Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind Listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb.
And my name is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day of each week that we read back messages from the Stuff to Blow your Mind mail bag. If you've never gotten in touch before, why not give it a shot. You can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Whatever kind of message you want to send is great. Of course, we always welcome feedback
to recent episodes. If you have something interesting you'd like to add, or a correction or a question, any kind of follow up on something we've talked about, send it on in. If you want to suggest a topic for us to do in the future, that's always welcome. Or if you just want to say hi, let us know your thoughts about the show, or how you listen, where you listen from, tell us about yourself. That's all fine too. It is contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Let's see Rob if you don't mind, I'm going to kick things off with a response to our series on mud.
Yes, please date.
This is from Stefan and Stefan says that he is German, so he hopes his German English is acceptable. It's perfectly acceptable, Steffan. We always want to hear from anybody whatever state you're English is in, you know, send it on in. We'll do what we can with it. So we appreciate this.
This is following up from a digression in one part of that series about the famous scene in the movie Predator, the Original Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger where he evades the heat vision of the alien hunter by covering his body in mud, and we talked a little bit about whether that would actually work. It seems like if it did work, it would only work for a very short time, basically until the mud heats up to same temperature as the rest of your body. Stefan says, Hey, Robert and Joe,
great podcast has always many thanks for your work. A short remark to mud, Arnold's and Predators. This is a direct reference to the German legend daslid der Nibelungen. Siegfried, the hero of this legend, killed a wildly feared dragon with his sword, the Balmung. A bit of the dragon's blood spilled on his skin, and he noticed that his
skin became invulnerable due to this plaster. He jumped into the puddle of dragon's blood and in this way provided himself with an impenetrable armor, except one little spot on his back, right between his shoulder blades, which was accidentally
covered by a leaf of a linden tree. The story goes that his wife cream Hilled, gave this information to his rival Hagen van Tronier Tronia, sorry, I'm doing my best, also who a little later took the opportunity to kill Siegfried by stabbing him with a spear right at the spot in his back which was covered by the leaf and therefore still vulnerable. I think mister Antol, the director
of the first Predators movie. And a quick side note, I think Stephan might have been confused here because Antol is the name of the director of the twenty ten movie Predators, but the name of the director of the first movie from nineteen eighty seven was John McTiernan. But whatever the case, Stefan is saying about the director of the first Predator movie, Stephan says must have been a
big fan of the German legends. So replace Siegfried by Arnold and dragon's blood by mud, and you don't have to go a long way to Arnold's and mud puddles winky face emoji. I hope my German English was sufficient to get this remark across. Looking forward to your next podcast, Greetings from northern Germany, half between Hamburg and New Munster if you are interested, Stefan.
Oh, that's wonderful. I mean, obviously, connections between myth and legend and modern horror and sci fi movies. I mean, that's that's our that's our cup of tea.
Now, this is a good question. I haven't seen the original Predator in quite a while. I don't recall how the mud invisibility armor is eventually compromised. What happens? Does Arnold fall into water and that washes it off? I think that might be the case.
Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to remember as well. Because he evades the Predator successfully and then of course preps for the big showdown where he makes an unrealistically powerful long bow.
Yeah, he builds a bow, just like stretching it with his arms.
Yeah, and then he covers himself with mud again, and you know, looks really badass to go out for this fight. But yeah, This is where you can really get You can ask a lot of questions about how long the mud would be effective, were were effective at all. I don't remember how how that battle really plays out. I think there's some back and forth there, because it's a pretty good fight. You know, it's the it's it's it's
it's man against alien. It's it's Dutch bringing all of his clever tricks versus the tricks that the Predator still has a bit sleeve, including a nuclear weapon literally up.
Well, and it has a move in it that I always like in movies. For some reason, I find a lot of the best human versus monster movies have this convention, which is the humans set a trap for the monster that always works well. I like that in you know, going way back to the Thing from Another World nineteen fifty is it nineteen fifty the Howard Hawks movie, you know, where they set the electricity trap and they you know,
Dutch does it. In Predator. He like builds up a counterweight log trap to try to pin the Predator up against like an overhanging branch that he hides by knives, and that doesn't exactly work out to plan, but he's still able to use the trap in a counterintuitive way
to win in the end. In fact, speaking of myth and legend, I would be interested in in tracing that that sort of human versus monster trope all the way back, Like, are what are the early versions of that where the hero is not able to defeat the monster in a direct contest, but defeats it by setting a clever trap.
Oh, you know, this is something we could potentially explore in a future episode. Maybe this would be a good one for Halloween season this year. We've touched on ghost traps before on the show before, but there could be more there, you know, monster traps and myth and legend, whereas ghost traps are often actual physical items and artifacts of superstition.
Right in about your favorite monster traps, whether that's from an ancient myth or from a modern movie.
All right, We continue to hear from a lot of folks concerning our Dream Falls series. This one comes to us from Adam. Adam writes, Hello, Robert and Joe and the rest, by which you means Jja, longtime listener of the show here. I've always wanted to write in, but after listening to the last listener mail episode, I now have some things to share. It's time for some more Baku content. In the video game Neo, there are many types of guardian spirits. We had to look this up.
By the way.
This is a Japanese video game that I believe is released on like the PlayStations. I'm not sure which format you know. I'm not familiar with the PlayStation so much these days.
Neither of us have played it, so we're unfamiliar.
So Adam continues. These are animal familiars that grant divine protection and power to those they favor. In the sequel Neo two, one of these guardian spirits is a baku. This particular baku is called Yumihami. Its name literally means dream eater. Its dream eating abilities are not shown in game, and it uses lightning powers instead. I believe its dream eating nature is more symbolic. In the story, Yumihami is
the guardian spirit of the game's main antagonist, Otakimaru. Otakimaru bestows Yumihami to a character whose ambitions are getting out of hand, causing him to turn into a villainous warlord. Thus, it could be said that the baku devours the dreams and ambitions of others. To fuel its own. In the game's expansions, you eventually acquire a Baku named as such. The game describes the Baku as devouring the desires of people.
It appears to have been corrupted by Otakimaru's dream to destroy humanity, which, given his history of interfering with humanity to cause conflict, also lines up with the idea of devouring the dreams of others to fuel its own. Otakima Momorrow eventually fuses with the Baku in an attempt to fulfill his dream, causing him to become a horrible monster, which has no physical Baku traits for his final battle.
Now, it would be funny if the horrible monster did have Baku traits and it, you know, it looked like a taper that you like, a monster taper that you had to fight.
I mean, I'm sure it could be done. People love taking cute things and twisting them into a little bit to the left into something a little more horrifying. But anyway, I'm gonna have to do an image search on these later and see what these look like. Yeah, Adam continues that appears to be all the interesting things about the Baku in Neo two that I can think of. The neo games have their own interesting takes on Japanese folklore and mythology, and the Baku's depiction is just one of them.
Never anything really deep, but fun to talk about. Anyways, thank you for hosting this show for many years and for all the interesting topics you've discussed. Hopefully I can write in another time with more ideas regards Adam.
So, one thing this got me thinking about is the multiple meanings of the word dream in English. So in English, a dream is the on one hand, the experience you have while you are asleep. It's like, you know, you go to the dream world, you have dreams, but the same word is used to mean desires, basically the things you wish to accomplish with your life, or you wish what happen to you. And I realized I don't know
if that same double meaning occurs in other languages. So like in Japanese, does the same word mean the things that you see when you're asleep and the things that you desire in your life? I would assume based on the blurring here in the game, where a quote dream eater is something that eats your ambitions, that means that it's the same way in Japanese, and I wonder if it's that way in many languages.
Yeah, it's a fascinating question, you know, when you get into the linguistics of things like this. Well, Adam, thanks for writing in. So many of these video games are off our radar, especially these days, so it's great to hear from folks who are familiar with them, because, yeah, there's so much amazing, amazing creativity that goes into these these virtual worlds that have been and continue to be created for the video game making a market.
All right, I'm going to read a message in response to our episode The Machine Speaks, which was about machines that were designed to synthesize human speech from before the age of electrical machines. So basically just like acoustical mechanical machines almost kind of pipe organs that were that were designed to try to speak like a human and to some degree accomplished that feat. So this message is from Magnolia.
Magnolia says, maybe it was the lack of sleep that got to me, but I listened to your recent episode The Machine Speaks. During a late night laundry crusade. Parentheses, broken dryer and found the story of Fober, that's Joseph Fobber, the inventor of the Euphonia and his Euphonia, absolutely heartbreaking. Often while listening to history, I find myself imagining myself as a time traveler speaking to the subjects that I'm
learning about. In this particular case, I saw myself approaching a depressed and disheveled Fober, my phone in one hand and the tiny blue case with my earbuds in the other. I imagine myself saying something along the lines of this for your right ear and this for your left as I shared the earbuds with him, and then playing something explaining how his efforts eventually inspired the creation of the miracle I was now demonstrating. The problem comes in when I
tried to imagine what I would play for him. The first scenario that I imagine was playing him the episode that I was just listening to. But I don't think hearing people's opinions of him would have been great for his mental health. Oh yeah, hearing all those descriptions of him is like a disheveled and obsessed and haunted Oh.
I think we were sympathetic to it, But yes, we were reading some unkind things by others.
Well, I think even some of the people who described him that way were sympathetic. They were just saying like, hey, yeah, this guy's having a hard time.
Yeah, they didn't hold anything back.
Yeah, but Magnolia goes on. The next thing I imagined was some contemporaneous music opera maybe, but I don't know enough about the music of his day to make a good choice. At this point, I've spent way too much time trying to imagine what to play for this person I'll never actually meet. So I throw the question to you, guys, what would you play for a depressed and disheveled fober to give him hope and show him what the future
held Magnolia? Ah, okay, So the idea that I guess not just music but speech could be replicated in a synthetic way and with infinite variety.
Hmm.
I mean, I guess the boring answer is to set him a talking to Siri or something, you know, just get him with like a digital voice assistant there. But I bet we could do better than that. To say, I would play some of those Peter Frampton songs that have the vocoder in them. You know what I'm talking about.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be a good choice.
Does he feel like we do.
Now?
He does because he's because he's hearing it himself.
Oh well, how about the nineteen eighty three Neil Young album trans.
Wow, Well that's kind of out of nowhere, but okay, yeah that does have vocoder, Yeah, I.
See, yeah, robot voice going on in there. Yeah, I don't know. I guess in general, I would I would think, well, he's in a tough place. I want to probably play some self help content, like, you know, think some eck cart toole or something. But if I but it was just music, I you know, i'd probably fall back on Tangerine Dream, you know, play him a nice, nice Tangerine Dream album. Maybe Ruby Kant, that's a good one. Nineteen seventy five.
I'm cycling through the songs on that Neil Young album in my head. Maybe maybe maybe he should hear Computer Cowboy.
Oh, I remember liking some of them, Transformer Man, Unit to Sample and hold.
There's actually a there's a nice cover of Transformer Man, but an acoustic one on his unplugged album from oh nineties.
I don't think i've heard that. Opticos Go look that up. All right, We're gonna go ahead and transition into some weird house listener mail here. This one comes to us from Pat. Guys, you recently asked about Elvis movies? Was he in a western? Was he in a movie in which he did not sing? Charro and Charo? The title of this movie has an exclamation point at the end of it. A non singing Elvis Western. This movie was typical of fifties westerns and not particularly special. I saw
it on an afternoon television showing. In the sixties and seventies, local television station showed a movie every day at four o'clock. They would have presentations like Elvis Week or Road two Week, Crosby and Hope Buddy Pictures. Thanks again, Pat. All right, So I had to look this up, and I actually actually ended up texting my aunt a little bit, because my aunt is a huge lifelong Elvis fan, like that's
one of her big things. So I reached out to her with a couple of questions about non singing Elvis movies, and she told me that, yep, there's only one non singing Elvis movie, and it is indeed nineteen sixty nine's Charro By the way. It's also the only film in which Elvis wore a beard. Oh, look this up, and he has a beard like in some shots and promotional stills, it looks more like stubble. Other times it looks like, yeah, he's kind of got the beginnings of a full beard.
There, I'm looking it up right now. Okay. He plays a character named Jess Wade. Oh yeah, I see the beard. I mean, yeah, it's a kind of a beard.
Yeah, it's but it's significantly more beard than you usually see on Elvis. I also asked my aunt what her favorite singing Elvis movie was, and she couldn't pick just one. She said that there are many good ones, but the quote Jailhouse Rock is excellent, and then she included a chef's kiss emoji. And she also highlighted King Creole and
Blue Hawaii. King Creole is notable. It has both Carolyn Jones and Vic Morrow in it, both of whom have come up on Weird House Cinema, and Blue Hawaii had Angela Lansbury in it.
I don't think I've ever seen all of an Elvis movie.
No, No, neither neither of I you know, And I guess the kicker is We could never actually cover an Elvis movie on Weird House, not a proper Elvis movie, because Elvis movies are pretty much the opposite of weird. He never popped up in anything with a like speculative element, no horror, no even real thrillers. However, I have toyed with the idea of doing a series of like square
movies by weird directors. I guess we'd call it square house cinema, looking at stuff like John Carpenter's nineteen seventy nine Elvis movie starring Kurt Russell and Shelley Winters, or David Cronenberg's Fast Company from the same year, which is carr movie.
I see in the notes you said that one has George Buza.
In it yep, along with John Saxon and an actor. The star is William Smith, who played Conan's father in Conan and the Barbarian. This is probably a funnier idea than it would be an execution, though, so probably just best to stick to things that are actually weird.
Okay. One last weird House message. This is from Tauntrey. Tauntrey says hello again to my favorite podcasters. Loved the black Hole episode. I'd never seen or even heard of the film and am delighted to have watched it now. However, I think you guys misread the ending. Maximilian and this is the devilish sort of steally red ARCon robot. The evil robot. Maximilian is I think supposed to be doctor Kate's father.
Hmm.
I definitely didn't put that together, but Tontree goes on, that's why doctor Reinhardt said he's afraid of him, and then when he mentions Kate's eyes so specifically, it is foreshadowing to the end when Maximilian and doctor Reinhardt are in the black Hole hell and we see her father's eyes inside Maximilian's head when he's tormenting doctor Reinhardt. The Horror,
The Horror. Also regarding the black Hole the ride, I found this and then Tautrey includes a link to something I couldn't click through to for some reason, but anyway I found it seems to be about a ride that was never fully implemented at Disneyland that would have been
based around the movie The black Hole. I think it is something that, if I understand correctly speculatively, this ride was previously what's it called Adventures in Innerspace and then eventually it was turned into the Star Tours ride.
Yeah. Star Tour is a fun ride.
Oh yeah, yeah, that was like the Star Wars ride they had before the modern era of the lucasfilm Disney Union, like it goes back to the eighties and.
They still have some version of it. My son and I wrote it when we went down to the Star Wars land at Disney World.
It is what do you call this type of ride? It's where you're not actually like going anywhere in the ride. It's more kind of like showing you a three three D video and moving you back and forth in a barrel.
Yeah. I forget the industry terminology for this. But there's a great series on Disney Plus about like the story behind some of the key rides, and they get into this one a.
Bit simulated motion or something. But Tandrey, coming back to your idea about this being Maximilian's father, that's very interesting and I think you may be onto something. I didn't catch that at all while watching. And when you see the eyes inside Maximilian and the kind of hell after life dream sequence at the end, I assumed that to be doctor Reinhardt's eyes and him being sort of having merged or fused with Maximilian and he's trapped inside. But
I could totally see it being the other way around too. Yeah.
I like hearing a different read on this. It certainly it's ambiguous enough that it invites different interpretations.
And I think it would make sense of doctor Reinhardt surprisingly saying he's afraid of Maximilian and then like asking Kate to protect him from Maximilian, which doesn't really make any sense otherwise.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it barely makes sense even with this interpretation, but that I like a fresh interpretation, and you know it, And it's also neat that that Tantry got the experiences for the first time. You know, we're bringing we're bringing these films out for folks to experience, treasures from the Temple for everyone to enjoy. Well, you know, our own murderous Kilbot. Carney is telling us that the
time is up. No more listener mail for this episode, but we have more that we'll come back to in future episodes. Listener Mail episodes published Mondays and The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed core episodes of our podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on Wednesdays, a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays. Indeed, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Protect us from Carney. Here's thanks to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.