Listener Mail: Union of the Snake

Whatever you want to send us, fair game. We of course always appreciate feedback on recent episodes, especially if you have something interesting to add to a topic we have talked about. I guess this is the first listener mail we're doing since the New Year, and we've got it. We've got a backlog. A lot of messages came in before we were out for the holidays, so so a lot of them have tags like happy Holidays and such. That is the reason.

and all. Make sure that you are still subscribed to the show, make sure you're still getting downloads and so forth. Just another thing that our internal departments have told us to flag for listeners.

having to count the grains of salt. The Doctor poors on the floor in front of them. I also gained a new appreciation for Sesame Street from the episode of Monster Fact in last week's Doctor Who. I always thought the count you know one two was just a clever play on the word count and the name Count Dracula, but now I realize this character was actually based on

real vampire mythos. Thanks for reading, Mike. So yeah, I think this was a talking about the magic of knots in this episode and about how you know you have

this one. There are a lot of ideas regarding vampires and the sort of folkloric and fictional worlds, but you do encounter the idea that if you leave a complex not out, they will have to untie it and maybe they'll get caught up when the sun rises, and then you know, presto, they're burnt to a crisp or leaving out grains of something for them to count as another variation that they will be compelled to do so and it might delay their escape from the sun.

of magic. You know it can. It's something that can take place across time, across space. It can bind wills, it can bind souls, and it can command monsters.

rat kings probably do occur naturally. Probably it occurs when rats of a specific species of Rattus ratus, the black rat huddle together in a nest, they get their tails entangled and stuck together somehow, maybe stuck together with a sticky substance or frozen together somehow, and then they by their natural movements kind of make the problem worse and tie their tails in a knot, ultimately that they are

unable to escape. But there's still a question as to whether this does happen in nature or whether it's people, you know, taking rats and doing some kind of weird surgery to them to create these Jenny Hannover type sort of taxidermy hoax objects. Jim has some commentary on that. Jim says, Hi, Robert and Joe, season's greetings to you both, your families and your listeners. Love the show. Been a

long time listener from Canberra down Under. In regards to the rat king episode, I can see how very young rats may get their tails tangled in a nest, especially if the nest is small and high populations of rats are inside the nest. But as an environmental and domestic pest controller, I've destroyed hundreds of nests and never seen this in a nest. I've used an arrangement of traps

in order to control these populations. With this method, we will sometimes trap the rats by their tails, and one hundred percent of the time the rats will warning here gnaw off their tails. Why I'm a bit skeptical is that the tales range from juvenile tales to large adult tales. Just thought I would add my experience to this one. Take care and keep up the great work. Cheers Jim. Well,

thanks Jim. That is interesting information, and I would wonder I guess, first of all, what species of rat your experiences are with, because, as I was saying a minute ago, basically all of the credible reports of rat kings are Rattus ratus, aka the black rat, and not some other species.

So if it's true that Ratus ratus will somehow gnaw off or otherwise detach its tail when trapped by the tail, I think that would make me more skeptical of the idea that rat kings do occur naturally and that the reports of people finding them are naturally occurring objects, because why wouldn't they just detach their tails like they do in these other situations where they become trapped. But that, yeah, that's interesting, Thank you, Jim.

Ghost Rock, says Hi Joe and Rob longtime fan ghost Rock. Here, I wanted to chime in on the rat King episode. My favorite pop culture reference to rat Kings is from the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. I have not read this one. The book combines stories of the rat King with the legend of

the Pied Piper of Hamlin. I won't go into too much detail, but the book could be almost a standalone novel in that it doesn't involve recurring characters like the night Watch or the Witches or any of the events that occur in Discworld, and could be a generic low

man fantasy world. A cat, the titular Maurice and his boy, along with some magically enhanced mice, are running a con game throughout the country where they scan the local officials into believing there is a horrible rat infestation, and then the boy will play his flute and magically rid the town of the pests. But actually the educated mice and the cat are the brains behind the scheme, and the boy is more or less along for the ride. Trouble comes when they hit on a town that has a

real rat infestation that is being controlled by a rat king. Hilarity, tension, and danger ensue. Thanks again for the show and all your hard work. I look forward to each episode. Gats Rock.

It has a great cast. You have Michelle Dockery as Death's daughter, susan Ian Richardson is the voice of Death, David Jason is Albert, Mark Warren is Mister t Time, and David Warner is Lord Downey, who's like the Lord of the Guild of Assassins. So it's a lot of fun. But anyway, ghost Rock, thanks for writing in. And yeah, I'll have to move some Terry Pratchett up on the reading list, all right. This next one comes to us from Daniel Daniels. Has a very interesting email here regarding

the Nutcracker episodes. Says, Hi, I listened to your Nutcracker episode and remembered an incident that I remember from my childhood. We went to visit my grandmother and I noticed she had a nutcracker on the table I'd never seen before. This would be the late seventies. It was a big chunk of clear acrylic the size of an adult fist. It was cube shaped with a hole through it big enough to fit even a walnut. There was a thread tapped into a half inchish hole bored through into the

center hole from one side of the cube. All right, I'm in trouble picturing this at this point, but let's keep up. This threaded hole had an acrylic rod with a thread and a wing nut style finger grip turner on it. I was excited to see it work, so we bought some nuts, and with great anticipation, my dad began to screw the first nut. There was a sharp crack and the cube split into I don't know how strong the acrylic was, or if there was some sort of an unseen flaw, but it never cracked a single

nut despite being a big, beefy chunk of plastic. Maybe it was one of the decorative, non functional ones you talked about. I've never before or since seen acrylic used for a device like this. Love the show, Cheers, Daniel.

stories before the actual Christmas Eve. But we pulled out the Christmas edition from the Enchanted World timeline book series, which has some various Christmas things and of course lovely illustrations, but it tells the classic version of the Nutcracker and has some wonderful, just terrifying illustrations of of course the rat King or the mouse King rather, and then has these added elements that are believer pulled right out of the original short story that inspired all of this, in

which the character of the Uncle takes on this added sinister tone because at the end, the little girl and her Nutcracker prints, you know, she asked that they be together forever and he grants her wish, and she's essentially trapped inside this toy castle that the uncle had constructed, so it's very haunted. We had a nice, nice haunting holiday story to share with each other there on Christmas Eve.

Imagine my surprise when you started talking about Santa Versus the Devil. I had a vague memory of it and wasn't entirely sure if it was the same movie it was. I actually went to see this at a movie theater, probably in the original sp Vanish. I don't remember much, just the cherry red devil getting burned with a door handle. For me, this counts as an early memory, and what I remember very clearly is how that movie made me

feel confused, uncomfortable, and a bit scared. I must have been about five years old, so not particularly young, but it made me go over what I think are my earliest memories, and all of them are anchored to a strong feeling I don't remember haha. If you came to a similar conclusion in your early Memory episodes. Anyway, thank you so much for your wonderful work. I always learned something from you. Best regards and happy holidays, Luisa. Well,

thank you so much, Luisa. I love when we hear from people who saw these movies when they came out, especially if they were little kids, like seeing them in the Luisa's so great. It's been a while since we did THEE Before You Could Remember series, but it does

seem right that a lot of early memories now. Apart from us commenting on the accuracy of like the narrative content of the memories, that a lot of early memories do have some kind of strong emotional content to them, that it might be something that made you feel good and cozy, or made you feel afraid or something like that.

John Savage's mom in The Princess Bride? And true enough, I did misspeak and I said John Savage, which would have been totally different, did totally different Princess Bride if you had had then thirty eight years old John Savage in the kid role. John Savage, of course, was in The Deer Hunter in the Onion Fields and also in a TV series titled Dark.

as I scroll through IMDb from time to time. Anyway, Walter continues, it says, but Anyway, the real reason I wrote in was because I listened to Crockett's theme after you both talked it up. I wanted to share that there is a whole genre of new artists putting out tracks trying to sound almost exactly like that song synthwave. I've included a Spotify link to my favorite synthwave playlist. If either of you are interested in taking a listen.

I love the movie recommendations and I can't wait to see what new Christmas themed movies you two will recommend in the coming weeks. Walter, So yeah, thanks for sending the synth wave playlist as well. I'm a fan of several of the artists on this particular playlist, but there are a number of them here that I am not familiar with, so I'm always excited to check out new music, particularly while working and driving, which is exactly what synthwave is for in my life.

from the eighties as a kid. I wonder how much of the appeal of this genre, the synthwave type music is specifically for people our age or older who remember that kind of media landscape and it's a nostalgic appeal for that thing, or whether this music might just be equally appealing. I don't know if it just sounds good and is equally appealing to people who don't have those memories to sort of rejog.

of the colors without knowing exactly what they all are. So, you know, I guess the nostalgia can add to the appreciation, but of course, the nature of nostalgia is it can also make something beautiful a little bit sad. I mean, that's the whole power of nostalgia. So I don't know. Maybe there are cases where you're better off not having them nostalgia because you don't get the you don't get as sweet of a taste, but you're also not getting that sour or the bittersweet as well.

For once, after listening through the Weird House Cinema episode on RoboCop and being a sound designer, myself, I was a bit bummed out over the fantastic sound design by Stephen Flick and John pospisil never being brought up, which deserves mention, as in my mind it sits right behind

Star Wars as the most iconic and instantly recognizable in cinema. Fortunately, the sound design is pretty extensively documented, as they meaning Stephen Flick and John Pospicial wrote a letter required for the Oscar nomination process, which has since been preserved online for all to read and folks at home. I did go and read this letter in full. It's worth looking up and reading because it describes in detail where a

lot of the sound effects in RoboCop came from. It like describes the process they went through to try to create the sounds, and like things that didn't work, that didn't sound right, and what they would what they ended up using, and in a lot of cases it's very funny and surprising. And Daniel goes on to describe some

of these in his email. Daniel says, some of my favorite highlights include, after many iterations, they settled on a footstep fully made from a prop of truck timing chains embellished with a low frequency synthesizer thud and a distinct clink afterwards, meant to evoke the spurs of Cowboy Boots, pulling from some of the Western themes present in the film.

It's great, how like you can watch the movie so many times and never think about the fact that you're hearing it and making these subconscious associations still like other media and stuff. As soon as I read that, I'm like, God, that's right. It does kind of sound like spurs on Cowboy Boots. There's like a clink there. But I never consciously put that together, even though I'm sure at some level I did make that association.

be kind of invisible. You don't necessarily think about them unless you know you have you know, maybe you know you have a little more insight into the world of it, or when it's bad, I stand out or there's something unnatural about it, But when it's so perfectly executed, you're like, no, that's that's the sound AD two nine makes exactly not going to second guess it for a second, or think about how the magic happens.

I think that's true too. That's great. Like the kinetic sound effects, there are things that are in reality generally silent, but you hear them in the movie, there's a kind of like whooshing or a movement sound effect, a kind of advancing noise when when something is approaching or moving, even though you if you were actually standing there and literally seeing an object moving in that way, you probably wouldn't hear anything. It's kind of like in visual animation,

like the movement lines drawn around something. Yeah, Daniel goes on. While not explicitly brought up in the letter, the application of the chorus slash flanger effect on his voice to make it sound more mechanical is also cleverly woven into the storytelling. As the effect is removed from his voice, wants his behavior shifts to becoming more human. If I recall, the specific point is once he confronts Emil Antanowski at

the gas station. Okay, yeah, I think I can hear this too, that the vocal processing is sort of turned down on his voice as he as he becomes more and more human throughout the film, JJ, could you put some chorus on my voice to make me sound more like a robot? What does chorus on a voice sound like? I am issuing commands? Now engage Finally, Daniel says, also

after listening to the ratking episode. With both rats and RoboCop fresh in my mind, I thought an excellent candidate for a future weird House cinema would be the nineteen eighty three movie of unknown origin, starring Peter Weller as a yuppie losing his mind fighting an unusually resilient and

destructive rat hiding in his fancy New York home. I had a hard time deducing what this movie was trying to be tonally, as the premise suggests something more psychological or perhaps comedic in nature, but while watching the trailer, it was clearly riding on the mood and imagery of Poltergeist, which had come out the year before Happy Holidays. Daniel, Wow, I don't know, I haven't seen that. That sounds weird.

I wonder if has that come up in another Weird House episode, Robert, The premise sounds kind of familiar, but I know I haven't seen it.

Absolutely worthy of a mention. And I'm sorry, you know, we we do often end up focusing mostly on the cast when we talk about people associated with the film, and obviously there are tons of there's tons of talent that goes into making any great movie, and a lot of that is behind the camera, not in front of it, or is you know, the people who create the you know, create the things we see on screen or that we hear on the soundtrack, but we we oftentimes don't even

know their names. It really emphasizes how much film is a team effort and it takes a lot of talented people to make a great one.