Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And today on the podcast, we are going to be starting a two part series of episodes exploring a kind of salad bar of topics related to the Star Wars universe. Now, Rob, I know you love a calendar tie in. We've got something going on on the calendar the week that these episodes are airing, Right.
That's right, May the fourth, the unofficial turn basically official holiday for all things Star Wars.
Okay, that's a pun, Right the fourth be with you? Yeah, very cute.
Yeah.
So I think for all of the first episode today, we're going to be talking about a setting from the Empire Strikes Back, my favorite of the Star Wars movies. It's going to be the planet Hath, the Ice World, location of the Hidden Rebel Bass where the first act of the movie takes place. So we're gonna be talking about wampas, We're gonna be talking about ton toons as organisms,
ton toons as sleeping bags, and maybe some other stuff. Rob, I wonder if you have a similar kind of particular childhood memories of the Hawth scenes to the ones that I hold. So I really loved the Hawth segment of Empire when I was a kid, not just because of the ice planet aliens, I did really like those, but
I really liked the snow speed or battle scene. I remember that always stood out to me as one of my favorite, you know, spaceship battle scenes in the movies, and I think it's because it wasn't just blasterbeams shooting back and forth. I really liked the way that they used the trick with the harpoons and the tow cables around. They use that to trip up the walker legs and knock them down, really like action scenes with the tactile all change up like that, where there's like a different
kind of I don't know, substance being deployed. And I remember liking the Ewok battle in Empire or Sorry in Jedi for the same reason, though that one maybe didn't age quite as gloriously for me personally, but it's still great.
Well, you love a good booby trap, and yeah both have traps. Both of these involved setting traps for big lumbering like machines, so uh and uh yeah, I mean, I obviously I love Empire Strikes Back as well. It's one of these weird films though for me that I saw it so early on, like like as a as a tiny child, and like grew up with it and grew up with the toys from this movie, grew up
with the world of this movie. It's almost like growing up like within a religion or a certain culture that you It was only much later that I really sat down and thought about, well, Okay, this is why I liked it, this is why it connected with me, and these are the things that's that are legitimately great about it, because yeah, it was just all around me. In fact,
I had to bring this in. I have my Tonton action figure, our action accessory from when I was a kid, showing that off on the video for folks who have the video. I didn't keep most of those things, but I did keep the Tonton. And I think that there are only a few aliens that I connected with so much that I had to like hold on to them in one way or another. There's this, There's Max Reebo, There's a few others like that. In the I had to keep the Tonton.
You showed me earlier. Can you let the people those who are watching on video, can you see the hinge where the action figure goes into the back of the ton Oh?
Yeah, right here, So there was also a saddle, there were you know, accessories and all. But but yeah, there was this little place where you just stick the feet directly into the back of the tonton, which is not how it actually worked in the show, but something like that, of course occurs.
Why did they make horses like that that you can ride inside?
I don't know. I wonder if this was a common toy build. I don't know. Toy historians will have to ride in and let us know if this trick was ever employed with just straight up like Cowboy and horse action figure sets.
All right, well, maybe we should just jump right in and talk a bit about the give a sketch of the fictional world of the planet Hawth.
All right, I'm gonna ahead and mention a book. I have a number of different like Star Wars bestiaries, and one is full of droids, So I guess it's a I don't know what you would call that droid technical guide. But this one here, this is a field guide from Star Wars. The wildlife of Star Wars a field guide. This one was by Tyrrel Whitlach and Bob Carral. They're
both from two thousand and one. Both of these authors, by the way, are interesting figures in the history of Star Wars because Corral wrote co wrote the nineteen eighty four film The Ewok Adventure, and Whitlatch, an illustrator with a background in zoology, served as a principal creature designer for Star Wars Episode one, The Phantom Menace, which of
course has a lot of great creatures in it. Okay, so, uh let's provide just a little overview of Hath First, just a reminder, and actually before I do the reminder, I'm going to give our standard sort of geek disclaimer here. Uh, Joe and I are not experts on Star Wars lore. We we we love a lot of it. We know what we love. But you know, there's this is not going to be like a a lore dump sort of episode.
So there are things that we're going to talk about that might not completely sync up with canon or extended universe and the various different like religious divisions within Star Wars fandom. Uh So, you know, refer to Wookipedia if you have any additional questions, but certainly right in if you have, you know, if you if you do want to say yes, but actually, uh, right in, well, we're happy to have those conversations.
I feel more inclined to give the non expertise caveats about like scientific domains, I would say, when it comes to star Ward. Not even George Lucas is an expert in Star Wars.
I firmly believe things like this, like it ends up belonging to everybody, so you can take what you want and make that be your Star Wars, make that be your universe, and so forth. So, you know, trying not to get to me, trying not to get to in a rut over any of it. But at any rate, let's talk about haw Hawk is the sixth planet where I understand, revolving around a small lower level blue white sun.
As we all know, it's frigid. It's a frozen world, mostly known to humans anyway for its vast glacier fields and snow drifts. It also has a breathable atmosphere, which from our point of view is a big deal. But I guess within the Star Wars universe is not that exceptional. There are playing planets that have atmospheres that most humanoids can breathe.
Seems like almost all of them, right.
Yeah. Now, as the Wildlife of Star Wars field Guide points out, there is a currently a great deal of geothermal heat that never fully reaches the surface, yet adequately warms various underground crake, underground caves, and grottos. So the surface is also frequently pelted with castaways from the nearby meteor belt. But still life persists on the planet and
to a great degree within the planet. So in these various caves of rock, caves of ice, there's life down there, and in particular where to understand, there's like nd in plant matter, because there seems to be enough plant matter on this world for an herbiv war population to thrive. And these are of course the tontons. We mainly see the one tonton species. I think in the movies this
is sometimes referred to as the giant tonton. But as this book gets into and various other bits of Star Wars you know, extended lore, have explored, there may be as many as fifteen tons ton species, and so you have like smaller tontons that are like crawling or climbing tontons, and this just happens to be the biggest one that can be domesticated or at least utilized as a steed by humanoid visitors to this world.
Now that I think about it, the movie never actually says that the tontons are herbivores, does it. You just assume that since you see one get attacked by the wampa, a larger, obviously carnivorous animal. So at least in my brain, it went like, oh, okay, tontons are prey, therefore they are herbivores. And I guess because animals that we ride in reality tend to be herbivores. I know, if there are any standard carnivorous animals that people ride as a regular thing.
I mean, it's weird enough that the carnivorous feline cat is in such close proximity to us, you know, an hot meat eater. But but yeah, I don't think we ever see the tontons eating the movie. But yeah, we just it's implied. It's or we just assume that they eat plants, so therefore there must be enough plant on Hoth or in Hath to sustain a sizable population of tontons, and there are enough tontons to sustain some population of apex predators the wamp interesting.
Yeah, but as you're alluding to, those plants must be mostly in places that we don't see in the film, because again we just see these like glaciers and ice field. Right, there's obviously not much to eat.
Yeah, they must be eating something that is under the snow, under the eyes in one way or another. And geothormally thermally heated cavern seems like a good enough beat. So what does a tantan look like? I think most of you are probably picturing it, but I or you if you have video you saw me hold up the toy and you're in that case, maybe reminded that it. It kind of looks like a cross between a ram, a goat, and a dinosaur.
Yeah, yeah, that's very good. Yes, like theropod dinosaur posture on the two back legs with the large hips and then a counterbalancing tail and a big upper body. But then yeah, a kind of fluffy, furry kind of appearance, more like a goat with those rams horns, and then the face is a little bit goat and also just a little bit muppet a little bit luf dragon sort of.
Yeah. And I don't know if this makes sense, but I used to think that they kind of look like George Washington in the face. I don't know if that makes a lot of sense, but I'll hold it up here. I don't know. I just as a kid, I would look at that and think it kind of looks like the guy on the dollar bill. But maybe that was just me.
I honestly can't say I see it, but I'm trying.
Okay, So what is this? Is it a mammal? Is it a reptile? Well, some of the lore books would say it is a repto mammalian creature, So some sort of warm blooded creature with scales, fur, and thick blubber. The let's see sort of some other things worth mentioning. The field Guide here says, you know, I think the other thing that is established in the movie is that
they smell bad. Characters are always commenting on this. The field Guide says that they can somehow turn this odor off, or at least cease to produce it while resting or holding up with young so as not to attract predators. Though given that they seem to have only one predator. Perhaps that predator just simply doesn't depend on smell. I don't know, I'm just throwing that out there.
Interesting. Well, now, I never thought about this. I always just assumed the idea that they smell bad is like people who aren't used to being around farm animals might think that farm animals smell bad. But I guess the other place you could go is that they have an incredibly like biologically intentional, pungent odor like a skunk, that is somehow used for something.
Right right like you could be I mean, certainly, it could be a way of communicating. It could be you know, it could be marking their territory. It could be the result of some sort of you know, some of the oils in their coat or somehow pungent. Or it could indeed be something that is, you know, signaling stay away from me, like don't eat me, Wampa, I smell terrible. It could be defense. It could even be a signal that there perhaps is something that they consume that makes
them potentially toxic for a predator to consume. And we may come back to that idea here in a bit. Interesting Okay, Now, as a kid, I'm not sure I ever really made that connection between tonton and dinosaur though I just I was super into dinosaurs. I really love Star Wars, but I didn't like think of them as being really all that connected somehow.
I don't know.
The toys probably even interacted with each other, but I just thought of the tonton more as a kind of goat or ram like monster.
Well, can I offer one reason that I think our brains might not have gone to this connection, even though morphologically it seems so obvious. And it's the Taunton exists on an ice world. And at least when I was growing up, I would have said dinosaurs existed in a hot weather and in hot weather only. I don't think when I was a kid, I would have even entertained the possibility that there could be a dinosaur on an
icy snowy world. But now I start to wonder, Yeah, what exactly was the temperature range of environments that could be occupied by dinosaurs? What do we know about that?
Yeah, this is a fascinating topic, and I think you're right on because when we were kids, we're looking at various excellent examples of paleo art and what's happening. It's a tropical environment, there's a volcano erupting in the background, there are no snow flurries, there's no ice, and you know, and they and all the dinosaurs are presented as being just very large reptile creatures that we instantly associate with warmer climates.
Yeah, and they live in hell in literal like me, molten lava environment.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, to be clear, we are talking about a distant Earth that was on the whole warmer. And I think this idea of dinosaurs living in a warm world and a kind of a tropical environment certainly was more of the mainstay back in nineteen eighty and even fifteen years ago. I think this was more common, but paleontology increasingly paints a picture of prehistoric settings in which dinosaurs sometimes lived in colder climates. So, and this
would actually include bipedal therapods. Bipedal therapods are among the remains found in what is now southeastern Australia, which over one hundred and ten million years ago, would have existed within the Cretaceous Antarctic Circle. Is explored in the twenty twenty article How Dinosaurs Thrived in the Snow by Riley Black For Smithsonian Magazine. This region was a temperate rainforest, but it's three months dark. Winters would have been harsh,
featuring snow and ice. We also have evidence from the Prince Creek formation in northern i Alaska. This suggests similar snow dinos from that part of the world as well. Yeah.
I don't think I would have been able to tell you before reading up for this episode that there were actually dinosaurs that lived above the Arctic Circle during the Cretaceous period or during the Mesozoic generally, that there were dinosaurs that you know, they probably had similar kinds of adaptations to many larger animals that live in far northern
or southern climates near polar climates today. But yeah, we know there were some large dinosaurs that lived up there, and that raises a lot of interesting questions like did they survive by migration or did they have extreme life adaptations to stay up in those kinds of conditions year round.
Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of these questions I think are still being discussed and we're still working out the answers. But yeah, you'd be dealing with situations where for like three months out of the year, this region might be shrouded in darkness and subject to some extreme temperatures, and yet the dinosaurs seem to have existed there at least some populations of them remained through these periods. So I was reading a bit more about this in Paleontology snow
Falling on Dinosaurs by Fluorian Modespakta. This was published in Current Biology twenty twenty one, and the author points out that, Yeah, we used to think that dinosaur activity was limited more towards the warmer climates on a warmer Earth, but paleontology finds in southern Australia in Antarctica as well, and then also Northern Siberia and Northern Canada have challenged those assumptions.
Prince Creek formation findings have painted a picture of considerable polar dino diversity from seven different families plus one bird. And this includes large and small bodied dinos. It includes both herbivores and carnivores. And this also includes the facultatively bipedal hydrosaur that was once thought to be a separate species and had a rarely had its own name, but has now thought I think to basically be a variety of the Edmontosaurus. But that could change. These things change
but yeah, it paints this picture. And we've seen this in more more recent and updated paleol art, and I believe it's made its way into some of the big budget computer animated documentaries about prehistoric life, where we're now seeing images of dinosaurs things we would even you know, identify, readibly, readily, even with feathers, as dinosaurs roaming about in some sort
of a snowy, icy setting. Now, without getting into the larger topic of broad dinosaur metabolism, the consensus today tends to be that therapod dinosaurs were likely warm blooded, and the same is likely true for the Edmontosaurus as well.
And as you know, it's interesting to think about about this our current take on all this when considering the tanton because when the when the Tonton was conceived, I don't think there was any sense of like, hey, I think dinosaurs actually were warm blooded and lived in snowy environments. You know. It seems more like a clear Sci fi hybridization of mammals and reptiles, which of course is a great way to try and conceive what alien life forms
in an alien world might look like. If you look at some of the Ralph McCrory early sketches for what a ton tan was going to be. They're fascinating because they kind of look like they look more like large rodents or kind of like weird furry kangaroos.
Well, I see two different illustrations that you've included in the outline here, I'd say, in the left one, yeah, I see the large rodent. It looks like a big mouse with a long shaggy tail and huge hind legs, bite, big bipedal mouse. And then the one on the right to me just looks like a furry velociraptor.
Yeah, yeah, it does.
Yeah.
But it's also interesting to think about this as Okay, it's kind of like a you know, thought experiment of like what if reptiles could live in a snowy environment. Well, they'd have to be furry, they'd have to be kind of half mammal, right, But you know, we increasingly, I guess,
realize that this isn't really necessary. A creature like this without fur, though possibly with considerable feathers, could certainly work in an environment similar to hawk and as we've discussed before in the show, the penguin is just a great example of how a dinosaur descendant does just fine in a polar climate.
That's true. Penguins are dinosaurs, Yeah, the strange thing to think about.
Now. We'll come back to some other scenes with tontons here in a bit, but there's one scene involving the tonton in Empire Strikes Back that is I'm sure already on everybody's minds, and we teased it out a little earlier, and that is, you know what happens inside of a tonton sometimes.
Sometimes sometimes what can be made of what's inside a tonton if you're too cold? Yeah, So to set up this scene at the beginning of the movie, Luke Skywalker is out scouting. He's on the surface of Hawk, the snowy world, on a tonton when he gets attacked and dragged away by a wampa. And we're gonna come back and talk about the wampa later in this episode, but it is shown to be some kind of bipedal, carnivorous beast, like a predatory, abominable snowman.
Yeah.
Luke later escapes the wampa's ice cave and then he stumbles out into the snow as night is falling. So it's going to be getting even colder on Hawth and there he has a vision of his dead master, Obi Wan Kenobi Obi Wan is telling him, Hey, gotta go say hi to Yoda, Gotta go visit Yoda, And so Luke is there in the cold saying Yoda, diego bus system. Meanwhile,
Han solo back at the rebel base. He learns that Luke has not come in for the night, and so he gets concerned about his friend and then rides out on his own Tonton looking for him. So Han finds Luke already collapsed in snow and delirious, and right when Han gets there, his own Taunton dies. So improvising Han takes Luke's lightsaber. I think this is the only time in the main series we see Han solo using a lightsaber.
But he takes Luke's lightsaber and then he awkwardly turns it on and slices open the Taunton belly, showing these guts bulging out, many of which look like like transparent, slimy white balloons. Kind of gross little appearance, and then Han shoves the semi conscious loop inside the Tnton. We don't see this directly happening. We get the Tonton in the foreground and then you see something's happening on the
other side. You get some squishing sound effects, and Han says, you know, it might not smell good, but it'll keep him warm until Han is able to build the shelter. And we don't see what happens after that until the next morning when the search party is out in the snow speeders and they find that our heroes have survived survived the night. So yeah, we don't see anything between stuffing Luke into the guts and the next morning when they're all right. But it does work, we are told.
Now.
First of all, I was wondering, are there any direct biological parallels to this? Is there an organism in nature that kills another large organism and then crawls inside it for warmth in snowy conditions? And maybe I overlooked something, But I was searching for something like this for a long time and didn't find anything that really fit the bill. So as far as I can tell, there is nothing in nature like this. There are animals that crawl inside other dead organisms, but they tend to do this for
reasons other than seeking warmth. Like there are animals that will make use of the physical structure of another dead animal, like the bones of another dead animal, to provide some kind of shelter, maybe sheltering protection in the rib cage of a larger animal, using that as a wind break
or something. Or there are animals, there are plenty of animals that go inside another animal to eat that animal or to lay their eggs in there, but they're using the flesh as an energy source, not trying to capture and make use of the residual warmth of the stead animal. So again, if listeners out there have a great example from nature of an animal that actually goes inside another animal just to capture the residual warmth after that animal's death,
let us know. Contact that stuff to blow your mind dot com, because I would love to find one. But I don't think there's an example of that except humans. There are some stories I want to talk about in human history.
Before we get into that, I will add that there's something you can do that doesn't involve cutting open another animal. And we've already mentioned in passing the penguin, but we see this with all sorts of species. But just getting really close to another organism is a great way to share heat with that organism, and we see this in penguins,
we see this in humans. We see this in relationships like humans and dogs, dogs and cats, cats and humans, where on a cold day these organisms will come together and share heat without actually crawling inside each other's bodies, though it may seem like like your cat may want to do this on really cold days.
Yeah, yeah, I guess that would have been the next best option. If there were no Tonton there, and if Han did not have a shelter that he could build, I guess they'd just have to kind of huddle up and snuggle and see if they can make it through. But I think the prospect for Luke in that situation would not be very good. So yeah, the question the next question to look at is are there any historical analogs of the Tonton sleeping bag scene? And I think the answer is yes.
Now.
When I started searching for stories like this, initially, I found a lot of sources bringing up the American frontiersman and fur trapper Hugh Glass, who lived roughly seventeen eighty three to eighteen thirty three. A fictionalized version of this historical figure is the main character of the twenty fifteen
film The Revenant. This character is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie, and in the movie there is a scene where the character based on Hugh Glass survives a freezing night I think a blizzard by gutting a horse and crawling into the body for warmth. However, from what I could find, this story is a fictional invention for the film, not something based on not based on anything that actually happened in the life of Hugh Glass. But I did find one apparently real and very well documented
account from much more recently so. One of my main sources here is an article in The Washington Post from February twenty sixteen by Karen Bruiliard, and the title of the article is, move over, DiCaprio, this man really did survive the cold inside a dead horse.
Wow.
Again the title, they're referencing the scene in The Revenant. And then I'm just going to read like a lead paragraph from this article quote. If you're wondering whether the carcass as tent technique would work in real life, let us introduce you to Richard Daily sixty eight, who is very likely one of the few Americans who has sheltered inside a horse.
Okay, I'm just saying this better has been really necessary.
You're about to hear the whole story. You can make your own decisions about this, and many people have judged the men involved in this story. So I don't know, we'll see what we think. The event in question took place in November nineteen eighty three. At the time, Daily was so this would be three years after Empire strikes.
Yeah, we're in a post empire world.
He post empire world, yes, and that will become relevant. Actually, at the time, Daily was thirty five years old working as a firefighter in Caldwell, Idaho, which is a small city west of Boise. One day that November, Daily decided to go on a several day long hunting trip at a place called Cuddy Mountain, which is north of Caldwell near the border with Oregon, and he took along his neighbor, Stephen McCoy. They were going to be traveling on horseback.
And so imagine out in the forest around this mountain, hunting on horseback for several days at a time and camping out. And the article also, I should just say mentions Daily's horse's name. The name is She's Obliging, Okay, the name it will become more tragic as the story goes on. Rob I included in the outline a picture you can see of Richard Daley and Stephen McCoy's. This is from the AP, the Associated Press article that came out on this event from November of nineteen eighty three.
I mean, they look like some real, real cowboys. They're wearing cowboy hats kind of.
I don't know.
Steve McCoy looks like he's I mean, it's a black and white photo, but I can sense a real denim tuxedo thing going on with his outfit here.
Yeah, these are some real cow hens right here.
So the two men on their two horses went out hunting as winter was falling and it started to snow. While they were out on the mountain on the third day, they shot two large deer, and then while loading one of the carcasses onto the horse, she's obliging the horse. The horse's body at least did not oblige, and it buckled and fell under the weight, and that broke daily
saddle in the process. After this, there are some shifting plans and recalculations about where to go next and what to do, but in short, they end up trudging through the snow with one of the deer carcasses but not the other one, deciding they're going to come back for the second carcass. And while they're doing this, the storm is getting worse and worse with terrible wind. In the article from the original event the event the ap article,
they estimate fifty to eighty mile per hour winds. Eighty mile per hour winds are going to be like that's hurricane territory. But they also estimate earlier in this storm fifty mile per hour wind so really high winds. They say it's very cold, and it also sounds like maybe they were not I think they were sort of prepared,
but not prepared enough for whether this bad. So it starts raining and they get completely soaked, and then the rain turns to sleet again, and so they are soaked to the bone, freezing out on this mountain, and they get lost and they can't find their truck. The article mentions that they were so cold they had been shivering uncontrollably, and then they stopped shivering. When you stop shivering, that's a dangerous sign of hypothermia. This is you're starting to
reach life threatening conditions here. So they abandon the plan of finding the truck and focus instead on immediately building a fire. They did have matches and kindling and fuel, but it was so windy and so wet that they couldn't get a fire started. And at this point, these two guys are going into panic mode. They knew they were about to cross some points of no return and
probably freeze to death. So here here, I'm also consulting that Associated Press article from nineteen eighty three that says the first thing they tried to do was Daily was like, well, I'm going to skin this deer carcass and we can wrap ourselves in the hide and that'll save us. But quoting Daily, it says, quote, I couldn't function after half the hide was skinned out, and I was watching Steve. His clothes weren't as wind resistant as mine, and he
was just standing there, almost asleep and watching me. So at this point, Daily guessed that they had less than an hour until they were dead if they didn't do something, but McCoy felt that somehow he knew they would survive.
Again.
From the AP article, McCoy saying, I just knew that wasn't the way I was going to go, and then it narrates McCoy and Daily earlier had discussed had discussed stories they'd heard about using the body of an animal for warmth, but they put off a decision until McCoy's increasingly slurred speech alarmed them to action. Now, I want to note that this original AP article characterizes the ideas coming from stories they had heard, which is a vague
and almost euphemistic sounding attribution. The twenty sixteen article from the Washington Post that has this interview with Daily is more specific. Quote by then, it was about ten pm. That's when McCoy brought up the ton Ton scene in the Empire strikes back.
Oh wow, so this is fascinating. It almost feels like I'm not casting a lot of blame here, but maybe in subsequent tellings of the story, and even telling of it within a like a journalistic framework, there's maybe a tendency to lean more into the pure cowboy aesthetics of the thing.
Or just not say what it was.
It was like that, you know, don't bring up Star Wars. It's such a such a this is such a like a rustic story of survival. If we bring Star Wars, it's just gonna feel kind of jarring. We can bring that up in the conversation. It just feels kind of jarring, right.
Well, to be clear, it's not the only story like this in reality. You know, there have been other claims of people crawling inside animals for warmth and history that are not very well documented. It seems like so maybe they could have brought that up also. But here Daily is specific. He says, yes, McCoy brought up the ton Ton scene, and the Empire strikes back.
Well, I mean it would, it would. There's no indication that they said this, but I mean you could say tonton me and you would know what I meant by that. You would know I need to cut open of the arge animal carcass and shove me inside it.
So after this, they did not wait. They shot the horses, and they immediately got to work with the gutting. Here, I'll quote from the Washington Post quote, lest you think gutting a horse under such circumstances would be revolting, Daily recalls it as almost euphoric.
Quote.
Its guts came out all over your hands and wrists. He said, you can't imagine how good it felt. Immediately warmed you up. So at first, they thought they could shelter together inside one of the horses. That makes sense, right, You get two men in one horse, you can share each other's body heat.
And horses are huge animals.
Yeah, horse is very big, so you would think you could get two men inside the horse. But no, it seems like our intuitions are quite wrong here. Daily says that not only could they not both get into one horse, Daily could not even get all of himself alone into the horse's gutted body cavity. He got his upper body in, wedging his shoulders and head into the top of the rib case, but his legs were hanging out and he had to cover them with saddle blankets.
Oh god, this is just this is at once like oddly kind of hilarious, but also just so grizzly and serious, Like I feel like my body doesn't even know how to react to the telling.
So they each had to get inside one of the horses, and Daily describes his reaction as initially relief like warming and counteracting of the hypothermia, and then claustrophobia and disgust. He says that every couple of hours he would panic and have to get back out of the horse, but then would start shivering and freezing again and have to get back inside. Also, this fix was only temporary, they say.
By about two am, which is about four to five hours after the horses were killed, the carcasses had cooled significantly and were no longer providing much warmth. By five am, the men were again shivering uncontrollably. At that point they felt that they could get out of the horse and continue looking for their truck, which the ap article says turned out to be only about a mile and a
quarter from where they had been. So one of those things where if they'd just not known where to go, they wouldn't you know, they could have just made it to their truck.
Yeah. But as we've discussed before, like people become lost in wilderness scenarios all the time, not that far from some sort of point of reference or possible refuge. It's just that's what happens to the human mind when we get lost in the woods without you know, with the caveat that's you know, certain preparations and certain knowledge can make the difference, but not always.
Yeah, I mean, when you don't know where to go, you don't know where to go.
Yeah, and then extenuating conditions with the horrible weather and and you know, shivering cold understandable.
So they both survived the incident. But when word got out about this, many locals were outraged at the two men. The article says that some accuse them of doing this as a publicity stunt. I don't know if that means that they thought that the men made the story up, or if they like actually did it but just for fame. The latter idea seems crazy to me.
Yeah, because in this scenario, they would have both killed their horses in order to achieve this slight level of fame, and it just doesn't seem very reasonable.
Apparently McCoy was deeply shaken by these events and moved away from the area not long after. But then, to quote from towards the end of that article, it says, quote Silvana Daily, Richard Daly's wife, said he later took her to see the dead horse's bones, another trip laden with misadventures. Everything to Richard is, Gee, this is a
lot farther than I remembered, she said. So there is one case where it's very well documented that some eyes actually were on the verge of freezing to death, crawled inside of a large, recently dead animal carcass and did manage to survive, probably due to being inside the dead animal. So but my question was, Okay, it works in this scenario. I mean, I guess we don't know for sure whether they would have died otherwise, but it seems likely it
worked in this scenario. But would this normally work? Is this something that generally has some validity as a survival technique? Went around reading several different articles and experiments that looked into this in different ways. So I read a twenty fifteen article in Slate by Laura Bradley, which again was connected to the scene in the Revenant film. This article consulted a couple of experts on the question, and it quotes one named Robert Reid, who is a research wildlife
biologist with the USGS. Reid says he thinks, yes, at least temporarily, a large animal carcass will provide residual heat, but it will start to cool right after death, so this is going to be temporary. He estimates that a very large animal like a moose or an elk would buy you about six hours worth of heat. Remember that Daily said that the horse stopped being warm after four to five hours, And when you really think about it, once the horse stops being warm, that's not just like
a net, you know, like no benefit. That actually becomes worse than being out of the horse, right because you're in this like colder thing that's wet around you. It is going to be sapping heat from you.
Oh yeah, it's it's like a really gross version of what happens when it's when you or maybe at your house and you'd decide, hey, it's a cold night, I'm gonna take a hot bath. Well that hot bath is great at first, but then it becomes a slightly less hot bath, then it becomes a warm bath, and if you stay in long enough, it becomes a cold bath. And yeah, getting out of that, you're going to be even worse off than when you went in.
Yeah, so it's obviously going to be bad to be in this cooling in this cooling, wet environment inside the animal. But the other thing is animal bodies are wet inside, so getting inside to be almost you know, wet, So getting inside one gets you wet, and so once you get out of the animal, you'll also now be wet
because you have been inside this wet dead animal. Then again in the daily story, you know that they were already soaked earlier from the rain and the sleet, so kind of at that point, like what do you have to lose? But but yeah, you like you don't want in a situation where you are at risk of freezing, getting wet is generally going to make your situation much much worse. A commonly cited figure is that you lose body heats something like twenty to twenty five times faster
if you're wet than if you're dry. So like, getting wet is the last thing you want to happen in a in a cold survival so situation.
Yeah, I think we've all seen survival scenarios, at least in movies where individual gets you know, falls into the water in a wintery environment. Like the next thing they've got to do is get out of those wet clothes and warm up by the fire. Like the wet clothes absolutely have to come off. Exactly better to be naked in the cold than in wet clothes.
You cannot stay wet when it's cold. That is really dangerous. Yeah. Read also mentions some other things. For example, dead animals can quickly attract predators such as wolves or bears or perhaps in our hothcase, wampas. So that could add to your troubles.
Yeah, them is going to be like this is a tr duncan here, this is perfect.
There you go. I would also add infection risk from all those animal guts. But once again, if you are about to freeze to death anyway, I would say other concerns take a back seat. And yes, read thinks that on balance, getting inside the large dead animal would probably buy you a few hours of survival. And you know this all, I guess depends on other variables in the scene, like how long does it take Han to build the survival shelter. The movie doesn't say what resources are available
once the shelter is built. Is it just a tin or does it have heaters and dry towels and things like that? Like all this makes a difference.
Yeah, yeah, And you know, coming back to what you said about infection risk, I mean Luke survives, and he does, He's going into the Boca tank that's going to BIOT take care of everything, so they can worry about that later if he survives.
Okay, another way in on the question of would this normally work, the MythBusters tried yes, I would you know, good good on them. So this was episode two oh eight. It was a Star Wars special. Uh and I wasn't able to watch this. I'm relying on a summary of the episode from myth results dot com. This is a website that tracks all of the episodes and what they found.
So in this experiment, they made a model ton ton out of a big chunk of phone with an outer layer of synthetic skin and fur lining, and then they gave it some artificial internal organs so that it would retain and conduct heat somewhat like a real body. In this test, they also used an in house dummy called thermoboy, which I think they had originally made to test something from the movie Titanic, but they had constructed it to
simulate thermal properties of a human body. So it has like an internal heater and a circulatory system to simulate human metabolism and heat distribution. And then they simulated the conditions of Hawth by building an insulated chamber lined with dry ice within an industrial freezer, creating conditions of negative
forty degrees celsius. Then for the test, they heated the dummy and the tonton body to body temperatures of ninety nine degrees fahrenheit or thirty seven degrees celsius, and they monitored the temperature of the dummy, reasoning that Luke would die if his body temperature fell to eighty two degrees fahrenheit or twenty eight degrees celsius. And after the two point five hours that they estimated it would take Han to build the shelter. I don't know if that's a
good guess or not. I don't know how taken.
Shelter, right, We never see it, not really.
Well, you kind of see some snow piled up in a few poles, but no, you don't get a good look at.
It, because that would be making a huge difference. Like, are we talking some sort of a sci fi collapsible thing where he just like pushes a button whil a shelter or is Han about to make some snow bricks and build some sort of an IgG loose sculptuous structure out there on the ice.
You know. I saw something online about some kind of Star Wars media. I think that had said Mace Windu carries something called a wallet tent or something. Oh okay, it's like a little thing that fits in the pocket and you can flip it out and press a button and it turns into a full sized tint immediately. Obviously it'd be good for Honda of something like this, but the movie makes it sound like it's gonna take him a while, which is why he has to get Luke
in the Taunton. If you had one of the those things and it would just instantly assembly, you don't think the Tonton would be necessary.
Yeah, the rebellion clearly doesn't have the resources of the Galactic Republic, so I guess that makes sense.
So let's see anyway. Yeah, they said after the two point five hours that it would take on to build the shelter. In their guests, the dummy Luke's body had only gone down to ninety two degrees fahrenheit or thirty three degrees celsia's, which is not good but not fatal by their estimation. So they deemed the Tonton survival sleeping bag plausible and not a long term solution, but it would probably buy Luke's survival for two and a half
hours in their view. Now, on the other hand, I found an interesting argument that given other specifics of the scene, in Empire or assumptions about what was going on there, This would actually not save Luke. This was an article from twenty twelve by a writer named Keith Veronese I Believe, originally for Io nine but now hosted on Gizmoto. In this article, Verinese uses Newton's law of cooling, which is a real reliable method for modeling a cooling body after death.
It's not just for a cooling body after death, but it is used to model that, among other things, and it is used in reality by forensic investigators to determine time of death and murder victims. Because you know, if you have a fairly stable environmental temperature and you know what that temperature is roughly, you can guess about how long it takes for a body to cool in that environment.
So Varnese in this article does the math and comes up with a few estimates based on Luke's starting body temperature and the ambient surroundings of Hawth, which he estimates our negative sixty degrees celsius at night. So he says, if Luke starts at normal body temperature, Hans got a little bit under an hour before the time he needs to get Luke dry and warm in the shelter in
order to avoid severe hypothermia and risk of death. He says, if Luke starts already with mild hypothermia, which he kind of seems to have in the movie, given the sluggishness and confusion, Han has only about forty seven minutes. And I think the difference between this estimate and the mythbuster's result is not just like theory versus the simulated experiment. I think it's at least in part due to environmental temperature differences. So the MythBusters use that freezer that's negative
forty degrees celsius. This thought experiment uses negative sixty degrees. So anyway, I would say in summary, I'm not a survival wilderness survival expert, so you know, don't plan your survival around anything you've heard on this show. We're just doing our best based on what we read. But my best understanding based on everything we've read here is that crawling inside a recently dead tonton or other large animal can probably buy you some survival time protecting you from
the cold. Yes, it can do that, but maybe not
as much time as you would think. Somewhere on the order of less than an hour on the shorter end to maybe four to six hours, depending on a bunch of factors like your starting body temperature, your body mass, the animals starting body temperature, the animal's body mass, and of course the outside temperature and conditions, and then even other things that you might not think about, like how much of your body you can get inside the animal, because like, here's the guy you know in that one
story where he's like, well, I can crawl inside a horse, but it turns out, nope, not enough room inside the horse for me to get in there.
Yeah, like if the tonton hadn't been big enough, like couldn't have fit all of Luke in there, he might have lost an arm or something.
Yeah, totally.
In one of the articles I was reading, they consult a guy who I think was just being a little too happy go lucky about the experiment. He was like, if you really want to do it right, so you can get your whole body inside and close up the incision, you should also cut out the animal's trachea so you can use it as a breathing tube.
And I don't know, Okay, that's it.
And then of course you know this, it could possibly buy you a short amount of time to stave off severe hypothermia. But it comes with many dangers and downsides besides just being gross. You know, you got the exposure to potentially pathogenic bacteria, could attract predators, it gets you wet if you're not already wet, and probably some other stuff. I'm not even thinking.
Who knows.
Well, that's fascinating, you know. I trust On Solo, so when he does this in the film, I assume this is absolutely the best option. He's not going to mess around. But yeah, I really had no idea exactly how this matched up with reality or about that amazing but again post Empire example of someone actually doing something similar to this in the.
Wild, seemingly inspired by the film.
Yeah crazy.
Now, if I can offer a critique of Han Solo's form, I would say the movie really makes it look like Han Solo does not appropriately gut the animals.
Doesn't guide it at all.
No, I don't see anything coming out. I just see the slice. You see the guts kind of pup, kind of splooping out a little bit, but he doesn't pull them out, so he's not creating a cavity inside. It seems like he is over stuffing this couch here with Luke's body going in. Just get in there, kid, Yeah, I don't know if there's gonna be room.
Yeah, you did this raise his other questions about I don't remember if they established how long the republic, I'm sorry the rebellion had been on hath like, how long have people been coming here? How long did it take to do at least partially domesticate the tontons? You know? How much like folk knowledge is there about Well, if you get into a jam, you need to cut one of these tontons open and shove your friend inside of it.
I'm not sure. Maybe this is lore that exists with other planets as well, that's true.
We don't know if Han is doing something that he just thought of in the moment, or if he has received wisdom about this. That's true.
We don't know, all right.
Well, for the rest of the episode, we're going to turn back to the Wampa, and I do want to want to show off that I am. I'm drinking my water from my Wampa tiki mug here whilst we record this. Those of you with video can see that if not look it up, you can find these things everywhere. But yeah, The Wampa is, as we discussed, kind of like a big yetty, like a big abominable snowman, you know, large, at least partially bipedal creature, has a gorilla like locomotion,
and the creature is certainly terrifying an Empire. But we don't even in the theatrical cut. We don't even get to see some of these additional sequences, right.
Oh, that's right. Yeah, there are deleted scenes from Empire. I don't know if they were fully even filmed, but at least planned and partially filmed scenes where I think it's while the Empire is attacking the rebel base on Hawk that also some wampas get loose in the base, and I think you get to see a wampa like grabbing a storm trooper and yanking it behind a doorway or something. Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen it, but I remember it being funny.
Yeah.
The main thing we see from it, of course, is that scene where it ambushes Luke, who, to be clear, is you know, not a full blown Jedi yet, but is a Jedi in training. He has heightened human abilities, and this thing still gets the upper hand on him. It knocks him out, takes him back to a cave and has affixed him to the ceiling. We'll come back to how this supposedly works, but he doesn't have long.
He manages to use the force to get his lightsaber, free himself and what slice the arm off of the creature and make his at least temporary escape, and then luckily Han Solo saves it.
Now, speaking of different versions of the film, am I correct that some of the great looking Wampa stuff in the version of the movie that I've seen more recently is actually like part of the Star Wars. I don't know that second round of versions of the film they did, Like I remember less of the Wampa in the version I grew up with than the version I have in my blue right now.
Yeah, it's it's It's tough, isn't it looking back at those those revamped versions that came out ahead of the prequels, because some of the things that they added are kind of obvious and obnoxious and maybe don't work that well.
Not great cgi, yeah, but others. But this is like a practical yeah, yeah, practical insertion here. This is probably, you know, off the top of my head, maybe the best practical thing they did in those those those remixes, those revamped versions of the episodes, but any rate in the version that I most recently saw, I certainly think it to be a frightening creature. Yeah, it looks great.
So the film definitely positions the the Wampa as an
ambush predator and also does most of the lore. Like the Star wars Field guy that I've been referring to, they talk about it as an ambush predator, and they also discuss how, you know, clearly this is not a creature that is capable of running down a Tonton in a dead chase like we see tontons out, you know, running around, Uh, you know, they're they run their stop motion so there their their gait is a little bit funny, but you get the impression that they can move when
they want to move. And another interesting thing about it is that, you know, we can compare the tonton to creatures like an ostridge or a giraffe, and we know that from those creatures interactions with potential predators that it's not just running that the that you know some that these creatures can do. They can also kick, and we can look at a tontan's basic build because those big claws and those big muscular leg and you can easily imagine this thing just kicking the hell out of a
wampa should a wampa get too close. So it makes sense that if a wampa were to actually bring down, especially one of these larger tonton species, it would have to really get the drop on them. It would would have to depend on some sort of ambush scenario.
Yeah.
The other thing, I've looked at other texts that have talked about the wampa's tendency to infiltrate cave systems, something that I think does factor into those deleted scenes for Empire. You know, what are they doing down here where the bases are? Well, it's because that's what wampas do. They know that life on howth is in the caves. That's where their prey can be found, and so you can delve after them. That makes a lot of sense as well.
And you know, we do see something like this with cave environments in our own world, with predators or scavengers entering certain caves to take advantage of certain high concentrations of bats, and you know that might be to actively prey on the bats, to actively hunt the bats or ambush them in some fashion, like catch them leaving the cave at a at a certain you know, choke point, or to scavenge what falls from the bats, such as you know, I guano, but also potentially dead bats or
young bats and so forth. But I think a slightly you know, more apt comparison might be looking at the way certain predators invade ant colonies or beehives. And I think that the beehives are a great example. Is what
the death said moth. Now, I don't think the Wampa is probably taking advantage of any scent masking deception strategies here, but I can see it thriving in this capacity, you know, like you know, going to creep into the caves, find those caves where the tontons are bedded down for the night or where they have their young, and then that's when you're gonna jump and make off with one or
two of them. Interesting Now in Empire Strikes back, of course, again, Luke is frozen feet first to the ceiling in a Wampa's ice cave, and within the heat of the moment, I don't know that I ever really questioned how does this happen? What possibly caused this to occur. Oh I did.
I thought that was pretty cool. I liked that when I was a kid, And you know what, I got the answer. I don't know if this is you know, lucas approved cannon answer, at least in the old days
how it used to go. But one answer came from the old Super Empire Strikes Back video game for the Super Nintendo, in which in the hot stages, you fight a lot of wampas and you find out that they have freezing breath, so they can breathe on you and that freezes you solid for a second like Sub Zero and Mortal Kombat, and they can kind of swipe at
you until you unfreeze and bust out. So what I learned from this is that a wampa can go hoof, you know, like huff on your feet and then freeze them solid into a wall.
Okay, all right, well that that that works because I had never really really thought about it. But the field guides, I believe, makes the case that essentially what the wampa would do is pick you up, uh like stick your feet in its mouth, I guess, or somehow get it saliva on your feet nice and wet, and then like stick you up to the ice, and I guess hold you as if it's like super glueing you until your feet have frozen in place.
They have to clamp you for a minute, wouldn't they.
Yeah, yeah, unless unless they did have the freezer cure. The freezing breath would help in this scenario, maybe make it a little less awkward.
I guess so.
But if this were, this would also while the wampa was holding you up there, the wampa is essentially hugging you, so that would also maybe help you survive a little bit some of that wampa body heat.
That's true.
Now. The authors of the Wildlife of Star Wars a field guide, they also present the idea that wampas in pale prey on large icicles and or in a day to sticking them to the ceiling with their saliva, and that this is also in the salivaccount. They mentioned that
the saliva may be somehow an anesthetic. Indeed, one of the books three Wampa illustrations that I've included, this one here for you Joe, depicts a mother wampa tending to her younglings in a cave where no fewer than four tontons are hanging.
Uh.
And these are I believe some of them may be hanging just from their feet froze into the ceiling, but some are pierced through the lower legs by meat hook like upward thrusting ice spikes. Yikes, Yeah, so I don't I don't know to what extent this is actually described in some of the extended you know universe material, but pretty grizzly detailed to include here, and of course not
just grizzly. It brings to mind terrestrial butcher birds, shrike, you know cases where you'll have you know, actual birds on our on our on our world, not a Star Wars universe. They use plant thorns to tear and store the bodies of insects and small rodents, as well as
detoxify certain insects, such as the eastern luber grasshopper. So the Star Wars authors don't the Star Wars Fuel Guide authors don't really get into this, but it does make me wonder, Okay, if they're sometimes used to detoxify meat in the case of actual terrestrial birds, what if the wampa is dealing with the tontons like could stink to some degree by sticking them up there? Like again, tontons
are famously stinky. What if they are toxic, and essentially the wampa has to detoxify the meat before it can eat.
It, aging them in a way to somehow improve the texture or aroma or flavor, kind of like the way you know we do in temperature controlled caverns or environments we do age meats. Humans do that kind of thing all the time, maybe treating their ton toons like a parma ham.
Yeah. Yeah, I was looking around and there used to be this idea that was presented that squirrels, some squirrels might do the same thing with certain toxic mushrooms or or even you know, psychedelic mushrooms. I do not think that this is a popular interpretation today. I think this is something you've found in certain nature writings and even
some mycological texts from the nineteen sixties. I think mostly the way we're we're looking at it now is Okay, you know, squirrels are going to cash away some amount of food stuffs, and you know, and and also squirrels are going to maybe be a little bit more robust and can handle things that you know, we can't eat because you know, as we've discussed the show before, they are tough as nails, so They're probably not trying to
detoxify anything. But but there, at least at one point that was a possible explanation that was presented.
Well, I mean, when I see the extra tontons hanging from the ceiling, or the scene in the movie where Luke is hanging there, just my mind immediately goes to not a preprocessing or aging thing, but rather just a storage like storage of extra food resources.
Yeah, and that would also make a lot of sense that Wampa is a predator. Maybe is going to find itself in a scenario where Okay, I can't find enough to eat for vast periods of time, but then maybe I get lucky and I get to kill a whole nest of tontons, and then what do I do. Well, I'm gonna drag it all back and I'm gonna store it in a place, and then I know where the meat is, and I am going to depend on that meat, and so will perhaps any you know, wampa young ones
that need to eat as well. Now, finally, the idea of them using ice spikes. This is also pretty fascinating because various terrestrial mammals, birds and fish do manipulate ice
or snow in their environments and belief. We've talked about this example before in the show when we've talked about polar bears, because it's pointed out by a Gloria Dickie in a twenty twenty one Science News article polar Bears and the title of that this is one of those cases where the title of the article tells you what I'm about to tell you. Polar bears sometimes bludgeon walruses
to death with stones or ice. Yes, polar bears have been observed to even throw blocks of ice at seals, and indigenous accounts report that polar bears sometimes use blocks of stone or ice to bash in the heads of walruses. As the article explains, scientists take this possibility very seriously, especially given similar behavior observed in the wild and in captivity.
Interesting, especially because we're always looking for, you know, previously undiscovered examples of tool use among animals, and that would seem to be a pretty blatant use of a tool, right if they're using ice as a weapon or even as a projectile. I mean, that seems like a more an advanced form of tool use.
Yeah, I was looking at another article on this. This is do wild polar bears use tools when hunting walruses by sterling it all. This was published by the Arctic Institute of North America, and you know, they point out that it does seem to be the case that they're you know, they're using ice as a weapon sort of, but it's going to be limited to dealing with walruses for the most part. And the main reason here would seem to be that a walrus is a pretty risky
and dangerous prey for them to go after. You know, it is a big creature, it is difficult to kill, and if you attack one, it's a very high probability you're going to suffer injury as well. And of course that's always the gambit with predators, right is it an easy meal or is it a hard meal? And what does a hard meal mean? Does that mean you end up dying after you partially secure it? So any ice weapon usage by polar bears is going to be very limited,
but still amazing that they seem to do this. This seems to be within the tool chest of possibilities for them. So that being said, you know, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine a wampa swinging an oversized ice cicle at a JETI does this happen in the video games that you grew up playing, you know, I.
Don't know if I remember this one. I think maybe there are some other things that kick ice at you in the in the Hawk levels, but I don't know off to revisit now. I'm curious.
The wampas aren't like throwing big, like video game blocks of ice, and you have.
To remember that. I remember them breathing the ice breath and then slashing at you with claws. And then there's a big wampa that there's like a giant wamp of boss you have to fight in a cave. He's just like, no, he's more like he's across the top of the screen and he's kind of reaching in at you with big arms. Maybe that thing's not even a wampa. I don't remember what that is. Listeners right in.
Yeah, I never played the Empire game in this year's I think I played because they did one for each of the original pictures, right, I only did this the first one. I think the Empire.
Game was my favorite of the three. Actually, yeah, I liked it nice though. One thing I always liked about the Return of the Jedi game for Super Nintendo is there were level there were levels where you could pick which character you wanted to play as, and you couldn't
do that in the other games though. So, like you know, there's a level where you're fighting through the desert to go to Jaba's palace, and I think you could play either as maybe as Chewbacca or as Leah in her bounty hunter outfit, or as maybe as Luke I'm.
Not sure, okay, but Max Rebo not in the mix.
No, you could never play as Max Rebo.
Okay, not yet, but hopefully one day we'll get there.
I remember those games were hard, really hard. Yeah, difficult platforming.
Well in that case, maybe I shouldn't. I was tempted to look them up, but I don't know if I can handle an old school platform in game these days.
I don't want to discourage you too much. I mean, they're not Battle Toads or Ninja guide in or something. I mean they're hard, but they're not like old Anys Hard Guard. They're challenge hard.
Yeah all right, well, listeners right in. We'd love to We know we have some Star Wars fans out there, and we'd love to hear anything you have to add to the conversation about any of this, and uh yeah. If everything goes according to plan, the next episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind will be another Star Wars episode and we'll get into some additional Star Wars topics, so tune in and find out what those are going
to be. Just a reminder for everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns, so just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And since this is Star Wars week here on Stuff to Blow your Mind, each of these episodes is going to be Star Wars themed one
way or another. I think you will. You'll be pleasantly surprised what we're going to talk about on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always 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.
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