The Monstrefact: The “Minnie the Moocher” Walrus Ghost

nineteen sixty nine film The Sword in the Stone. But we also carefully dig a little deeper in the animation graveyard to unearth, say the classic nineteen twenty nine Silly Symphony Skeleton Dance, or the nineteen thirty two Fleisher Studios Betty Boop short mini The Moocher. If you haven't seen

this string Jim, look it up. I'm gonna summarize the plot briefly here, but it's gonna sound really weird, okay, jazz Age Flappergal Betty Boop has an argument with her parents, with whom she lives, and runs away with her boyfriend, a dog human hybrid named Bimbo. After a brief encounter

with Coco of the Clown from an earlier short. They encounter a number of strange and terrifying creatures in a cavern, dancing skeletons, ghosts, devils, a witch, and what we might loosely describe as a dancing, singing octopus armed ghost Walrus, voiced by American jazz great Cab Calloway. Note I realized those might be front flippers, but they sure do look like octopus arms to me. Walrus front flippers have digits. The ghost Walrus's front limbs in this cartoon do not.

Cab Calloway also provided the ghost Walrus' sweet dance moves via rodoscoping. Boop and Bimbo eventually flee home in terror from all of these sights and sounds in the cavern, and true to the shorts title, the ghost Walrus performs Callaway's big hit mini, The Moucher, a song that he would go on to perform in the nineteen eighty film

The Blues Brothers. The nineteen thirty two short is low on plot and message, high on spooky, animated weirdness, and, of course, the stylings of Cab Callaway and his orchestra. But why a ghost walrus. Why does it seem to have octopus arms? I'm to understand it all comes down to animator whimsy, but it got me thinking, is there anything remotely similar to this creature in global myth and

folk traditions? Well as far as supernatural walruses go, there are certainly examples to draw on from the various traditions of different Arctic peoples who knew the creature and invoked it in their belief systems. Likewise, medieval European folklore exaggerated the walrus as a sea monster, but the only thing even close to a walrus octopus hybrid I've come across is the ursus or maritursus or eco turso of Finnish

folklore and literature. Creature is predominantly associated with the walrus and often described as a kind of walrus human hybrid, or even a walrus centaur of sorts, and it's thought to have inspired the sea giant Rosemarine in Edmund Spencer's

fifteen ninety work The Fairy Queen. The Terusus also factors into the Finnish national epic The Kalevala, which concerns the mythical Sampo, but then the tersus also takes on many octopus and even Cuthulhu sque qualities in modern visual interpretations, in part due to the word meritsus referring to the common octopus in contemporary finish. I realize it's a stretch to connect the Finnish Sea Monster to a nineteen thirty two Cabcalloway Betty Boot cartoon, but many the moucher certainly

invites speculation. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Factor, The Artifact or Animalius Dupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.