Listener Mail: Leave it to Birgit

Once more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Listener Mail.
My name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
And my name is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the
day of each week that we read back messages from
the Stuff to Blow Your Mind mail bag. If you've
never gotten in touch with us before, why not you
give it a shot. You can reach us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Any kind
of messages or fair game feedback to recent episodes, questions, corrections,

(00:35):
suggestions for new topics, just want to share something you
think we would find interesting. All that's good, send it
on in Now. We do have an announcement at the
top of today's episode, which is that this is going
to be an all new listener Mail episode. But Rob
and I are going to be out for several days
this week, so we will be running some vault episodes.
So I believe Tuesday and Thursday's core episodes are going

(00:58):
to be from the vault, and Friday's going to be
a weird house cinema rewind that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
We picked out a fun one for that, and then
on Wednesday we're going to do another Monster Fact omnibus,
where we have multiple Monster Fact episodes compiled into a
single listening experience. These are all going to be vampire related.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
Ooh, very nice, but so yes, it'll be Vault episodes
rest of this week and then next week we will
be back with you again.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
All right, let's go ahead and jump into it. We
heard it back from several different people regarding our episodes
on The Remarkable Beaver.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
All right, I'm going to read this first message from Jacob,
and then there's a very short one after that, so
I might do that one too. But so this is
Jacob writing in about castorium. This is something we talked
about in the context of Beaver's. Castorium is an oily
substance harvested from the glands of beavers that has been
used by humans for thousands of years, actually for all

(01:56):
kinds of purposes, ranging from cosmetics to medicine, to treating
tools and weapons to food, and Jacob got in touch
with one of the food related uses. So Jacob says, Hi,
longtime listener, first time emailer, just finished listening to parts
one and two of The Remarkable Beaver series and thought
I knew exactly what you were going to talk about

(02:17):
when you mentioned castorium and food, but I was wrong.
Have you ever had blue Moon ice cream? Jacob provides
a link. Maybe you've had Superman ice cream. The blue
part of Superman ice cream is traditionally blue moon. It's
popular in the upper midwest of the US and has

(02:39):
a flavor profile that is difficult for most to discern.
Some speculate that this blue moon ice cream's flavor was
originally derived using castorium. I'd encourage you to give it
a try if you ever come across it. I quite
enjoy it. Thanks for entertaining and educating me all these years. Jacob, Okay,
I don't think I have had blue Moon ice cream

(02:59):
or Superman ice cream. Superman appears to be like a
three flavor ice cream, and it's like Superman's suit colors,
so it's got like blue and yellow and red. I
don't know what the yellow and red flavors are. Maybe
they're also derived from mammal glands, but blue moon. I
have never had it all, but I like the idea.
I assume from what you're saying that castorium is probably

(03:21):
not used anymore to flavor it, but that maybe whatever flavors.
It now is attempting to recreate an original flavor which
did come from beavers.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
This would track with what we were discussing in that episode,
with castorium being used more frequently, like early twentieth century
and so forth, and then it's just not as much
call for it, I'm noticing. So I've never had this
BlueMoon ice cream. I've never had Superman ice cream. I
just haven't spent I don't know that I visited any
of the states where it is popular, But just looking

(03:52):
at the wiki on Superman ice cream, I see that
the different colors in some of the commons of Superman
ice cream, the flavors just vanilla across the board, oh
for all the colors. And of course that tracks with
what is sometimes described as the flavor profile of castorium
and the way castorium was used as a as an

(04:14):
artificial flavor. Ruse, it's a natural flavor, but it's just
maybe not what you might expect. Now.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Is blue Moon ice cream one of those things where
there are like seven different places that claim to have
the original Blue Moon and all the others are copycats.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Hmmm, I don't know, good question. Maybe our blue Moon
ice cream specialists out there can chime in.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Well, Jacob, you definitely raised my curiosity. I would like
to try this now. I don't know how do you
get your hands on and if you're not in the Midwest,
can you order ice cream by mail?

Speaker 2 (04:42):
I don't know if they do that, i'd be probably.
I'm not sure if that if it works out cost wise,
but I bet you can do it all right.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
I'm gonna also do this short message from jam next,
but quick context for this next email. We were talking
in the Beavers episode about the well known fact in
medieval bestiaries that when a male beaver is being pursued
by hunters, it will bite off its own testicles because
it knows that this is what the hunter wants, and

(05:12):
it's just sort of like, okay, you can have them,
don't kill me. This is not true in multiple ways.
This is not true. Beavers don't actually do this. Plus,
the glands that hunters were harvesting from beavers for the
oily substance known as castorium were not actually testicles, So
this is just medieval bro science. It's like quadruple wrong.

(05:34):
But we discussed several real facts about beavers that might
have led to this false belief, and we also discussed
the general biological adaptation known as autotomy, which is not
especially observed in beavers in the real world, but it's
more often observed in animals like lizards, where for example,
some lizards will just shed their whole tale if threatened

(05:56):
or caught by a predator, so the tale stays behind,
wiggling to or appease the predator. You know, here's a
little snack or something to keep your attention, and then
the lizard with the stump on its hindquarters runs off
and gets away. But in all the cases we could
think of in the moment in the episode, with the
possible exception of crabs, autotomy is just kind of an

(06:17):
automatic release of the sacrifice appendage. And we were wondering
if there are any examples where the animal actually has
to actively do some kind of cutting or biting or
other work to sever its own body part, like in
the Legend of the Beaver. The only example we could
think of was I remembered how I'd seen in some
documentary footage that a crab with an injured claw would

(06:40):
actively like reach over with the other claw and cut
or pull the damaged claw off and discard it now. Finally,
Jan says, love your show. You ask for examples of
when animals might remove an appendage to escape a predator.
I was thinking about animals that are caught in traps
removing a foot or other appendage to escape the trap.
Not sure if this is the type of situation you

(07:02):
were thinking about, but it is a case of knowing
they need to escape and being willing to sacrifice the
body part to save the overall animal's life. Just a thought, Jan, Yeah, Jan,
that is really interesting. It didn't occur to me at
all in the episode, but you're right that does happen.
I could be wrong, but I don't think zoologists or

(07:23):
people who specialize in animal behavior would usually consider this autotomy,
maybe because it is not like an anatomically facilitated behavior,
Like if a mammal choose its leg off to get
out of a trap, there's no natural seam for the
leg to sever along, and it won't necessarily heal easily,
and it certainly won't grow back like a lot of

(07:44):
the autonomized appendages of maybe a lizard or a crustacean
or something will. So yeah, I wonder something tells me
to kind of think about that differently, that maybe that's
just like a desperate behavior showing the more versatile behavioral
repertoire of mammals that they can just come up with

(08:07):
all kinds of solutions, even very desperate and grizzly ones.
Whether a beaver would ever do this, I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Now, speaking of Besty Harris, I do have to mention
this briefly. Listener Matt sent this to me via discord. Well,
you know, we're a big fan of the the illuminated
manuscripts and the various strange illustrations. That was one of
the talking points in the Beaver episodes. Well, somebody out
there in the like the wild world of fandom has

(08:36):
created a Codex pokemonas a Pokemon illuminated manuscript. I don't
think this is like a licensed Pokemon product or anything.
I think it's like a fan creation that's, you know,
mostly just for fun. But I included a link for
it in our our our slack here Joe for you
to glance at. Here. I was, I don't know if
I'm actually going to buy this thing, because I don't

(08:58):
know that anyone else in my family besides me would
find it amusing. But I love these illustrations that it's
apparently in Latin, and you have these suitably strange medieval
illustrations of things like Pikachu and Mew two and so forth.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
Oh yeah, I see here. I think we have a
big bulba sore.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Is that right?

Speaker 3 (09:18):
It's yeah, I think so, kind of a big green
gopher with a plant on its back.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah, there's a nice illustration of the angels bestowing a
human with a Pikachu. All right, But anyway, that's it's
just too amusing to not share. But I want to
come back to some more beaver Listener mail here. This
one is in response to the subject of beaver shout. Okay,
so the background on this is there's a Swedish spirit

(09:47):
called beaverhaut. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, but it's made
with castorium, translated as beaver shout. Now, I'm not sure
if it's something that is actually commercially available anywhere or
if it's just reached only traditionally prepared. I suspect the
latter based on the sorts of images that were had
come up for me when I start looking around for it.

(10:07):
For instance, there'll be a picture of somebody clearly in
the state of preparing beaver shalt with a bottle of
vodka and some other bottle with what's clearly supposed to
be castor glands in the bottom of a like a
jar of vodka or something. So we heard back from
Emil on this. Emil writes, and it says, Hi, my

(10:33):
name is Emil. I'm a Finish expat residing in Norway.
Thank you for your varying and often surprisingly interesting deep
dives into topics concerning the natural world. I have greatly
enjoyed your series on the humble beaver. You're mentioning of
the dreaded beaver shout brought a compartmentalized core memory back
to life. Eight or nine years ago, a friend of

(10:53):
mine took a sabbatical year as a teacher in the
northern Swedish municipality of Jacquesmanc. In this area, beaver hunting
is still practiced to some extent. An avid hunter and
imbiber of strong spirits himself, my friend took it upon
himself to concoct baverhoot by infusing a bottle of cheap
vodka with the glands from a beaver he unfortunately killed

(11:14):
while hunting there he brought this bottle, with the glands
still present, back home, where we, of course couldn't resist
the dare to try some for ourselves during a night
of drinks, barbecuing and pretend machismo, as meetings with childhood
friends seemed to always go. The sight of the glands
in that very bottle is still etched into my retness,

(11:35):
resembling shriveled up testicles in an otherwise clear, slightly amber
colored liquid. The smell is difficult to describe, somewhat reminiscent
of old leather and fir tree. The drink was served
in a shot glass, and I was advised not to
think too hard about my task, and I more or
less went for it in one go. The first impression
was that of any shot of cheap distilled liquor. A

(11:57):
few seconds later the taste hit me again. This is
hard to described. The closest analogy would be chewing on
fur tree sap in worn leather, and following this up
with smelling a rug of rubbing alcohol. Although much more
pungent than either, the oily nature of the drink seemed
to cover the whole esophagus, and the taste lingered for
close to an hour. Even though I tried to wash

(12:18):
away the taste with every liquid available. After the taste
eventually subsided in, the smell still seemed to be present
on my breath for the remainder of the night, bringing
me close to gagging with every exhalation. In all my
days of eating and drinking exotic food and drinks, nothing
comes close to the pungent nature of this unholy concoction.
I have since come to wonder if my friend, with

(12:40):
his at best questionable knowledge of beaver and natoby, had
harvested the anal glands by mistake, although I choose to
believe it really was the intended glands present in the bottle.
So in other words, one out of five stars as
a gastronomical experience, but certainly memorable. Once again, thank you
for all that you do. Best regards emil PS. We
also willed some beaver meat the same night. This was

(13:02):
surprisingly mellow, reminiscent of rabbit, and really quite pleasant.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
Well okay then, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Mean, I guess part of this too is the I
know there are recipes online for the preparation of beaver shout,
but I don't know it's like it. Maybe there's a
fine art to getting it just right. And also maybe
this is just what it kind of what it's its
reputation suggest it is a rugged, woodsy like kind of

(13:33):
survivalist spirit. And you know it's not for for for
us city folks to really attempt this is not for us.
We are not meant to know of it.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Maybe it is not meant to be pleasant, but meant
to be painful, because it is pain that forges the
fastest friendships.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
All right, Well, setting aside the Mighty Beaver, should we
dip into a little weird house cinema listener mail here?

Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yeah, sure, maybe I will do. This message from Richard
in response to our episode on The Incredible Shrinking Man,
Richard says, I love your podcast and have been particularly
impressed by both your intricate research and interesting discussions. On
the episode about the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, there
was a discussion about how water tension is not a

(14:29):
major factor for human life, where gravity overrides the forces
on us. It is only when you consider the size
of insects that water tension is a key concern. Yeah,
this is from that essay I've referred to numerous times
on the show before, called on being the Right size
by jbs hal Daane. The point is that big animals

(14:50):
have to worry about gravity because when you fall, it
can be really rough when you hit the ground, But
a tiny insect falling to the ground is usually not
seriously harmed, even from a great But meanwhile, if you're
a very small animal like an insect, water tension can
really grab you. It can be dangerous. You know, you
get wet and that's kind of like it's multiples of
your own body weight clinging to you on the outside.

(15:12):
But Richard goes on, however, humans do have to deal
with the significance of water tension when gravity is countered
in orbit during weightlessness. There are many popular videos of
astronauts showing how they have to deal with water when
it contacts a person and objects. Very importantly, there was
the case of an astronaut during a spacewalk having a

(15:33):
water leak in his helmet. He had to carefully and
quickly move to the airlock before water capillary action drove
the water around his head where it could have covered
his eyes, mouth, and nose. Even within gravity, this could
have been a major issue, of course, so you don't
have to wait for a sci fi movie to show
water tension's possible effect on people. It's happening every day

(15:55):
in the sky above us, I suppose, referring to like
in the space station. Thank you for reading my email
and the great podcast, Richard. That is a good point, Richard,
I'd mainly thought about you know, when I think about
water in the Space Station, I think of cute little
videos where astronauts are like playing, you know, they've got
a cup of water and then they just let it
float out in front of them in a blob and

(16:16):
then maybe gobble it up or something. It just sits
there and it kind of clings to itself. But yes, if
you were, say in an EVA suit, and some water
leaks out and get stuck to the outside of your head,
that can just really like kind of crawl around on
your skin. You can't depend on it dripping downwards like
it does when you're on Earth's surface.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
All right. Of course, we recently talked about nineteen ninety
three's Super Mario Brothers, so we heard from some folks
on this. First up, This one comes to us from Rusty.
Rusty says, thank you so much for the recent Weird
House Cinema on the Super Mario Brothers movie. I have
been delighted to see the cultural re examination of it

(16:59):
over the last couple of years, and it truly is
a bizarre gem. It lingered in my memory from childhood,
and I think helped shape my desire to seek out
the strangest non horror movies I can find. There really
is an entire second episode's worth of context to be
discussed with it, But the part that seemed worth mentioning
for listeners interested in cinema history is actually about Yoshi.

(17:20):
During pre production for Jurassic Parks, Spielberg was testing an
advanced stop motion technique called go motion, even producing a
test scene you can watch on YouTube. They included a
link here for us, and yeah, this is basically the
scene where the t Rex attacks the vehicle in Jurassic Park,

(17:40):
but it is a test footage with the with stop
motion animation that's more in line with what you would
expect from like Ray, Harryhausen and so forth.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
I think this was created by Phil Tippett, I believe so.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
But one thing I'm to understand is that go motion here,
the technique being used, is different from stop motion in
that it attempts to introduce motion blur to stop motion,
because we've talked about this before that I love stop
motion effects, but they do have a kind of unnatural
quality to them. There is a crispness and clearness to

(18:15):
the action because there's no blurring between the frames. Each
frame is a sharply focused still photograph, and then you're
just showing a lot of those in quick succession, whereas
when you film something that's actually in continuous motion, there's blurring.
And apparently go Motion had something to do with trying
to recreate this effect for heightened realism.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
The footage here, I mean, I love it, but I
can see why they ended up not going with it.
I think Jurassic Park would have been a different experience
had the dinosaur attacks been more in line with this.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, it's interesting that. I think one time when we
were talking about different kinds of special effects regimes and
how the at least in my view, the main point
of special effects is not necessarily to be realistic. It
is to be enjoyable, and realism is only one of
the ways that special effects can be enjoyable. So, like

(19:11):
stop motion effects don't usually look realistic, but I love them.
They're beautiful and they're fun. But I think the example
I used in that discussion for a movie where realism
is the goal and it's achieved to great effect was
Jurassic Park. I mean, in the t Rex escape scene,
I don't know how you could tell that's not a

(19:31):
real t Rex walking out of an enclosure. I mean,
it looks absolutely real, and I wouldn't change anything about it.
So in that particular case, in this movie, for some reason,
realism is what's called for. That is the what's demanded
of the special effects team in other movies. You know,
in a Sinbad movie, I don't want realistic looking skeletons.

(19:52):
I want stop motion skeletons, but they're weird, you know,
overly crisp movements.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah. I mean that's the necromancy at work there, right Anyway,
Rusty continues. The production team spent time on the set
of Super Mario Brothers to learn from the advanced Yoshi
puppet that had beat out Hintson Studios for the creature designs. Allegedly,
the positive impression it left swayed the decision to use
animatronics instead. I can't recommend enough that any fan of

(20:19):
bad movies or general oddities. Check out the Super Mario
Brothers Movie nineteen ninety three or the Morton Jankle Cut,
a two hour version available for free on archive dot org.
Thanks for the show's, Rusty. Yeah for anyone out there
who watched the Super Mario Brothers ninety three movie and
was like it was. It was a lot of fun,

(20:40):
but I just wish it were two hours long.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Yeah, not long enough, Rusty. You don't say what is different,
what is added into the Morton Jankle cut.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, I mean I didn't research it to see, but
I don't know. I'm of two minds on this, Like, yeah,
sometimes longer cuts of films can definitely add much needed
connective tissue, you character development, and just basic information you'd
need to make sense of the plot. On the other hand,
like sometimes they're just real diminishing returns by adding more

(21:12):
to a film. So I don't know, I'm doubtful. I'm
not in a big hurry to go check out this
extended cut, but I don't know. Maybe it makes all
the difference in the world more Koopa character development.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Oh oh hey, that reminds me. So we had a
brief discussion in the Super Mario Brothers episode where we
were like, what is going on with Dennis Hopper's hair?
Why does he have these these like elevated sort of
Dino fins of blonde hair. They dyed his hair blonde
and they put it up in these ridges. I couldn't

(21:45):
understand that until I was texting with a friend about
he listened to our episode and then he was telling
me about Max Headroom, the original creation of the directors
of Super Mario Brothers. And I went back in the
look at some Max Headroom videos and I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh,
King Koopa just has Max Headroom hair. Max Headroom has

(22:07):
ridges of blonde hair going from front to back, just
like that. So that's obviously what they were doing. They
were giving him Max Headroom hair. I don't know why,
but that's what they did.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
Similar aesthetic choices made in this character design. Yeah, all right,
we have one more here for you concerning Mario Brothers.
This one came to us on Discord and if you
want to join the Stuff to Blow your Mind Discord channel,
send us an email and we'll send you the link
so that you can join up there. User YMZ says

(22:40):
the following boy that nineteen ninety three Super Mario episode
brought me back. My childhood best friend had a pirated
VHS that we watched every weekend for a few months.
I remember thinking even back then that whoever made the
movie was trying to replicate the gritty New York vibe
of the live action nineteen ninety Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
but with none of the charm. I have to disagree

(23:02):
with Rob that Detective Pikachu was a good movie, though
my kids loved it. That the two thousand and one
Final Fantasy Movie and nineteen ninety three Super Mario turned
me off permanently to any video game movies.

Speaker 3 (23:14):
Well, that's rough. I saw that Final Fantasy Movie in
the theater, and you know, you go back and look
at that. It's got a great voice cast, but I
don't know, I'm not in a hurry to watch that again.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Now I agree to disagree on Detective Pikachu, but this
is a great point about teenage memeting Ninja Turtles. I
remember I haven't seen it since maybe since I saw
it in the theaters back in nineteen ninety, but I
remember it being a lot of fun, and it also
had this nice vibe where it's like, yeah, they really
made an effective live action adaptation of this cartoon world,

(23:49):
like the Turtles look great, Hintson Creations. You know, the
ninjas are cool, shredders, terrifying all that. It really worked
and I could. I think this is a solid view
on some Mario Brothers is coming in the wake of
teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and thinking well, if they can
do that for the Turtles, then surely we can do
something similar for Mario and Luigi.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
Now, Rob, how long until on Weird House Cinema we
do the two nineteen nineties live action Mortal Kombat movies,
the Original Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat Annihilation, two of
the greatest films of all time.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
I've always seen the first one. I don't think I
ever saw the second one, but I think we could.
We could have a feast out of either.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
They are also both quite weird.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, and I mean especially the I mean they both
have very interesting casts. Yeah, yeah, both of them. Both
of them have some great casts work going on there.
So yeah, let us know. If you want to hear
us cover a Mortal Kombat film, chime in, contact us
make your vote count.

Speaker 3 (24:50):
There is really almost nothing that tickles my soul as
much as Christoph Lambert as Raiden with his little attitude.
I don't think think.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
So inspired casting inspired casting.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
Yeah, oh hey, I have one more very important short
message to include before we sign off today, and this
one comes from Hugh. Hugh says, Hello, Robert and Joe.
I hope all is well. I was wondering when JJ
will become excellent? Is it hereditary? Is there an exam?

(25:26):
Is it a point system? I'm dying to know. Best
wishes Hugh. Well, Hugh, thank you for pointing out a
major major oversight. This made me realize that I did. Indeed,
I used to usually refer to our previous audio producer
Seth as our excellent audio producer, which he was. But
let it now and henceforth be known that our current

(25:47):
audio producer JJ has been extremely, extremely excellent from day one,
and I will make sure to mention that in our
sign off going forward.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Huzzah.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
Thanks for everything, man.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
All right, well, note we're going to go ahead and
sign off here for this episode. But just a reminder.
The Listener Mail publishes every Monday, and the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind podcast feed Core Science episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, Monster Factor, Artifact on Wednesday, and on Fridays,
we set aside most serious concerns just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest to
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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