The Monstrefact: The Mugatos of Star Trek

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the Neuralian Mugatos of Star Trek…

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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):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
Star Trek Week continues here on the show, and I
want to turn our attention to a classic monster from

(00:30):
the original Star Trek series, the Mugatos of the Planet Neural.
The Mugato is a white gorilla like creature with a
dorsal spine, a tail, and a cranial horn. In the
original season two Trek episode A Private Little War, we
see that the creature is highly aggressive and given its strength, horns,

(00:50):
and spines, it's already a fierce opponent for any humanoid
who happens to encounter one. But we learn that the
creature also boasts a venomous bite that can prove lethal
if not treated. The Magato bites Kirk with its venomous
things in the episode, shortly before doctor McCoy is able
to blast it with his phaser. What do we have

(01:12):
in the natural world to make sense of the Mugato? Well,
we of course have actual gorillas, which lack the horns, spines, tails,
and carnivorous diet of the mugato. Great apes, which include humans,
lack all of these things, and primates in general sometimes
have tails and diets that include meat. Spines and horns, however,

(01:33):
are right out. The black horned capuchin monkey, for instance,
is only so named because a pair of hair tufts
on its head sort of look like a pair of horns.
But what about venom, Well, we do have something similar
in the pygmy slow lores of Southeast Asia. The creature
is able to secrete a toxin from modified sweat glands

(01:55):
near its elbows. When threatened or alarmed, the lors can
lick these glands, mixing the secretion with its saliva. The
toxin then coats the tiny monkey's teeth in order to
power up a venomous defensive bite. In addition, a few
other species of monkey and lemur are known to anoint
their fur with toxins obtained from plants or millipedes for

(02:17):
medicinal or pest control purposes, but they do not create
the toxic substances themselves. As far as the mugato goes,
it's difficult to imagine why a creature like this would
evolve so many offensive and defensive capabilities, a horn, spine,
and venom on top of its already large, powerful body.
Each of these is a costly investment from an evolutionary standpoint.

(02:39):
A mountain gorilla doesn't need venom because it's already large
and powerful. A slow pygmy loris does need venom because
it's incredibly small. But of course the demands of the
Mugato's environment might be quite different. While large and intimidating
by human standards, perhaps it's quite small and weak by
planet neural standards, thus requiring the evolution of multi defensive strategies.

(03:02):
As we never see the creature actually gore anyone with
the horn, we might also hypothesize that this and perhaps
the dorsal spines as well, serve some other purpose, such
as communication or thermal regulation. In the Star Trek episode
in question, the creature is brought to life, of course,
via an augmented gorilla suit, and in this case the

(03:22):
man inside the suit was Hungarian American stuntman and former
circus performer Janus Prohaska, who donned ape, alien and other
creature suits on such classic TV series as The Outer Limits,
The Monsters Lost in Space Land, of the Giants Gilligan's Island,
and then he also pops up in the nineteen seventy
one movie Escape from the Planet of the Apes. I

(03:45):
love a good gorilla suit and performance and a production
as it centers the physicality of the monster around a
distinct natural role body plan the gorilla and caters to
an equally distinct physical performance by the actor. Tune in
for additional episodes of The Monster, Fact the Artifact, or
Animalius to Pendium each week. As always, you can email

(04:08):
us at contact It's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
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