The Monstrefact: The “Minnie the Moocher” Walrus Ghost

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the Walrus Ghost from the spooky 1932 Fleischer Studios Betty Boop animated short "Minnie the Moocher."

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamman. This is the Monster Fact,
a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. Every
Halloween season, my family and I invariably pull up some
old favorite animated shorts. Some of these are clips like

(00:33):
the This is Halloween number from nineteen ninety three's The
Nightmare Before Christmas or the excellent Wizard Battle from Disney's
nineteen sixty nine film The Sword in the Stone. But
we also carefully dig a little deeper in the animation
graveyard to unearth, say the classic nineteen twenty nine Silly
Symphony Skeleton Dance, or the nineteen thirty two Fleisher Studios

(00:55):
Betty Boop short mini The Moocher. If you haven't seen
this string Jim, look it up. I'm gonna summarize the
plot briefly here, but it's gonna sound really weird, okay,
jazz Age Flappergal Betty Boop has an argument with her parents,
with whom she lives, and runs away with her boyfriend,
a dog human hybrid named Bimbo. After a brief encounter

(01:18):
with Coco of the Clown from an earlier short. They
encounter a number of strange and terrifying creatures in a cavern,
dancing skeletons, ghosts, devils, a witch, and what we might
loosely describe as a dancing, singing octopus armed ghost Walrus,
voiced by American jazz great Cab Calloway. Note I realized

(01:38):
those might be front flippers, but they sure do look
like octopus arms to me. Walrus front flippers have digits.
The ghost Walrus's front limbs in this cartoon do not.
Cab Calloway also provided the ghost Walrus' sweet dance moves
via rodoscoping. Boop and Bimbo eventually flee home in terror
from all of these sights and sounds in the cavern,

(02:00):
and true to the shorts title, the ghost Walrus performs
Callaway's big hit mini, The Moucher, a song that he
would go on to perform in the nineteen eighty film
The Blues Brothers. The nineteen thirty two short is low
on plot and message, high on spooky, animated weirdness, and,
of course, the stylings of Cab Callaway and his orchestra.
But why a ghost walrus. Why does it seem to

(02:22):
have octopus arms? I'm to understand it all comes down
to animator whimsy, but it got me thinking, is there
anything remotely similar to this creature in global myth and
folk traditions? Well as far as supernatural walruses go, there
are certainly examples to draw on from the various traditions
of different Arctic peoples who knew the creature and invoked

(02:42):
it in their belief systems. Likewise, medieval European folklore exaggerated
the walrus as a sea monster, but the only thing
even close to a walrus octopus hybrid I've come across
is the ursus or maritursus or eco turso of Finnish
folklore and literature. Creature is predominantly associated with the walrus

(03:02):
and often described as a kind of walrus human hybrid,
or even a walrus centaur of sorts, and it's thought
to have inspired the sea giant Rosemarine in Edmund Spencer's
fifteen ninety work The Fairy Queen. The Terusus also factors
into the Finnish national epic The Kalevala, which concerns the
mythical Sampo, but then the tersus also takes on many

(03:25):
octopus and even Cuthulhu sque qualities in modern visual interpretations,
in part due to the word meritsus referring to the
common octopus in contemporary finish. I realize it's a stretch
to connect the Finnish Sea Monster to a nineteen thirty
two Cabcalloway Betty Boot cartoon, but many the moucher certainly

(03:45):
invites speculation. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Factor,
The Artifact or Animalius Dupendium each week. As always, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
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