March 11, 2021 • 45 mins
In the second part of this two-part episode, Ben, Noel and special guest Gabe Luzier drill down into the nuts and bolts of flea circuses -- how did they actually work? Is it true that some flea circuses did not, in fact, have fleas? Is there any way to see a real flea circus in the modern day? Tune in to learn more about one of history's strangest novelty performances.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. This is our part two
of a two part series on the weird weird rise
and spoiler alert fall of the flea circus. Hi, I'm
ben Hi, I'm no uh what? What? What is? How?
(00:48):
We flee? Flease on, flease on trapeze tiny, Now you'll
let you do a game. We flease, Okay, we we
flease on flying trapeze. We three Bethlehem. That's a good one.
It's a good tongue twister. But no, it's true. We're
back with fleas um and we should just dive right
into because I'm sure a lot of you were slightly
(01:11):
irritated that we left you with such a cliffhanger where
you're asking yourself, how do they do it? How? How?
It doesn't make any sense. They're fleas I know that
these human fleas or a little a few millimeters bigger
than um, you know, than the traditional dog or cat fleas,
but still these are basically microscopic creatures. We talked a
lot about watchmaking, which requires the use of specialized tools
(01:33):
to handle microscopic or maybe not microscopic, but very small pieces.
So Gade, we gotta ask you, what's the deal? How
was the magic made? And before we get to that,
we have to say that a lot of those questions
and complaints came from our very own super producer, Casey Pegrum.
That's true. He was livid. He was so mad at
(01:54):
you gave me hit. He's got a lot of a
lot of thoughts about flea circuses and uh yeah, well
we'll try to do him proud on this one. I'm
gonna I'm gonna clue you guys in because there's actually,
I mean, it is a guarded industry. Let's say there is.
You guys, remember that show Breaking the Magician's Code where
that guy in the mask was These are how the
(02:15):
tricks are done. We're still waiting on the flee circus
version of that. It hasn't happened yet, or you know,
maybe it did and nobody noticed. I don't know, but um,
there are you know, some tricks of the trade that
we that we know about, or or alleged tricks at least.
Um For example, one of the stories that these uh
these flea ring masters often tell and apparently by the way,
(02:38):
they're called professors usually, um, if you're a flee trainer,
your professor. So one story that these professors like to
share is that after they trap these fleas, they tame
them by keeping them in a shallow glass case with
a lid on it, and of course the fleas jump
up and bump their heads on the shallow case, and
(03:00):
after a few days, supposedly they're not jumping so much anymore,
not because they're dead, they're just a little more docile,
and they they've learned how high h the roof is
of their enclosure, and so they don't jump as high
anymore because they don't want to hit their heads. So
their spirits are broken, essentially strip them of their will
(03:22):
to live. In their brain dead, they can barely move
um and uh know, they're actually just incredibly well trained, right,
that's what they claim, at least, I mean, yeah, that's
you know, probably just part of the act explaining that,
but they will swear to it. That's how they get
the fleas to um uh to be, that's how they
(03:42):
tame them, and how they keep them from jumping out
of the circus ring or whatever. They only jump yea
high because they've been conditioned to do so. I mean
they jump at their full capacity. You're out of fleet.
You don't know where they could go. It could be
out in the audience, jump onto a person. And that's
why that's why they hop, right, because they hop from
host to host. Can't have that. Yeah, But I mean,
you know, there are those among us who would argue that,
(04:04):
you know, these guys are kind of full of it. Uh,
fleas don't have the capacity for learning um. But one
thing that is true is that some fleas are better
athletes than others. Right, they can jump higher, or you know,
just move it a faster clip. And so you know,
maybe maybe you have ten fleas and there's only one
that's kind of nimble and athletic enough, you know, for
(04:27):
the circus life. And so fleet trainers will keep a
close eye on on, you know, a potential crop of fleas,
and they will kind of earmark the guys with potential,
the ones that are doing the most jumping, you know,
fit for the circus life, and those become the star
of the shows. The ones that scut you gotta have it.
(04:48):
There are is there like a minor league for fleas
are like it's all the big leagues. It's all I
just I love that as a career description. What do
you do? Actually, I am the most successful uh flee
scout in the southeast region of northwest Ohio. It's a
big claim to fame, big dreams, that's what claim to fame. Okay,
(05:11):
But but it is true. It makes sense that not
every every flee could be the equivalent uh the flea
version of an Hussain bolt, because not every human is,
right there always exceptionally adept living organisms. Um did they
how how did they determine this though? Like? Were they
(05:32):
just able to notice what's appeared to be one flee
consistently hopping higher or faster more often than the others?
Like for me, the biggest difficulty and again I'm I'm
not a professor in this regard, but for me, the
biggest difficulty would be uh, differentiating one flee from the next. Right, Yeah,
(05:53):
you would think so, but again, you know, the secrets
have not all been revealed. Um, we don't know how
they're keeping track of these guys. Maybe they're marking them,
you know, color coded fleas. Um, I'm not sure. Maybe
it's just like you know, a mother with her with
her brood. You know, she knows them each bye bye,
touch by site, by personality, person Yeah, classic Jeffrey. But yeah,
(06:21):
that's uh, you know, and it's really just so okay,
these guys aren't trained, right, these fleas, they're just doing
what comes naturally. They're jumping. They're jumping around. Um, they're
looking for something to land on and feed on. And
so that the trick part, the entertainment part, comes in
what you harness it to. Right. It's putting on these
little collars and and uh, you know, yoking them to
(06:43):
chariots or putting little tiny instruments in their hands, um,
and watching them kind of fiddle away at them. Um.
The audience kind of supplies the rest. The fleas are
just jumping around, but because they're tied to these little contraptions,
the audience reads it as a trick. Right. It's not
a flee just of mindlessly jumping. He's part of a
chariot race. He's racing the other fleas around. Um. That's
(07:07):
you know, that's the illusion that they're selling. And again,
apparently it worked because this has been an act for
hundreds of years. Um, we do know again, uh, you know,
some tricks of the trade, like, for instance, the flea
music band that we talked about earlier. UM, I do
love a good music band. Well you're not alone in that,
(07:28):
um Bertolatto. You know, he's the one that kind of
pioneered that. Um he blew London away with his his
flea music band. UM and other people ran with the idea,
but prepared to think less of him for doing that
trick because how he actually did it was the fleas
were glued to the base of the flea circus, and
(07:48):
then the the instruments were glued to their mandibles, and
so when you heat the base up, the fleas tried
to escape. They were trying to get away. But again
the audience is reading this as them playing twiddling and
playing the instruments. Pay no mind to that smell of
cooking fleas. You know, I think they're so small and
(08:08):
probably wouldn't smell like much. But yeah, they're essentially like
cooking alive and and trying to save themselves in there,
and that's it's essentially this is this is animal cruelty.
I think you could argue that this is animal cruelty. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, insects are very small. We don't usually
think of in that terms. People swat a fly without
thinking twice about it, But this is yeah, altogether different. Right.
(08:30):
You're making tiny contraptions specifically to yoke them into service
and then kind of torturing them for people's entertainment, and
it's on such a small scale that you just don't
really notice that that's what's happening. Yeah, it's still it's
still in principle the same thing, because just eliminating of
flea is different from you know, torturing it in a
(08:50):
very weird way. It's kind of like beer money bear baiting. Yeah,
it's also like it's like a much more elaborate form
of that little psychopath kid that pulled the wings off
of flies for fun exactly. So you know, some people
think that um, this form of entertainment, these flee circuses,
(09:13):
that they actually declined, you know, in the twentieth century
because of concerns over you know, animal cruelty and kind
of the welfare of these fleas. That's not really the case.
There are some groups out there who definitely felt that
this was wrong and still do um, But really what
happened was the fleas got harder to find. It was
(09:33):
harder to source them, and it was difficult to train
them such as it was, and you know, you had
to keep replacing them and stuff like that. Things would
go wrong. Sometimes fleas would drop dead mid performance. Um
and so as technology progressed, you know, some of these
enterprising professors found an easier way of doing this, and
(09:55):
that was the John Hammond route, the mechanical route. They
turned to h chanical illusions. They had magnets and electrical
contraptions that would kind of um again, trick the audience
into thinking that these objects were being moved and manipulated
by fleas, when in reality it was, you know, a
gear system. Yeah, so this to me is pretty clever.
(10:19):
First off, it's it's kinder to the fleas involved, and
even if they're not my type of animal, that doesn't
mean they shouldn't be alive, right, but they it's kinder.
But also it seems like it's a very easy con
to pull, is it not. I mean, you would you
would have these contraptions, you could make them elaborate, especially
(10:39):
if they're just um automations or mechanisms of their own,
and people if there are a certain distance, way would
just assume a flea is there right, Oh yeah, absolutely,
once again referring to Jurassic Park. That's uh, That's what
John Hammond says is the little the little kids would
see it and be like, oh, I can see the fleas, Mommy,
do you see the fleas? And uh yeah, I mean
(11:00):
the audience is willing to believe. I think, so you
don't really have to torture It turns out you don't
have to torture four hundred plus bugs every night. Oh
it's it's it's it's charming, and it's a thing we
do all the time. I mean, there's no such thing
as superheroes. You know, there's like it's all suspension of disbelief.
So how is this any different. It's it's a show,
(11:22):
I would argue, it's not necessarily an overt form of
like deception. It's sort of part of the whole deal.
Right yeah, No, absolutely, people want to believe. Right. Um.
And but again, you know, the flea circus did not
did not go into decline specifically because of these animal concerns.
It was actually largely because hygiene improved so much. Um,
(11:46):
By the time you get to the twentieth century, we
have stuff like vacuum cleaners and you know air filters
in our houses and um, you know a lot of
cleaning agents and stuff. So the fleas pretty much just
packed their bags and hit the road. It was too
clean for them. Uh. And so human fleas, which again
were the ones being used in these circus acts because
they were bigger and better jumpers, they just got scarcer
(12:08):
and scarcer until the mechanical kind of flea circus that
we're talking about, the fleeless flee circus, became the norm. Oh,
we should point out there was there was a kind
of i would say an increasingly desperate band aid or
transitional phase uh that that you hipped us to where
(12:29):
some circuses said, while these fleas are dead, but we'll
we'll just keep using them, right Yeah. Yeah, that's probably
when they were getting harder to find, and it was
like or you know, I don't feel like training another
crop all over again, putting them in the shallow case,
let's skip that and uh yeah, so they would just
use the dead fleas again and again. They would dress
(12:49):
them up in their little costumes and just glue them
down to uh, you know, wherever they needed to be. Um.
And so yeah, that was kind of uh like you said,
the transitional phase. You would see that in in live
flee circuses, where really it was you know a lot
of dead fleas mixed in there. And you would also
see it in the mechanical ones where everything was operating
on gears and pulleys and that kind of thing. But
(13:11):
then you had, you know, for the for the kids
who weren't willing to bring their imaginations to it, I
guess they were you know, dead ones actually glued to
these surfaces. Um, so fleas were still involved in the
mechanical ones, but you know, not in the traditional live sense.
Oh weird, And and people still enjoyed it. People still
(13:33):
like the show. There weren't protesters out there saying, you know,
this is a false flee circus f f C. No,
of course there were, but they were ignored rightly. So, um, no,
you know, flee circuses are actually still popular. Um it's
you know, it ain't what it used to be. But
depending on where you live, you can actually still find
(13:56):
a modern day flee circus of both varieties mechanical ones
but also live ones too. Um. For example, there's one
of the most famous and long running ones is at
this October Fest celebration in Munich that still goes on
every year. Um, and there's a bunch in the US too.
So is the Munich one real or mechanical? It's real?
(14:17):
Oh wow? So are they still hot gluing a little
flea boys down to two platforms and heating them up
and making them flail? Most likely that's weird because Germany
is a little more progressive in the field of animal
rights in comparison to a lot of other places. Right,
I think it was was it Germany where there were
legal cases or there were cases going to court arguing
(14:40):
that some uh, non human animals be granted legal personhood Like,
uh yeah, So it seems like you believe you're correct, sir.
It seems like that would be a weird country to
to continue it. But then again, maybe they're just they're
just saying, well, fleas are fleas or fleas fleas or
insects to us? Uh it is. It is fascinating though,
(15:02):
that they're still they're still using the living fleas. I
guess they wouldn't be legit. Um. There's one detail you
had gave that really stood out to me, and I
don't know if it's stopped for you as well know
which is that? So a great proportion of flee trainers
historically had backgrounds in you know, theatrical work or in
(15:24):
stage performance. So is this just maybe like a thing
where a lot of magicians, especially ones with long careers,
go on to specialize in something right like up close magic,
card magic, grand copperfield escalusions or so on. Is a
flee circus sort of a more specified discipline within the
(15:49):
world of stage magic. Would you say it's I? I
think that's right. Um, Like you said, a lot of
stage magicians kind of pivoted into being a flee circus professor. Uh.
And again, like we've been talking about, there's a pretty
long history of miniatures, UM and showmanship, you know, the
the entertainment business kind of going hand in hand like UM.
(16:13):
One thing I read that I always thought was interesting
was Walt Disney was a huge fan of miniatures. And
again it was from UM touring Europe and finding, you know,
the remnants from these miniature houses that we talked about
earlier and just kind of falling in love with the
detail and the craftsmanship of it. And so before he
hit on the idea of doing Disneyland, he had the
(16:33):
idea for something called Disneylandia, which was going to be UM,
detailed models, little miniatures of the wild West and um,
you know, different eras in history. He was going to
pack these things onto train car and drive it around
the country and have people come and see Disneylandia. UM.
And that's kind of the idea at the heart of it. UM,
(16:56):
it's just building these little worlds. We'll check this out.
You may already know this, UM. But at the Disney
Family Museum in San Francisco, which is not run by
the Disney Corporation, it's run by the Dwalt Disney Family Trust. Uh,
they have all of these like scale models of tomorrow
Land and of all of the things that became Disneyland, UM.
(17:20):
And they're beautiful and intricate and exactly like what you're describing.
So obviously he took that idea and ran with it,
and then you know, built like the real thing. But
that was my favorite part of the whole I mean,
it's it's it's an amazing experience. UM. You can also
see the kinds of things they show at this museum
are the kinds of things that would be off limits
for the Disney Company. Like they have a whole um
(17:40):
gallery of a lot of those war propaganda Disney cartoons
and like posters and stuff like in the Furor's face,
you know, the Donald duck one um, which you know,
they don't really only even get those on Disney. They
don't get much not much play these days. But yeah, no,
I've been to that museum as well, and they they
do have of um, a lot of his personal collection
(18:02):
of miniatures there, you know, underglass you can see he's
got like a whole pantry of all these tiny, tiny
canned goods and little boxes and stuff and lots of
you know, tiny spoons. So he fell in love with it.
There's something about it that just appeals to showman. Um.
Just like again John Hammond and Jurassic Park. Um, it's, uh,
(18:23):
there's something about it. So I actually I did have
a thesis actually, which is that Jurassic Park is the
history of Flee circuses in reverse. Oh nice, okay, okay, okay,
okay expound Yeah, yeah, so again original flee circus owners.
They became, you know, over time, very well versed in
(18:45):
the difficulties of trying to control a living system. You know,
they had trouble sourcing the fleas they had trouble training them,
the performers had short lifespans, they had to be replaced, etcetera.
So eventually get we were talking about. When the technology allowed,
they moved to a mechanical system, flee less circuses that
(19:06):
relied on gears, and they were much more reliable, much
less messy, and much easier to control. But John Hammond,
he got into the flea business during that second era,
the mechanical run of flee circuses, so he was always
pining for the real thing to go back to that time.
He didn't have the living system, which he saw as
(19:26):
a step up because it was more real, Right, I
just wanted to make something really exactly, something they could
see and touch and and and then there's there's some
Uh I'm trying to figure out who are gold bloom
is in here? Who's the guy who's like fleas? Uh?
Find a way they do? They find a way? It's
(19:48):
by jumping. Yeah, I think that's right. So I mean,
you know, instead of going back to that old kind
of flea circus and and you know, learning his lesson
that way, he opted for the dinosaur circus instead, and
you know, chaos and sued. But I think that's a
lesson that we see kind of in the real world
all the time of that trying to control you know,
(20:09):
a living system as if it were a mechanical one,
and it breaks down all the time, like with um
manmade dams and levies or those programs where they try
to you know, drive out all the carnivores and eliminate them,
and right exactly, it doesn't work. There's a there's a
great point there, because what we're seeing is that the
(20:31):
further technology evolves, the more closely it mimics pre existing
natural processes or natural mechanisms, and then eventually, you know,
the idea of want to get very sci fi about it,
is that the most highly evolved forms of technology quote
unquote are themselves um indistinguishable from what appears to be
(20:53):
the natural world, which is which is a neat thing
to think about. And thank you for classing up the
episode with this, with this part game. But I do
want to say there's there is one piece of history
I found so fascinating and I feel like we'd be
remiss if we didn't hit it. Uh, The idea of
acknowledging fleas in an entertaining way and not just in
(21:16):
like a gloom and doom. These guys spread the play
kind of way. You found this fantastic, uh, this fantastic
little tidbit about Mesoamerica. Could you tell us just a
little bit about that, Yeah, for sure. So one example
that cropped up in the early nineteenth century, so this
was around the same time that flea circuses were kind
of really hitting their stride in Europe, is this form
(21:39):
of Mexican folk art called pulgas vestidas, which literally means
dressed fleas. And this was exactly what it sounds like.
People would take dead fleas and dress them up in
little outfits, and they would accessorize them too. They put
on you know, shoes and hats and belts like whatever
you can think of, and then they would mount the
(22:00):
fleas and pose them to make these little scenes inside
of these tiny shadow boxes. They were like the size
of a dime. And you know, sometimes you see an
entire mariachi band crammed into one of these things, like
playing their tiny little instruments, or maybe a pair of
flea dress like a bride and groom at the altar.
(22:21):
That was a really popular one. So all kinds of stuff.
This is kind of like some serial killer stuff right here,
I'm picturing, yeah, a little I don't know. It's also
simultaneously adorable and kind of goes back into that like
whole like obsession with miniaturization that we were talking about.
It feels like that's the impulse here, is like, oh,
(22:42):
let's dress that these cute, little, tiny dead things. Um.
But it's interesting because I'm looking at it now and
it seems like nobody's quite sure where this started. I mean,
I think again my conjecture might be that it was
just like the nature of like, look look at these
little things, let's make them cute. But there is a
theory that it began in Mexican convents. Um. I guess possibly.
(23:03):
You know, like a lot of things start with board
nuns when they go a little stir crazy, and that's
that's where Q and on started. Everybody knows that, um
and you know, started let's dress up the fleas. Uh.
So then eventually villagers you know, got hip to the idea,
and when they realized that the shadow Box has actually
made great souvenirs, uh, they started selling them to tourists.
So I guess it seems like they were a massive
(23:26):
hit too, because there are a ton of examples out there, right,
Oh yeah, these these things were everywhere. Everybody knew about them.
Actually found this great quote from the Mexican writer Octavio Pause.
Uh in the nineteen twenties. He weighed in on the
art of dressing fleas. That's how big it was. He
called it, quote a difficult art, exquisite and useless. Pause,
(23:48):
that's pause classiclassics, always always always quick with the hot take.
But but right, so it's it's uh, not only is
it exquisite and useless, but also quite pricey. Right, yeah,
that's right. Uh. I checked while I was, you know,
looking into this and the most recent dressed fleas to
(24:09):
sell on eBay. This was an auction just about a
month ago. It was a bride and groom set and
it's sold for nine hundred dollars US plus u us US.
This was auction, was in Arizona and uh, you know,
plus shipping to Nope Bridge too far. I'm sorry, guys,
but but are these like historical artifacts? Are these modern
(24:32):
re enactments of these older you know? He was claiming
that this is uh, this was an original. I guess
it's kind of a lost art now. So most of
them are still doing this. You know, this is this
is um, as you said earlier, both fascinating and pretty creepy.
(24:54):
I got some Tim Burton vibes off this, but I
gotta be honest, I didn't know there were two different examples.
I was thinking of a different kind of meso American
flee art gave you found a sculpted flee that predates
the concept of flee circuses entirely like I think it's
um it was created by Aztec civilization. Could you tell
(25:18):
us the story about that one? Yeah, absolutely, sorry, sorry
about that. You know, meso America was flushed with flee art,
so it's hard to contract sometimes. But uh, yeah, that's right.
The Aztecs produced this massive collection of intricate sculptures back
in the fifteen hundreds. A lot of them portray like
gods and goddesses, but there's some sacred objects to like
(25:40):
these containers that were used in ceremonies and musical instruments.
Strangely enough, like plants and vegetables are also represented in
this collection. There's this, uh, there's some sculptures of grains
of wheat, and there's also this footlong green stone pumpkin.
That kind of had my eye on. But uh, there's
also this whole section dedicated to animals, like a sculpture beast,
(26:01):
sheerry with snakes, dogs, jaguars, turkeys, all kinds of stuff,
pretty much any animal they were coming into contact with.
And that includes this enormous stone fleet. And what's most
impressive about it to me is the artist sculpted it
to be hundreds of times the size of a real fleet.
It's like a foot tall, so you get all these
details and features that would be really hard to see,
(26:24):
you know, with the naked eye. Like I don't really
know how he pulled it off without a magnifying glass
or microscope or anything like that. It's pretty amazing. Yeah,
and this would have predated like the you know, the lens, right,
I mean, they wouldn't have had anything like that, right
at least on this part of the world. I would think, Yeah,
it's fascinating because like back in part one, UM when
we were kind of discussing like the fleas and their
(26:47):
little parts and how they were posed with things, and
like how does a fleet hold a tiny Mariotti guitar?
And it's a little clause I looked up some like
imagery of like electron microscopes blowing up fleas and they
are just the most bizarro alien looking little guys. I mean,
they have these weird little mandibles. And it's very clear
that like, uh, for a lot of science fiction, you know,
(27:09):
practical effects and you know, um imagery and film. Uh, clearly,
insects are are a huge influence, and fleas in particular,
there's something very you know, alien about you know, like
they're exactly exactly they can't do the things that we
would consider routine routine activities like walking right right, um,
(27:33):
jumping and drinking blood. That's it? Yeah, hm, Now what
else is there? Man? What else do you need? That's
a good point. So what do you think it was
that that that made these sculptors so particularly fascinated with
these things that they could barely see? I mean even
I mean I I can't imagine, don't have perfect eyes side,
but I have pretty good eyes sight. But even like
squinting and looking up close to one of these, it
(27:54):
wouldn't look nearly like it would through the electron microscope.
And I was talking about, what's what where, where's the
fascination come from? Yeah? Yeah, it's kind of a strange pull.
But you know, the thing is, none of the subjects
for these sculptures were chosen at random. Like every one
of them says something about the concepts of Aztec religion,
and the key belief of their society was that, you know,
(28:14):
there were these certain gods, these creator gods, who had
sacrificed themselves in order to create humans in the world
and you know, everything in it, and so in order
to sustain those gifts, to kind of keep the universe going,
the Aztecs believed that their god's sacrifice had to be
you know, renewed over and over again with human blood. So, yeah,
(28:36):
the result of this is, you know, a steady stream
of ritual human sacrifice, which you know a lot of
these sculptures do focus on that in gory detail, Like
some of those vessels I mentioned earlier, those are like
blood and organ collection tools for these sacrifices. And you know,
that could also be why the fleet is represented here,
(28:57):
you know, in such detail as an animal that feeds
on blood in order to sustain itself. It's you know,
it's possible the Aztecs like looked at this fleet and
saw it a kind of little micro scale embodiment of
you know, the system they saw in place that like
blood renewal thing something holy. Exactly. Yeah, at the very
least sacred, like like like the way the you know,
(29:19):
Indians treat cows. And then exactly, and then we came
a lot a lot less reverent, making them dance and
uh yeah, attaching them to a little toy chariots and stuff.
I don't something don't think the Aztecs would have been
fans of fleet circuses. Yeah, like, you know, electrifying them
so they like spaz out and pretend to play instrument.
(29:40):
I wasn't electrifying, It was just heating them up until
they started literally cooking place and that kind of even
still probably wouldn't have one of any points. Yeah, we're
low on fleet points at least with the where the
Aztecs are concerned. Yeah, I think I think you guys
are right. Something tells me, um, the people of that
time would not have maybe been the hugest fans of
(30:03):
flee circuses, but Gabe Weird, huge fans of hanging out
with you. Thank you so much for taking us on
this journey, not just for one part, but for two parts.
On the Weird Weird history of the rise and fall
of Flee Circuses. Yeah, likewise, guys, I've had a blast.
Thanks for having me on. I hope to come back soon.
But you know, maybe we could just leave the blood
(30:25):
contract thing out next time. We're all friends. Sorry, deal breaker, Sorry,
I tried, No, Nolan, I had a meeting about this.
We we voted, mandatory majority rules gave but just the same.
Thank you so much for joining us for this two
partner and and hipping us to the magical uh and
(30:46):
and and somewhat disturbing world of Flee circuses. And honestly
you took us even further than even that with the
whole meso American angles. So huge thanks to you, my
friend research, your extraordinaire Gabe Lucy. Yeah, and also huge
thanks to Christopher haciotis here in spirit. Big big thanks
of course so one' only super producer Casey Pegram. Big
(31:09):
thanks as well to Alex Williams, who composed this slap
in Bob and uh, you know, I guess we have
to say it. Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland's you said,
you said his name. It's time, gentleman. You did this
(31:30):
Ben No, no, you both did this. Gentleman. For now,
you said my name first and then Ben said my
name second. We all know that if I hear my
name the three times I appeared, But since your action
so many other people's names, I just assumed mine was
in there too, and so here, Wow, I feel like
(31:50):
your accents changed. It's gotten a little more absurd. Well,
you know, it's been a while, so I just thought
i'd really turn it up to eleven. Okay, guys, what's happening? Yeah,
gave sorry, we should have mentioned this at the top. Um.
There is a part of the show that we uh,
(32:12):
we were kind of hoping you wouldn't have to see,
but every so often, due to another contract signed in blood, uh,
we are bombed by our own nemesis, h Jonathan Strickland,
a k a. The Quister, who will not let the
episode end unless we participate in a battle of wits. Yes, yes,
(32:37):
it's very sad because one half of this equation is unarmed.
Gave you all Now welcome to the most cringe worthy
segment in all of podcasting. Yes, they shall present to
all of you three scenarios, two of which all reel
and one I made up seas and it is your
(32:58):
job to figure it out which of the three is
the fake. As always, after I tell you all three scenarios,
you will have three minutes to make your decision, and
you are allowed to ask me questions, but you must
first proceed that with phrase of my arbitrary choosing. Now
I understand you were speaking of flea circuses. Now we're
(33:23):
talking about flee circus. Yes, flea circuses. Well, I have
chosen a very very similar topic, political assassinations. And so
before any question you must proceed it with a quotation
from Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins. And in case you don't
(33:44):
know any everybody's got the right to be happy works
just fine. So if you have a question, you have
to start with something from Assassins. Here are your three scenarios.
Scenario number one. Paul, the third Duke of Strawberry, also
known as Paul the Merciless, had a problem. He met
(34:04):
an ill fated end at the hands of an assassin
in fourteen twenty five. He had made many enemies, having
previously served as bishop in Bavaria, and he ruled with
an iron fist. He even warred against his own family
in order to secure his position as duke on a
night in October fourteen twenty five, and unidentified assassin, likely
(34:27):
sent by his own sister, didn't just stab Paul to death.
According to reports, Paul's body was practically drained of all
blood and left hanging over the rail of his bed
chamber's balcony, wearing only his chain of office. His passing
was unmourned. Scenario two. Swiss politician org Yanech had a problem.
(34:54):
He was many things. Protestant pastor, Roman Catholic, secret society leader, soldier,
torture supervisor, assistant, axe murderer, duelist, and of course prominent politician.
He met his end in sixteen thirty nine at the
hands of a bear, or rather the pause of a man,
or rather the hands of a man dressed like a bear,
(35:17):
who assassinated Georgie with an axe. As it said, whether
Janech was axed a question or some other weapon was used.
He was really most sincerely dead after the whole thing.
Scenario A three. Yugoslavian statesman Yosip Broz Tito had a problem,
(35:38):
and that problem was Joseph Stalin. Stalin's head of state
security planned out an ambitious assassination on Tito The plan
was to employ a Soviet agent to pose as a
diplomat from Costa Rica. The agent would smuggle in lethal
bacteria into the presence of Tito, infecting him and everyone
else in the area. But before plan could be set
(36:01):
in motion, Stalin himself shuffled off this mortal coil in
nineteen fifty three. Tito would die in nineteen eighty, just
a few days shy of his eighty eight birthday. Start
the clock, Okay, I am running to that grandfather clock.
(36:21):
You mean just one second? You mean that really big
watch the corner. WoT you push and you push, you
just insist. Um. I'm gonna be honest, you guys. The
best thing I can say is I have a thirty
percent chance of randomly guessing the correct thing here. Same. Yeah.
(36:45):
The thing about Jonathan is the quister. His quizness is
that he uh, he puts a lot of effort into
these uh he really makes them pretty tricky to to
just get it out right. Gosh, what was the name Assassin?
The musical? That was pathetic? No, you could what was
(37:08):
the guy's name the second name? Oh, George Schmarman. It
sounds like it sounds like a made up it's a
job because I love a good oomb loud. Yeah, he
loves a good oomb loud. I feel like that's a
name that came from the depths of the hellish ma
that is the quister's mind. Yeah, it's just it's it's
(37:32):
a good argument with the name that does sound a
little too fun, written by perhaps someone with a deep
love of absurd names. But then there's that guy who
was the axe murderer, Like, what was that all about?
He was in a bear suit, but he used an axe.
That's the same guy. Oh right, Yeah, that's still the
(37:54):
second one. You know, I was paying the most attention
to the first one, so I think that one was it. Yeah, yeah,
I think the real one. That was the real one. Yeah,
the real one. I I felt pretty pretty real about
the first one. John that's had to point this out.
Nobody has heard of Assassin the musical by Stephen hows
(38:15):
on time if it's not into view with Patrick Harris
knows all about it. Thank you very much. Uh why
did you do it? Johnny? Very well done? Mr Bolin.
What is your question? What is the third scenario? What's
going on? The get longer longer? I am well, you
keep pointing out that if I spend too much time
(38:35):
on one, that's clearly the one that I made up.
So I made all of them long that's what you get,
Mr Bolin. You pointed out your your way of figuring
out my tricks. Uh, that was about about Joseph bros Tito,
who was Joseph Stalin attempted to assassinate Tito multiple times, actually,
but one of the plans was to smuggle in a
(38:58):
form of lethal bacteria to in affect him. The the
Soviet agent in charge of doing this was not told
that that was what he would be doing, only that
he would be bringing in something perhaps poisonous into Tito's presence.
The way you're talking about that sounds like the way
someone talks about something they've researched. So I think that
(39:19):
one's probably real. Although the name of what is it,
Yosef Bros Yosip Broz Tito, he was Yugoslavia. Do you
think people called him bros? If Finally, yeah, I mean
you know how many minutes I left on that three
minutes out of time. You've got a great since a time.
I guess we gotta lock in one. I'm gonna go
(39:41):
with games gut. Yeah, I'm gonna say number three feels
true that yeah, oh sorry sorry, games Gut was one
three the description yes with you. Sorry. He had a
lot of details for that one. Which of the three
are you saying is the one I made up? Because
right now you're saying one is real? Three he is really.
I don't know which one you're saying. I mean two
(40:02):
is fake? Two is fake fake? Wait wait, wait two
of them are real? No, two are real. One's fake?
Which was the bake on the bear one? All right, well, Gabe,
the daughters go to you. Uh you really you really
want to be responsible for besmirching our sterling record. I
think we're ahead right now, we're ahead by one. This
(40:24):
is gonna eating us out if we lose, alright, you'll
be dead to us. Well, Gabe, Gabe, you'll welcome on
the show. Anytime that was that was a real thing
that happened, was your again? He really was a Swiss politician.
He really was murdered. The reason the man was dressed
(40:44):
as a bear was he was murdered on conival of
Old Times. And yes it's said that it was an
he was murdered by an ax, although that is that
part is perhaps the least well documented. But he was
certainly killed by someone dressed as a air So this
one's untrue. Also, that one is absolutely true. The one
that is untrue is Pulled, the third Duke of Straubing.
(41:07):
There never was such a person. Is there a place
called Strouby? Yes, there is, it's next to okay, but
it's but there was no There was no pull the
third who was who was stabbed to death and left
drained of blood and hanging over his balcony railing, wearing
nothing but his chain of office that was completely made up.
Seas Helloll, we're well done. I'm I'm absolutely exhausted on
(41:32):
my face. Yeah, yeah, it's tag on all of our faces.
We you know, we we we were in this together.
But you should do an episode about your niche seriously,
because this fellow was you read his biography and his
list of accomplishments. It is crazy. Got to have yeah,
we've got to have you on for that one man.
(41:53):
Uh in maybe your alter ego and I know we've
built a really weird meathos here because we refer to
you by your government name and your alter ego. Ah, well,
if you want to see I agree, I will do it,
but only if the quizter could be on at the
end of that episode. Why we'll do it, Jacqueline Hide,
(42:14):
Jacqueline Hyde vibe. Well, we are tied, folks, so we're
going into our next bout with the quister with everything
on the line. As you know, this is a very
high stakes pursuit we have here. Uh, Jonathan, well played,
Thank you for your time. Um, we should have known.
(42:35):
Paul is a weird Paul is a weird name, right
for a month like a I do have no no,
there's no no, no, no, there's no paulse except for
super producer Paul deck Ends mission control of of something.
I want you to know, Fami, He's the only Paul
that matters. I will say, Uh, Strickland that when you
(42:57):
said Duke of Straub, I thought you were going to
say Duke of Strawberry, which sounds a lot more appealing
than that story. Well, we've all got a lot to
learn from history, I think is our takeaway here. Uh,
if you would like to share some stories about your
own experiences with weird uh God, where do we go guys?
(43:20):
Weird flea stories, flee facts God, any of that you
can find us on the internets of plenty. We like
to recommend our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians, but you can
also find us as individuals online. That is correct. You
can find me on Instagram where I am at how
(43:40):
now Noel Brown, Ben, how about you my friend? Yes, folks,
you can find me at Ben Boland bow l I
n on Instagram. You can also find me on Twitter
at Ben Bowland. H s W joined the Adventures. I'm
getting into some weird stuff lately. No spoilers, Uh, Gabe,
what about you? Well, if people were so inclined, they
(44:02):
could go to a number of different Transformers message boards
and track me down under the pseudonym Magic Dishwasher. And
that is all I am comfortable revealing. So what you're
saying is you're a giant nerd? Correct? And the way
we go, Uh, you know it's fair? Fair is fair?
(44:23):
I hope we don't regret this. But Jonathan, where can
people find you? If they are so inclined? On a
chilly November more, you may find me looking down that
alley you never looked directly at. I'm there, I'm waiting.
He's also got a show called tex Stuff. You can
find him on Twitter. Yes, you can subscribe to text
(44:46):
stuff on all your favorite pub catching apps, or you
could just go down that alley. Don't do I've got
change my answer to it to what he said. No,
it's too late, too late, but I locked it. Yeah,
blood Oath, See you next time, Folix. Yeah. For more
(45:07):
podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. This is our part two
of a two part series on the weird weird rise
and spoiler alert fall of the flea circus. Hi, I'm
ben Hi, I'm no uh what? What? What is? How?
(00:48):
We flee? Flease on, flease on trapeze tiny, Now you'll
let you do a game. We flease, Okay, we we
flease on flying trapeze. We three Bethlehem. That's a good one.
It's a good tongue twister. But no, it's true. We're
back with fleas um and we should just dive right
into because I'm sure a lot of you were slightly
(01:11):
irritated that we left you with such a cliffhanger where
you're asking yourself, how do they do it? How? How?
It doesn't make any sense. They're fleas I know that
these human fleas or a little a few millimeters bigger
than um, you know, than the traditional dog or cat fleas,
but still these are basically microscopic creatures. We talked a
lot about watchmaking, which requires the use of specialized tools
(01:33):
to handle microscopic or maybe not microscopic, but very small pieces.
So Gade, we gotta ask you, what's the deal? How
was the magic made? And before we get to that,
we have to say that a lot of those questions
and complaints came from our very own super producer, Casey Pegrum.
That's true. He was livid. He was so mad at
(01:54):
you gave me hit. He's got a lot of a
lot of thoughts about flea circuses and uh yeah, well
we'll try to do him proud on this one. I'm
gonna I'm gonna clue you guys in because there's actually,
I mean, it is a guarded industry. Let's say there is.
You guys, remember that show Breaking the Magician's Code where
that guy in the mask was These are how the
(02:15):
tricks are done. We're still waiting on the flee circus
version of that. It hasn't happened yet, or you know,
maybe it did and nobody noticed. I don't know, but um,
there are you know, some tricks of the trade that
we that we know about, or or alleged tricks at least.
Um For example, one of the stories that these uh
these flea ring masters often tell and apparently by the way,
(02:38):
they're called professors usually, um, if you're a flee trainer,
your professor. So one story that these professors like to
share is that after they trap these fleas, they tame
them by keeping them in a shallow glass case with
a lid on it, and of course the fleas jump
up and bump their heads on the shallow case, and
(03:00):
after a few days, supposedly they're not jumping so much anymore,
not because they're dead, they're just a little more docile,
and they they've learned how high h the roof is
of their enclosure, and so they don't jump as high
anymore because they don't want to hit their heads. So
their spirits are broken, essentially strip them of their will
(03:22):
to live. In their brain dead, they can barely move
um and uh know, they're actually just incredibly well trained, right,
that's what they claim, at least, I mean, yeah, that's
you know, probably just part of the act explaining that,
but they will swear to it. That's how they get
the fleas to um uh to be, that's how they
(03:42):
tame them, and how they keep them from jumping out
of the circus ring or whatever. They only jump yea
high because they've been conditioned to do so. I mean
they jump at their full capacity. You're out of fleet.
You don't know where they could go. It could be
out in the audience, jump onto a person. And that's
why that's why they hop, right, because they hop from
host to host. Can't have that. Yeah, But I mean,
you know, there are those among us who would argue that,
(04:04):
you know, these guys are kind of full of it. Uh,
fleas don't have the capacity for learning um. But one
thing that is true is that some fleas are better
athletes than others. Right, they can jump higher, or you know,
just move it a faster clip. And so you know,
maybe maybe you have ten fleas and there's only one
that's kind of nimble and athletic enough, you know, for
(04:27):
the circus life. And so fleet trainers will keep a
close eye on on, you know, a potential crop of fleas,
and they will kind of earmark the guys with potential,
the ones that are doing the most jumping, you know,
fit for the circus life, and those become the star
of the shows. The ones that scut you gotta have it.
(04:48):
There are is there like a minor league for fleas
are like it's all the big leagues. It's all I
just I love that as a career description. What do
you do? Actually, I am the most successful uh flee
scout in the southeast region of northwest Ohio. It's a
big claim to fame, big dreams, that's what claim to fame. Okay,
(05:11):
But but it is true. It makes sense that not
every every flee could be the equivalent uh the flea
version of an Hussain bolt, because not every human is,
right there always exceptionally adept living organisms. Um did they
how how did they determine this though? Like? Were they
(05:32):
just able to notice what's appeared to be one flee
consistently hopping higher or faster more often than the others?
Like for me, the biggest difficulty and again I'm I'm
not a professor in this regard, but for me, the
biggest difficulty would be uh, differentiating one flee from the next. Right, Yeah,
(05:53):
you would think so, but again, you know, the secrets
have not all been revealed. Um, we don't know how
they're keeping track of these guys. Maybe they're marking them,
you know, color coded fleas. Um, I'm not sure. Maybe
it's just like you know, a mother with her with
her brood. You know, she knows them each bye bye,
touch by site, by personality, person Yeah, classic Jeffrey. But yeah,
(06:21):
that's uh, you know, and it's really just so okay,
these guys aren't trained, right, these fleas, they're just doing
what comes naturally. They're jumping. They're jumping around. Um, they're
looking for something to land on and feed on. And
so that the trick part, the entertainment part, comes in
what you harness it to. Right. It's putting on these
little collars and and uh, you know, yoking them to
(06:43):
chariots or putting little tiny instruments in their hands, um,
and watching them kind of fiddle away at them. Um.
The audience kind of supplies the rest. The fleas are
just jumping around, but because they're tied to these little contraptions,
the audience reads it as a trick. Right. It's not
a flee just of mindlessly jumping. He's part of a
chariot race. He's racing the other fleas around. Um. That's
(07:07):
you know, that's the illusion that they're selling. And again,
apparently it worked because this has been an act for
hundreds of years. Um, we do know again, uh, you know,
some tricks of the trade, like, for instance, the flea
music band that we talked about earlier. UM, I do
love a good music band. Well you're not alone in that,
(07:28):
um Bertolatto. You know, he's the one that kind of
pioneered that. Um he blew London away with his his
flea music band. UM and other people ran with the idea,
but prepared to think less of him for doing that
trick because how he actually did it was the fleas
were glued to the base of the flea circus, and
(07:48):
then the the instruments were glued to their mandibles, and
so when you heat the base up, the fleas tried
to escape. They were trying to get away. But again
the audience is reading this as them playing twiddling and
playing the instruments. Pay no mind to that smell of
cooking fleas. You know, I think they're so small and
(08:08):
probably wouldn't smell like much. But yeah, they're essentially like
cooking alive and and trying to save themselves in there,
and that's it's essentially this is this is animal cruelty.
I think you could argue that this is animal cruelty. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, insects are very small. We don't usually
think of in that terms. People swat a fly without
thinking twice about it, But this is yeah, altogether different. Right.
(08:30):
You're making tiny contraptions specifically to yoke them into service
and then kind of torturing them for people's entertainment, and
it's on such a small scale that you just don't
really notice that that's what's happening. Yeah, it's still it's
still in principle the same thing, because just eliminating of
flea is different from you know, torturing it in a
(08:50):
very weird way. It's kind of like beer money bear baiting. Yeah,
it's also like it's like a much more elaborate form
of that little psychopath kid that pulled the wings off
of flies for fun exactly. So you know, some people
think that um, this form of entertainment, these flee circuses,
(09:13):
that they actually declined, you know, in the twentieth century
because of concerns over you know, animal cruelty and kind
of the welfare of these fleas. That's not really the case.
There are some groups out there who definitely felt that
this was wrong and still do um, But really what
happened was the fleas got harder to find. It was
(09:33):
harder to source them, and it was difficult to train
them such as it was, and you know, you had
to keep replacing them and stuff like that. Things would
go wrong. Sometimes fleas would drop dead mid performance. Um
and so as technology progressed, you know, some of these
enterprising professors found an easier way of doing this, and
(09:55):
that was the John Hammond route, the mechanical route. They
turned to h chanical illusions. They had magnets and electrical
contraptions that would kind of um again, trick the audience
into thinking that these objects were being moved and manipulated
by fleas, when in reality it was, you know, a
gear system. Yeah, so this to me is pretty clever.
(10:19):
First off, it's it's kinder to the fleas involved, and
even if they're not my type of animal, that doesn't
mean they shouldn't be alive, right, but they it's kinder.
But also it seems like it's a very easy con
to pull, is it not. I mean, you would you
would have these contraptions, you could make them elaborate, especially
(10:39):
if they're just um automations or mechanisms of their own,
and people if there are a certain distance, way would
just assume a flea is there right, Oh yeah, absolutely,
once again referring to Jurassic Park. That's uh, That's what
John Hammond says is the little the little kids would
see it and be like, oh, I can see the fleas, Mommy,
do you see the fleas? And uh yeah, I mean
(11:00):
the audience is willing to believe. I think, so you
don't really have to torture It turns out you don't
have to torture four hundred plus bugs every night. Oh
it's it's it's it's charming, and it's a thing we
do all the time. I mean, there's no such thing
as superheroes. You know, there's like it's all suspension of disbelief.
So how is this any different. It's it's a show,
(11:22):
I would argue, it's not necessarily an overt form of
like deception. It's sort of part of the whole deal.
Right yeah, No, absolutely, people want to believe. Right. Um.
And but again, you know, the flea circus did not
did not go into decline specifically because of these animal concerns.
It was actually largely because hygiene improved so much. Um,
(11:46):
By the time you get to the twentieth century, we
have stuff like vacuum cleaners and you know air filters
in our houses and um, you know a lot of
cleaning agents and stuff. So the fleas pretty much just
packed their bags and hit the road. It was too
clean for them. Uh. And so human fleas, which again
were the ones being used in these circus acts because
they were bigger and better jumpers, they just got scarcer
(12:08):
and scarcer until the mechanical kind of flea circus that
we're talking about, the fleeless flee circus, became the norm. Oh,
we should point out there was there was a kind
of i would say an increasingly desperate band aid or
transitional phase uh that that you hipped us to where
(12:29):
some circuses said, while these fleas are dead, but we'll
we'll just keep using them, right Yeah. Yeah, that's probably
when they were getting harder to find, and it was
like or you know, I don't feel like training another
crop all over again, putting them in the shallow case,
let's skip that and uh yeah, so they would just
use the dead fleas again and again. They would dress
(12:49):
them up in their little costumes and just glue them
down to uh, you know, wherever they needed to be. Um.
And so yeah, that was kind of uh like you said,
the transitional phase. You would see that in in live
flee circuses, where really it was you know a lot
of dead fleas mixed in there. And you would also
see it in the mechanical ones where everything was operating
on gears and pulleys and that kind of thing. But
(13:11):
then you had, you know, for the for the kids
who weren't willing to bring their imaginations to it, I
guess they were you know, dead ones actually glued to
these surfaces. Um, so fleas were still involved in the
mechanical ones, but you know, not in the traditional live sense.
Oh weird, And and people still enjoyed it. People still
(13:33):
like the show. There weren't protesters out there saying, you know,
this is a false flee circus f f C. No,
of course there were, but they were ignored rightly. So, um, no,
you know, flee circuses are actually still popular. Um it's
you know, it ain't what it used to be. But
depending on where you live, you can actually still find
(13:56):
a modern day flee circus of both varieties mechanical ones
but also live ones too. Um. For example, there's one
of the most famous and long running ones is at
this October Fest celebration in Munich that still goes on
every year. Um, and there's a bunch in the US too.
So is the Munich one real or mechanical? It's real?
(14:17):
Oh wow? So are they still hot gluing a little
flea boys down to two platforms and heating them up
and making them flail? Most likely that's weird because Germany
is a little more progressive in the field of animal
rights in comparison to a lot of other places. Right,
I think it was was it Germany where there were
legal cases or there were cases going to court arguing
(14:40):
that some uh, non human animals be granted legal personhood Like,
uh yeah, So it seems like you believe you're correct, sir.
It seems like that would be a weird country to
to continue it. But then again, maybe they're just they're
just saying, well, fleas are fleas or fleas fleas or
insects to us? Uh it is. It is fascinating though,
(15:02):
that they're still they're still using the living fleas. I
guess they wouldn't be legit. Um. There's one detail you
had gave that really stood out to me, and I
don't know if it's stopped for you as well know
which is that? So a great proportion of flee trainers
historically had backgrounds in you know, theatrical work or in
(15:24):
stage performance. So is this just maybe like a thing
where a lot of magicians, especially ones with long careers,
go on to specialize in something right like up close magic,
card magic, grand copperfield escalusions or so on. Is a
flee circus sort of a more specified discipline within the
(15:49):
world of stage magic. Would you say it's I? I
think that's right. Um, Like you said, a lot of
stage magicians kind of pivoted into being a flee circus professor. Uh.
And again, like we've been talking about, there's a pretty
long history of miniatures, UM and showmanship, you know, the
the entertainment business kind of going hand in hand like UM.
(16:13):
One thing I read that I always thought was interesting
was Walt Disney was a huge fan of miniatures. And
again it was from UM touring Europe and finding, you know,
the remnants from these miniature houses that we talked about
earlier and just kind of falling in love with the
detail and the craftsmanship of it. And so before he
hit on the idea of doing Disneyland, he had the
(16:33):
idea for something called Disneylandia, which was going to be UM,
detailed models, little miniatures of the wild West and um,
you know, different eras in history. He was going to
pack these things onto train car and drive it around
the country and have people come and see Disneylandia. UM.
And that's kind of the idea at the heart of it. UM,
(16:56):
it's just building these little worlds. We'll check this out.
You may already know this, UM. But at the Disney
Family Museum in San Francisco, which is not run by
the Disney Corporation, it's run by the Dwalt Disney Family Trust. Uh,
they have all of these like scale models of tomorrow
Land and of all of the things that became Disneyland, UM.
(17:20):
And they're beautiful and intricate and exactly like what you're describing.
So obviously he took that idea and ran with it,
and then you know, built like the real thing. But
that was my favorite part of the whole I mean,
it's it's it's an amazing experience. UM. You can also
see the kinds of things they show at this museum
are the kinds of things that would be off limits
for the Disney Company. Like they have a whole um
(17:40):
gallery of a lot of those war propaganda Disney cartoons
and like posters and stuff like in the Furor's face,
you know, the Donald duck one um, which you know,
they don't really only even get those on Disney. They
don't get much not much play these days. But yeah, no,
I've been to that museum as well, and they they
do have of um, a lot of his personal collection
(18:02):
of miniatures there, you know, underglass you can see he's
got like a whole pantry of all these tiny, tiny
canned goods and little boxes and stuff and lots of
you know, tiny spoons. So he fell in love with it.
There's something about it that just appeals to showman. Um.
Just like again John Hammond and Jurassic Park. Um, it's, uh,
(18:23):
there's something about it. So I actually I did have
a thesis actually, which is that Jurassic Park is the
history of Flee circuses in reverse. Oh nice, okay, okay, okay,
okay expound Yeah, yeah, so again original flee circus owners.
They became, you know, over time, very well versed in
(18:45):
the difficulties of trying to control a living system. You know,
they had trouble sourcing the fleas they had trouble training them,
the performers had short lifespans, they had to be replaced, etcetera.
So eventually get we were talking about. When the technology allowed,
they moved to a mechanical system, flee less circuses that
(19:06):
relied on gears, and they were much more reliable, much
less messy, and much easier to control. But John Hammond,
he got into the flea business during that second era,
the mechanical run of flee circuses, so he was always
pining for the real thing to go back to that time.
He didn't have the living system, which he saw as
(19:26):
a step up because it was more real, Right, I
just wanted to make something really exactly, something they could
see and touch and and and then there's there's some
Uh I'm trying to figure out who are gold bloom
is in here? Who's the guy who's like fleas? Uh?
Find a way they do? They find a way? It's
(19:48):
by jumping. Yeah, I think that's right. So I mean,
you know, instead of going back to that old kind
of flea circus and and you know, learning his lesson
that way, he opted for the dinosaur circus instead, and
you know, chaos and sued. But I think that's a
lesson that we see kind of in the real world
all the time of that trying to control you know,
(20:09):
a living system as if it were a mechanical one,
and it breaks down all the time, like with um
manmade dams and levies or those programs where they try
to you know, drive out all the carnivores and eliminate them,
and right exactly, it doesn't work. There's a there's a
great point there, because what we're seeing is that the
(20:31):
further technology evolves, the more closely it mimics pre existing
natural processes or natural mechanisms, and then eventually, you know,
the idea of want to get very sci fi about it,
is that the most highly evolved forms of technology quote
unquote are themselves um indistinguishable from what appears to be
(20:53):
the natural world, which is which is a neat thing
to think about. And thank you for classing up the
episode with this, with this part game. But I do
want to say there's there is one piece of history
I found so fascinating and I feel like we'd be
remiss if we didn't hit it. Uh, The idea of
acknowledging fleas in an entertaining way and not just in
(21:16):
like a gloom and doom. These guys spread the play
kind of way. You found this fantastic, uh, this fantastic
little tidbit about Mesoamerica. Could you tell us just a
little bit about that, Yeah, for sure. So one example
that cropped up in the early nineteenth century, so this
was around the same time that flea circuses were kind
of really hitting their stride in Europe, is this form
(21:39):
of Mexican folk art called pulgas vestidas, which literally means
dressed fleas. And this was exactly what it sounds like.
People would take dead fleas and dress them up in
little outfits, and they would accessorize them too. They put
on you know, shoes and hats and belts like whatever
you can think of, and then they would mount the
(22:00):
fleas and pose them to make these little scenes inside
of these tiny shadow boxes. They were like the size
of a dime. And you know, sometimes you see an
entire mariachi band crammed into one of these things, like
playing their tiny little instruments, or maybe a pair of
flea dress like a bride and groom at the altar.
(22:21):
That was a really popular one. So all kinds of stuff.
This is kind of like some serial killer stuff right here,
I'm picturing, yeah, a little I don't know. It's also
simultaneously adorable and kind of goes back into that like
whole like obsession with miniaturization that we were talking about.
It feels like that's the impulse here, is like, oh,
(22:42):
let's dress that these cute, little, tiny dead things. Um.
But it's interesting because I'm looking at it now and
it seems like nobody's quite sure where this started. I mean,
I think again my conjecture might be that it was
just like the nature of like, look look at these
little things, let's make them cute. But there is a
theory that it began in Mexican convents. Um. I guess possibly.
(23:03):
You know, like a lot of things start with board
nuns when they go a little stir crazy, and that's
that's where Q and on started. Everybody knows that, um
and you know, started let's dress up the fleas. Uh.
So then eventually villagers you know, got hip to the idea,
and when they realized that the shadow Box has actually
made great souvenirs, uh, they started selling them to tourists.
So I guess it seems like they were a massive
(23:26):
hit too, because there are a ton of examples out there, right,
Oh yeah, these these things were everywhere. Everybody knew about them.
Actually found this great quote from the Mexican writer Octavio Pause.
Uh in the nineteen twenties. He weighed in on the
art of dressing fleas. That's how big it was. He
called it, quote a difficult art, exquisite and useless. Pause,
(23:48):
that's pause classiclassics, always always always quick with the hot take.
But but right, so it's it's uh, not only is
it exquisite and useless, but also quite pricey. Right, yeah,
that's right. Uh. I checked while I was, you know,
looking into this and the most recent dressed fleas to
(24:09):
sell on eBay. This was an auction just about a
month ago. It was a bride and groom set and
it's sold for nine hundred dollars US plus u us US.
This was auction, was in Arizona and uh, you know,
plus shipping to Nope Bridge too far. I'm sorry, guys,
but but are these like historical artifacts? Are these modern
(24:32):
re enactments of these older you know? He was claiming
that this is uh, this was an original. I guess
it's kind of a lost art now. So most of
them are still doing this. You know, this is this
is um, as you said earlier, both fascinating and pretty creepy.
(24:54):
I got some Tim Burton vibes off this, but I
gotta be honest, I didn't know there were two different examples.
I was thinking of a different kind of meso American
flee art gave you found a sculpted flee that predates
the concept of flee circuses entirely like I think it's
um it was created by Aztec civilization. Could you tell
(25:18):
us the story about that one? Yeah, absolutely, sorry, sorry
about that. You know, meso America was flushed with flee art,
so it's hard to contract sometimes. But uh, yeah, that's right.
The Aztecs produced this massive collection of intricate sculptures back
in the fifteen hundreds. A lot of them portray like
gods and goddesses, but there's some sacred objects to like
(25:40):
these containers that were used in ceremonies and musical instruments.
Strangely enough, like plants and vegetables are also represented in
this collection. There's this, uh, there's some sculptures of grains
of wheat, and there's also this footlong green stone pumpkin.
That kind of had my eye on. But uh, there's
also this whole section dedicated to animals, like a sculpture beast,
(26:01):
sheerry with snakes, dogs, jaguars, turkeys, all kinds of stuff,
pretty much any animal they were coming into contact with.
And that includes this enormous stone fleet. And what's most
impressive about it to me is the artist sculpted it
to be hundreds of times the size of a real fleet.
It's like a foot tall, so you get all these
details and features that would be really hard to see,
(26:24):
you know, with the naked eye. Like I don't really
know how he pulled it off without a magnifying glass
or microscope or anything like that. It's pretty amazing. Yeah,
and this would have predated like the you know, the lens, right,
I mean, they wouldn't have had anything like that, right
at least on this part of the world. I would think, Yeah,
it's fascinating because like back in part one, UM when
we were kind of discussing like the fleas and their
(26:47):
little parts and how they were posed with things, and
like how does a fleet hold a tiny Mariotti guitar?
And it's a little clause I looked up some like
imagery of like electron microscopes blowing up fleas and they
are just the most bizarro alien looking little guys. I mean,
they have these weird little mandibles. And it's very clear
that like, uh, for a lot of science fiction, you know,
(27:09):
practical effects and you know, um imagery and film. Uh, clearly,
insects are are a huge influence, and fleas in particular,
there's something very you know, alien about you know, like
they're exactly exactly they can't do the things that we
would consider routine routine activities like walking right right, um,
(27:33):
jumping and drinking blood. That's it? Yeah, hm, Now what
else is there? Man? What else do you need? That's
a good point. So what do you think it was
that that that made these sculptors so particularly fascinated with
these things that they could barely see? I mean even
I mean I I can't imagine, don't have perfect eyes side,
but I have pretty good eyes sight. But even like
squinting and looking up close to one of these, it
(27:54):
wouldn't look nearly like it would through the electron microscope.
And I was talking about, what's what where, where's the
fascination come from? Yeah? Yeah, it's kind of a strange pull.
But you know, the thing is, none of the subjects
for these sculptures were chosen at random. Like every one
of them says something about the concepts of Aztec religion,
and the key belief of their society was that, you know,
(28:14):
there were these certain gods, these creator gods, who had
sacrificed themselves in order to create humans in the world
and you know, everything in it, and so in order
to sustain those gifts, to kind of keep the universe going,
the Aztecs believed that their god's sacrifice had to be
you know, renewed over and over again with human blood. So, yeah,
(28:36):
the result of this is, you know, a steady stream
of ritual human sacrifice, which you know a lot of
these sculptures do focus on that in gory detail, Like
some of those vessels I mentioned earlier, those are like
blood and organ collection tools for these sacrifices. And you know,
that could also be why the fleet is represented here,
(28:57):
you know, in such detail as an animal that feeds
on blood in order to sustain itself. It's you know,
it's possible the Aztecs like looked at this fleet and
saw it a kind of little micro scale embodiment of
you know, the system they saw in place that like
blood renewal thing something holy. Exactly. Yeah, at the very
least sacred, like like like the way the you know,
(29:19):
Indians treat cows. And then exactly, and then we came
a lot a lot less reverent, making them dance and
uh yeah, attaching them to a little toy chariots and stuff.
I don't something don't think the Aztecs would have been
fans of fleet circuses. Yeah, like, you know, electrifying them
so they like spaz out and pretend to play instrument.
(29:40):
I wasn't electrifying, It was just heating them up until
they started literally cooking place and that kind of even
still probably wouldn't have one of any points. Yeah, we're
low on fleet points at least with the where the
Aztecs are concerned. Yeah, I think I think you guys
are right. Something tells me, um, the people of that
time would not have maybe been the hugest fans of
(30:03):
flee circuses, but Gabe Weird, huge fans of hanging out
with you. Thank you so much for taking us on
this journey, not just for one part, but for two parts.
On the Weird Weird history of the rise and fall
of Flee Circuses. Yeah, likewise, guys, I've had a blast.
Thanks for having me on. I hope to come back soon.
But you know, maybe we could just leave the blood
(30:25):
contract thing out next time. We're all friends. Sorry, deal breaker, Sorry,
I tried, No, Nolan, I had a meeting about this.
We we voted, mandatory majority rules gave but just the same.
Thank you so much for joining us for this two
partner and and hipping us to the magical uh and
(30:46):
and and somewhat disturbing world of Flee circuses. And honestly
you took us even further than even that with the
whole meso American angles. So huge thanks to you, my
friend research, your extraordinaire Gabe Lucy. Yeah, and also huge
thanks to Christopher haciotis here in spirit. Big big thanks
of course so one' only super producer Casey Pegram. Big
(31:09):
thanks as well to Alex Williams, who composed this slap
in Bob and uh, you know, I guess we have
to say it. Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland's you said,
you said his name. It's time, gentleman. You did this
(31:30):
Ben No, no, you both did this. Gentleman. For now,
you said my name first and then Ben said my
name second. We all know that if I hear my
name the three times I appeared, But since your action
so many other people's names, I just assumed mine was
in there too, and so here, Wow, I feel like
(31:50):
your accents changed. It's gotten a little more absurd. Well,
you know, it's been a while, so I just thought
i'd really turn it up to eleven. Okay, guys, what's happening? Yeah,
gave sorry, we should have mentioned this at the top. Um.
There is a part of the show that we uh,
(32:12):
we were kind of hoping you wouldn't have to see,
but every so often, due to another contract signed in blood, uh,
we are bombed by our own nemesis, h Jonathan Strickland,
a k a. The Quister, who will not let the
episode end unless we participate in a battle of wits. Yes, yes,
(32:37):
it's very sad because one half of this equation is unarmed.
Gave you all Now welcome to the most cringe worthy
segment in all of podcasting. Yes, they shall present to
all of you three scenarios, two of which all reel
and one I made up seas and it is your
(32:58):
job to figure it out which of the three is
the fake. As always, after I tell you all three scenarios,
you will have three minutes to make your decision, and
you are allowed to ask me questions, but you must
first proceed that with phrase of my arbitrary choosing. Now
I understand you were speaking of flea circuses. Now we're
(33:23):
talking about flee circus. Yes, flea circuses. Well, I have
chosen a very very similar topic, political assassinations. And so
before any question you must proceed it with a quotation
from Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins. And in case you don't
(33:44):
know any everybody's got the right to be happy works
just fine. So if you have a question, you have
to start with something from Assassins. Here are your three scenarios.
Scenario number one. Paul, the third Duke of Strawberry, also
known as Paul the Merciless, had a problem. He met
(34:04):
an ill fated end at the hands of an assassin
in fourteen twenty five. He had made many enemies, having
previously served as bishop in Bavaria, and he ruled with
an iron fist. He even warred against his own family
in order to secure his position as duke on a
night in October fourteen twenty five, and unidentified assassin, likely
(34:27):
sent by his own sister, didn't just stab Paul to death.
According to reports, Paul's body was practically drained of all
blood and left hanging over the rail of his bed
chamber's balcony, wearing only his chain of office. His passing
was unmourned. Scenario two. Swiss politician org Yanech had a problem.
(34:54):
He was many things. Protestant pastor, Roman Catholic, secret society leader, soldier,
torture supervisor, assistant, axe murderer, duelist, and of course prominent politician.
He met his end in sixteen thirty nine at the
hands of a bear, or rather the pause of a man,
or rather the hands of a man dressed like a bear,
(35:17):
who assassinated Georgie with an axe. As it said, whether
Janech was axed a question or some other weapon was used.
He was really most sincerely dead after the whole thing.
Scenario A three. Yugoslavian statesman Yosip Broz Tito had a problem,
(35:38):
and that problem was Joseph Stalin. Stalin's head of state
security planned out an ambitious assassination on Tito The plan
was to employ a Soviet agent to pose as a
diplomat from Costa Rica. The agent would smuggle in lethal
bacteria into the presence of Tito, infecting him and everyone
else in the area. But before plan could be set
(36:01):
in motion, Stalin himself shuffled off this mortal coil in
nineteen fifty three. Tito would die in nineteen eighty, just
a few days shy of his eighty eight birthday. Start
the clock, Okay, I am running to that grandfather clock.
(36:21):
You mean just one second? You mean that really big
watch the corner. WoT you push and you push, you
just insist. Um. I'm gonna be honest, you guys. The
best thing I can say is I have a thirty
percent chance of randomly guessing the correct thing here. Same. Yeah.
(36:45):
The thing about Jonathan is the quister. His quizness is
that he uh, he puts a lot of effort into
these uh he really makes them pretty tricky to to
just get it out right. Gosh, what was the name Assassin?
The musical? That was pathetic? No, you could what was
(37:08):
the guy's name the second name? Oh, George Schmarman. It
sounds like it sounds like a made up it's a
job because I love a good oomb loud. Yeah, he
loves a good oomb loud. I feel like that's a
name that came from the depths of the hellish ma
that is the quister's mind. Yeah, it's just it's it's
(37:32):
a good argument with the name that does sound a
little too fun, written by perhaps someone with a deep
love of absurd names. But then there's that guy who
was the axe murderer, Like, what was that all about?
He was in a bear suit, but he used an axe.
That's the same guy. Oh right, Yeah, that's still the
(37:54):
second one. You know, I was paying the most attention
to the first one, so I think that one was it. Yeah, yeah,
I think the real one. That was the real one. Yeah,
the real one. I I felt pretty pretty real about
the first one. John that's had to point this out.
Nobody has heard of Assassin the musical by Stephen hows
(38:15):
on time if it's not into view with Patrick Harris
knows all about it. Thank you very much. Uh why
did you do it? Johnny? Very well done? Mr Bolin.
What is your question? What is the third scenario? What's
going on? The get longer longer? I am well, you
keep pointing out that if I spend too much time
(38:35):
on one, that's clearly the one that I made up.
So I made all of them long that's what you get,
Mr Bolin. You pointed out your your way of figuring
out my tricks. Uh, that was about about Joseph bros Tito,
who was Joseph Stalin attempted to assassinate Tito multiple times, actually,
but one of the plans was to smuggle in a
(38:58):
form of lethal bacteria to in affect him. The the
Soviet agent in charge of doing this was not told
that that was what he would be doing, only that
he would be bringing in something perhaps poisonous into Tito's presence.
The way you're talking about that sounds like the way
someone talks about something they've researched. So I think that
(39:19):
one's probably real. Although the name of what is it,
Yosef Bros Yosip Broz Tito, he was Yugoslavia. Do you
think people called him bros? If Finally, yeah, I mean
you know how many minutes I left on that three
minutes out of time. You've got a great since a time.
I guess we gotta lock in one. I'm gonna go
(39:41):
with games gut. Yeah, I'm gonna say number three feels
true that yeah, oh sorry sorry, games Gut was one
three the description yes with you. Sorry. He had a
lot of details for that one. Which of the three
are you saying is the one I made up? Because
right now you're saying one is real? Three he is really.
I don't know which one you're saying. I mean two
(40:02):
is fake? Two is fake fake? Wait wait, wait two
of them are real? No, two are real. One's fake?
Which was the bake on the bear one? All right, well, Gabe,
the daughters go to you. Uh you really you really
want to be responsible for besmirching our sterling record. I
think we're ahead right now, we're ahead by one. This
(40:24):
is gonna eating us out if we lose, alright, you'll
be dead to us. Well, Gabe, Gabe, you'll welcome on
the show. Anytime that was that was a real thing
that happened, was your again? He really was a Swiss politician.
He really was murdered. The reason the man was dressed
(40:44):
as a bear was he was murdered on conival of
Old Times. And yes it's said that it was an
he was murdered by an ax, although that is that
part is perhaps the least well documented. But he was
certainly killed by someone dressed as a air So this
one's untrue. Also, that one is absolutely true. The one
that is untrue is Pulled, the third Duke of Straubing.
(41:07):
There never was such a person. Is there a place
called Strouby? Yes, there is, it's next to okay, but
it's but there was no There was no pull the
third who was who was stabbed to death and left
drained of blood and hanging over his balcony railing, wearing
nothing but his chain of office that was completely made up.
Seas Helloll, we're well done. I'm I'm absolutely exhausted on
(41:32):
my face. Yeah, yeah, it's tag on all of our faces.
We you know, we we we were in this together.
But you should do an episode about your niche seriously,
because this fellow was you read his biography and his
list of accomplishments. It is crazy. Got to have yeah,
we've got to have you on for that one man.
(41:53):
Uh in maybe your alter ego and I know we've
built a really weird meathos here because we refer to
you by your government name and your alter ego. Ah, well,
if you want to see I agree, I will do it,
but only if the quizter could be on at the
end of that episode. Why we'll do it, Jacqueline Hide,
(42:14):
Jacqueline Hyde vibe. Well, we are tied, folks, so we're
going into our next bout with the quister with everything
on the line. As you know, this is a very
high stakes pursuit we have here. Uh, Jonathan, well played,
Thank you for your time. Um, we should have known.
(42:35):
Paul is a weird Paul is a weird name, right
for a month like a I do have no no,
there's no no, no, no, there's no paulse except for
super producer Paul deck Ends mission control of of something.
I want you to know, Fami, He's the only Paul
that matters. I will say, Uh, Strickland that when you
(42:57):
said Duke of Straub, I thought you were going to
say Duke of Strawberry, which sounds a lot more appealing
than that story. Well, we've all got a lot to
learn from history, I think is our takeaway here. Uh,
if you would like to share some stories about your
own experiences with weird uh God, where do we go guys?
(43:20):
Weird flea stories, flee facts God, any of that you
can find us on the internets of plenty. We like
to recommend our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians, but you can
also find us as individuals online. That is correct. You
can find me on Instagram where I am at how
(43:40):
now Noel Brown, Ben, how about you my friend? Yes, folks,
you can find me at Ben Boland bow l I
n on Instagram. You can also find me on Twitter
at Ben Bowland. H s W joined the Adventures. I'm
getting into some weird stuff lately. No spoilers, Uh, Gabe,
what about you? Well, if people were so inclined, they
(44:02):
could go to a number of different Transformers message boards
and track me down under the pseudonym Magic Dishwasher. And
that is all I am comfortable revealing. So what you're
saying is you're a giant nerd? Correct? And the way
we go, Uh, you know it's fair? Fair is fair?
(44:23):
I hope we don't regret this. But Jonathan, where can
people find you? If they are so inclined? On a
chilly November more, you may find me looking down that
alley you never looked directly at. I'm there, I'm waiting.
He's also got a show called tex Stuff. You can
find him on Twitter. Yes, you can subscribe to text
(44:46):
stuff on all your favorite pub catching apps, or you
could just go down that alley. Don't do I've got
change my answer to it to what he said. No,
it's too late, too late, but I locked it. Yeah,
blood Oath, See you next time, Folix. Yeah. For more
(45:07):
podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
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