smith, it's not isolation, but contact with distant lands via Atlantic commerce that serves as their undoing. So Lampey says, quote in Smith's degradation is a result of its worldliness,

not its isolation. Even if the city became a backwater, it looked out to the Atlantic for much of its history, open to the world, it's ideas and its people. So in some ways the creatures from the sea here are standing in for contact and intercourse with other cultures, right yeah. And and that sort of works for the sea because the sea is traditionally like a way for cultures to come together. It's the you know, the trade routes through

the sea. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then that's what what makes the story so so ikey, if you read it with all of this in mind, is that it's a tale that's describing the adoption of of of other cultures, and certainly with the the the interbreeding with other cultures as being something that is inherently monstrous, that the white Anglo Saxon people should not venture out, either you know,

mentally or certainly physically or sexually. Yeah, this is a really troubling strain and Lovecraft's work, especially since Lovecraft is so pop peeler with so many people today like for his monsters and his settings and stuff, that I feel like this is sort of like the part of him

that nobody really wants to think about. Yeah, I mean it can be difficult because, like I said, I grew up loving Lovecraft's work and I still have have a strong affinity for for for the love crafting and vibe, but you know, for the weird fiction world and many of the older writers from the day. But I mean, you can't stick your hand in the sand regarding the sensibilities that are they're not only president in the individual behind the stories, but in the works themselves. And so

we got here from Creature from the Black Lagoon. I'm wondering if this is leading to to you thinking that some of the same themes can be poured it over to Creature from the Black Lagoon. Well, you know, I didn't used to think so. I used to think that the Creature from the Black Lagoon was was somehow separate

from from any real world concerns. You know, it's kind of this, I mean, he's ready to g for for goodness, say the first one anyway, maybe the other two as well, but I distinctly remember seeing the g rating on the first film. It's essentially a Disney movie, just with a murderous monster in it. Well, but before we get into any racial aspects of the Creature from the Black Wood, and we should probably just take a moment to enjoy the existence of the film on its own. Narrits quote

from Q magazine about Creature from the Black Lagoon. This horrendous pseudoscience fiction melodrama revolves wildly in three dimensions and with considerable excitement around a poor ancestral fish that never quite made the grade to man. All right, Well, that's that's pretty accurate, I guess. I mean it's it's generally it's often looked, it looked at is one of the lesser of the universal movies, though, even though the monster itself is pretty great. Yeah, it might be the best

universal monster in terms of makeup and stuff. Uh, well, I don't. I mean, it's that's debatable. I guess it's certainly is more ambitious makeup wise than I mean, Harlow's Frankenstein is a pretty amazing makeup creation, it's true. But does Frankenstein begin with the Big Bang? No, it doesn't, and Creature from the Black Lagoon sure does. It starts with a big explosion. It's sort of the inverse of Bride of the Monster. Uh, starts with the big explosion.

And their idea of what the big Bang is is that it involved literally exploding chunks of rock. Yes, yeah, it looks like a like a like a mining detonation. And they get into this whole narrative about how the creature is a product of the Devonian period from sixty million years ago. Okay, that's pretty old, the age of the trilobytes. Yeah, that's when they went extinct, I think, right, yeah, yeah, and uh, and of course you get the dunk least as back then, that's right. And then they spend a

lot of time talking about the long fish. Uh. They sort of throw a lot of science at the screen early on to try and trick you into thinking that this is a like a scientifically accurate picture. Now, it was really released in three D? Did you ever see it in three D? Robert I never did, but the fight. They filmed the first two of these films in three days.

But a lot of people, even when it very first came out, saw it flat because it was at the very end of the early fifties three D craze that it was released, so it was already becoming pass a I actually rewatched this movie last night, and if you ever get a chance to check out the Universal Monster Movies set the remaster of Creature, it's got a great commentary track by horror scholar Tom Weaver, and I just wanted to mention a few things I learned from it,

some really interesting highlights. Um one of them was where did this story come from? Like? What what is the origin of the creature? So the producer of Creature from the Black Lagoon was this guy named William Aland who was the He was the producer of the film. He was a Universal producer at the time, and he made his start as an actor working with Orson Wells in the Orson Wells Theater Group, and he was part of

the infamous War the World's radio broadcast. But he was also friends with Wells and so sometimes sometime in the nineteen forty during the filming of Citizen Kane. Aland was an actor in Citizen Kane as well. He was he was the reporter who was hunting down the meaning of the word rosebud and so Aland was over at Wells

House for a dinner party. Also in attendance was Dolores del Rio, who was a Mexican actress who was Orson Welles partner at the time, and a Mexican cinematographer named Gabrielle figaroa who would go on to a really stellar career. He was the cinematographer of things like The Pearl and John Houston's Night of the Iguana. And during this dinner

party the story goes. Figaro starts in on this bizarre story about a half man, half fish creature that lived in the Amazon River near a certain village, and, according to Figaro is telling, once a year the fishman would come up out of the river and claim one maiden from the village as its victim, and then it would retreat into the water and the village would be safe

again until it emerged the next year. Apparently, at first the other guests thought Figaro was kidding, but he insisted and he started getting worked up because he wasn't being taken seriously, and he claimed the story was absolutely true and that he'd seen a photo of the Amazon fishman. So this was early forties, and despite how awkward of a dinner it must have been, apparently the story must have stuck in the deep inside the mind of William Alland.

And about ten years later, when he was a producer at Universal, he decided to make a version of the Amazon Fishman story into a new entry in the Universal Monster movie canon. So he wrote up this three page treatment of the film, which was supposed to start not with the big bang, but with a reenactment of his dinner conversation with Figaroa, followed by an expedition to the Amazon with a fishman creature, and of course he wanted to have a gorgeous blonde that would get kidnapped by

the fishman. Uh. And then the rest of the story was basically just a rip off of the plot of King Kong, but with a fishman instead of a giant ape. So they'd capture him, bring him back to civilization, he'd escape and you know, run him up in the at ease and it's this basically the territory they explore in

the three Creature of movies. Yeah, if you put together the first Creature from the Black Lagoon and the second movie, Revenge of the Creature that came out in nineteen fifty five the following year, together, they are the plot of King Kong. Now. One of the other things I love about the Creature from the Black Lagoon is that you

had this is a product of Florida. Yeah, and I've I've now been to some of these locations in Florida that they are tied to it, such as Wakoula Springs, which I mentioned on the show before of a fabulous destination. That's where they shot a lot of the underwater stuff. Yeah, I think maybe all of the underwater stuff. Well, if I'm if memory serves, they certainly did all of the

underwater stuff in the third movie there. I'm not as sure about the first one because there are a number of different spring locations that are used in some of these these films. Uh. And then they're tied into other like weird Florida places like the wiki Watchie uh Mermaid Show. Uh. Julie Adams stunt double from the first film was a

mermaid swimmer at the wiki watchy Mermaid Show. Oh yeah, that's a great fact about the movie is that anytime you see the characters above water, they're played by different actors than the people who played them below water. So like the Gilman above water was one actor they had in in I guess in Hollywood, and then below the water,

the Gilman was always this other guy, Rico Browning. Yes, yeah, a fascinating figure who's also come up on the on the podcast before because he worked briefly with John C. Lily. But yeah, it was a crazy story there. I go back and listen to that episode if you want the details on that. But he was also tied to Wiki Watchee and I really had quite a career outside of of the Creature from the Black Cagoon. Yeah. Did you know that Rico Browning directed the underwater scenes that go

on for thirty seven hours in Thunderball? I I read that the other day, but I wasn't aware of it previously. No, Oh my god, when was the last time you saw Thunderball? I was a child watching on TVs. Okay, yeah, it's one of those Sean Connery on so it has parts that are kind of fun, but the underwater fight scenes are just in termn uh bull go on forever. But there. I'm sure they're very well choreographed, especially for the time. I mean, shooting underwater back in the fifties and sixties

was not easy. Yeah, I mean, if you accept them on their own terms, they're they're kind of marvelous. It's just they don't necessarily match up to to modern cinematic

pacing standards. I guess another thing that's kind of interesting to me about the Creature from the Black Calagoon that Weaver mentioned in his commentary is that creature has a lot of monsters I view shots, and this is contrasted to some of the earlier Universal Monster movies and some of the other movies that Alan and Jack Arnold had done.

I'm not sure if that says anything interesting about how they thought of the creature, but there is a lot in how the story was created and in how it's filmed that does to me make the creature kind of a sad, melancholy, sympathetic sort of character, unlike say Dracula, who is a predatory demon who arrives to you know, to to consume people's souls and kill them and turn them into his servants. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is a is a sad creature who who never really

I mean, like he lives in the Black Lagoon. People come and invade his territory and then they start messing with him and attacking him, and and he fights back. Now, of course he does try to kidnap Julie Adams, the leading lady in the movie, presumably because he's wowed by her beauty. Um, and so it's a King Kong kind of thing. You know, he falls in love and wants

to carry her off to his cave. But you often get the sense in the Creature from the Black Lagoon movies that the real villains are like the human heroes.

Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think this is something I picked up on as a kid, especially the more I learned about and unultimately when I saw the third film, Uh, the creature walks among us because in this one they've captured the creature horror really burned it in the process, and then they treat the creature and there's this there's this hokey scientific explanation basically Lamarckian evolution where the creatures scales fall away and it has human flesh underneath, and

it's becoming more man like. And they're all these just sad scenes of the this now land creature standing in this little enclosed area surrounded by barbed wire, longing for the sea, but it can't even go back to the sea because it will drown, and it does. And uh. In all these films, it's like the especially the white leads in the film, like they're never really in peril, like they're always in control. The creature just lumbers about

and uh. And the only reason it's able to grab the lady is because she just stands there and screams instead of like walking away from it. Yeah, generally the human lead characters in these films are just not very sympathetic that they're usually just coming into this monster's domain or not. I mean, it's a creature. They're coming into the creature's domain. And they're in the second movie, they even they fish for the creature with dynamite. They throw

dynamite into the black lagoon. It blows him up and he floats to the surface, stunned, and then they take him and they put him in a tank at Sea World and chain him to the bottom. And there's a great scene where somebody goes, I hope that chain holds, and the other guy goes, I wouldn't worry about that chain. So you see him like suffering and struggling and pulling at his chain, and eventually he gets free and this is and then runs around and yet again it's like

the heroes of the movie or the real villains. It reminds me a lot of the late great Gil Scott Heron had a bit kind of a stand up bit, like a spoken word bit that he did talking about Jaws, and he was saying, like, why why are you upset about Jaws attacking people? You're going where Jaws is, like you should you should only be upset if Jaws is attacking people in the city where where you are, Like you've gone where you're not supposed to be. So of

course there's Jaws. All right. I think we need to take a quick break and then when we come back, we'll discuss more about aquatic humanoid legends and the creature from the Black Lagoon. Thank alright, we're back, al right. So I mentioned earlier that I used to to think of the creature as being this mostly pure thing that

was untouched by the concerns of the real world. But then I was turned onto the commentary of Robin R. Means Coleman, particularly in particular, there was an episode of the NPR podcast Code Switch about the movie get Out, and they talked about some of the history of of African Americans and horror movies. So I ended up looking up Coleman's book. It's titled a Horror Noir Blacks in American Horror Film from an eighteen nineties to the present and uh and she she shares the following read on

the creature quote. The gil Man is cal long and Gus from the Birth of the Nation rolled into one impossible body. Bodily, the monster resembled a racist caricature. Its lips are large and exaggerated, Its skin is dark. It is seemingly feeble minded. Its movements are shambling, except for a swift, adept move it displays when stealing away with a white woman in side note, if anyone's not familiar Gus, who she mentions here, is the antagonist from the nineteen

fift movie The Birth of the Nation. Uh. The film attributed to the revival of the klu Klux Klan terrorist organization in the United states. In it, the clan served as heroes as they lynch an African American named Gus portrayed by a white actor in black face, who chases

a white woman off of a bridge. Coleman refers to this as the first real racial horror movie, and, as Coleman points out, the Creature from the Black Cogoon, the film features a white female researcher who is only there to scream and serve as the object of desire, a team of local Brazilians who only serve to p irish, and the first portion of the film, yeah, uh, only and then only the white scientific elite are able to best the creature. And uh, and certainly best that they

do that. These guys are supposed to be scientists, but instead of studying it, they just destroy it. Uh, for the crime of making eyes at this white woman. Yeah. Again, that's what we've been saying. I mean that they just show up in its lagoon and then they start attacking it essentially, and we're it's like we're supposed to feel

bad for them. I don't know, I mean, there's always this ambiguity in the monster movies of old, like King Kong, creature from the Black Calagoon, where you get the sense that maybe you're supposed to feel some sympathy for the creature, it's not quite clear how much. Yeah, and then I mean this additional um like racial read on everything just makes everything all the more problematic. She argues that the film presents the world in which the white race alone

has evolved and the rest are static. She points to the work of Patrick Gonder, who argues that the film isn't just about reinforcing white superiority and non white inferiority. It's a film that taps into racist fears of desegregation. Quote as the Black Monster, in leaving its proper place in the water and attempting to integrate among those on land,

is a Darwinian reminder of why segregation is necessary. So and I would argue that this is all the more unsettling if you go into the third Creature movie and watch it with these scenes of this, this even more human looking creature, like just behind barbed wire, just trapped, treated treated like an animal, even as you have these two characters that are engaging in these monologues about the it's the jungle versus the Stars, about how how we need to be kinder to the creature instead of violent

towards it. It's it's it's a very flawed and mishandled film in my opinion. But it's interesting how that this this read of this racial read of the creature um which some of you might not care for, but I think on one hand, it meshes with with with what

was going on in the Shadow of Rin Smith. I think it also echoes a lot of these ideas that we've already discussed of the the aquatic humanoid as being this this other, this uh, this uh, this creature that I mean, think to the Triton and the siren, Like the siren is beautiful and desirable. The triton, though the masculine version is to be feared, is more more brutal.

And that that lines up with with various racist depictions in which the female of another race is is an exotic object of desire and then the male counterpart part is depicted as something brutish. I'm not trying to ruin a classic film for anybody, but I do think this, this read is really worth considering. We need to start thinking about about the era that the film came from, and uh, the attitudes of the of the time. Uh, and and and what that the film is supposed to

say to a modern viewer. Yeah, I think that is a totally valid interpretive lens. I. I don't know of any of ths that this is what the filmmakers consciously had in mind. I think it's probably not, but that you can certainly see how these sorts of themes come out from, you know, the unconscious forces that guide our creativity, right, very much so, So as we begin to close out this episode, let's let's return to just some of the

trends that we've identified and skirted around. Uh, were concerning the various myths and fictions of aquatic humanoidse like what do they what do they represent? What do they convey? Obviously the mirror world, that's right, Yeah, Uh, the unknown depths as well as the dangers of the sea, the feature we so often see in Legends of Monsters, which is hybridity, you can bringing together different features of different

animals and humans. Yeah, and just mysterious biology as well, animals again washing up on the beach, and also humans with birth defects such as uh siren o'melia, which is a birth effect that involves the fusing of the legs together. It's a really depressing topic. But I have I was, I have read a couple of papers making the argument that some mermaid legends might be based on these defects. Also, we've mentioned mermaids as harbingers of doom as well as

sources of divine aid. There's the the idea that it's the erotic other, it's the monstrous other, that the evil or monstrous feminine. And uh, and just the idea too that it can be depicted as a racial other to that does not belong in our world. It's amazing that water has so much power, to carry so much symbolic weight and and to project so many different symbolic meanings.

Like I'm thinking about the way it's this mirror world in the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but then also the way in shadow over in Smith that can represent the idea of commerce with the rest of the planet. Yeah. Yeah, and you see again, you can think of the Golden Cities and which Merrorpy Bowler said to live, or you

can just think of dark, depressing depths. Um, yeah, it's a it's it's it's just put a proof positive again that there there are no simple monsters, no matter how shallow you think a particular fictional or even mythological creature, maybe when you start teasing it apart, there's there's a lot going on there. There's a whole legacy that it's built upon. What's the name of the Cathulu city, the city under the under the ocean where he's where he hangs out. I believe it's really a or something to

that effect. I wonder how that compares to the to the Golden Palace of Triton. I'm thinking it's might be a little darker, a little less less well lit, a little less golden. Totally random thought. Have you ever seen the coins that are the currency of Iceland? No? Do they have mermaids on them? Yeah? I haven't made it to the mermaid coins. Maybe it really high value they do.

But the coins, I remember, they are great compared to our coins because our coins have like politicians on them, and their coins have all the children of Dagon, so they've got crab coins, they've got trout coins, like all of the sea creatures make it onto the currency, and that has to be better for teaching kids about money. Like my my son would would would be far more into coins if they each had a cool animal on them.

So take note, uh, Nations of the World. Alright, Well, on that note, we're going to close out this episode, but there is going to be a follow up episode in which we will discuss some of the science of aquatic humanoids. Uh. And if you don't think there's any science there, well, just tune in and you'll be surprised. In the meantime, check out all the previous episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Stuff to Blow your

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