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January 26, 2019 59 mins

From the sirens of “The Odyssey” to “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” and beyond, humans have always imagined their underwater doubles. In this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss the revealing myth and fiction of mermaids and gillmen -- as well as the aquatic ape theory and the biological possibilities of an aquatic humanoid. (Originally published Jan. 23, 2018)

Related Content: Aquatic Humanoids, Part 2 (podcast)Don't Drink the Salt Water (podcast)Here There Be Sea Monsters (podcast)Outside Content: 'Horror Noire' by Robin R Means Coleman

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
It's time to go into the vault. Today. We're going
to be going back to our first episode on aquatic
humanoids from January. This was almost exactly a year ago
that this first stired. Now why are why are we

(00:26):
doing so much ocean stuff lately, Robert, Oh, it's because
Transgenesis is coming out. That is a fiction sci fi podcast.
All ten episodes are gonna launch at once so that
you can you can binge them, you can, you can,
you can spread them out over your commute, you know,
however you want to do it. Wait, did you even
tell them who created Transgenesis? Oh? Well, I created Transgenesis.

(00:47):
Um I wrote and created, worked with Alexander Williams, one
of our producers here and Stuff to Blow your Mind. Uh.
Lauren Vogelbaum was also instrumental in the project, worked with
a number of different outside actors, but also a lot
of talent from within the Stuff network, including you, Joe,
you were there. It's right, I make a strange cameo.

(01:11):
So if you want, if you want to check that
show out, go and subscribe. You should be able to
look up Transgenesis all one word. You can also go
to Transgenesis dot show for more information. But again, this
is a science fiction show that then it deals with
the deep ocean. It deals with strange humanoid like creatures
in the deep ocean. But this is why we're going
back to these episodes on aquatic humanoids, because they deal

(01:33):
with with with creatures from the deep, creatures of myth
and legend, things such as the Triton's, things such as
mermaids and and other uh dwellers of the deep. I
think we talked about creature from the Black Lagoon, and
good we do. We do spend a good bit talking
about the creature and various gil men. We talked about
Lovecraft and in Smith and and we may even get

(01:55):
into the the aquatic a hypothesis. I'm having trouble room bread.
I think that comes and maybe in part two. All right,
all right, well, we hope you enjoy this classic episode
of stuff to blow your mind. First you will come
to the sirens, who enchant all who come near them
if anyone unwarily draws in too close. And here's the

(02:19):
singing of the sirens. His wife and children will never
welcome him home again, for they sit in a green
field and wabble him to death with the sweetness of
their song. There is a great heap of dead men's
bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.

(02:44):
They meant the things on the little island with the
queer ruins, and it seems them awful pictures of frog
fish monsters. Was supposed to be pictures of these things?
Maybe they was the kind of critters has got all
the mermaids stories and such started. They had all kinds
of cities on the sea bottom, and his iron was
heaved up from there. Welcome to stuff to blow your

(03:11):
mind from How Stuffworks dot com. Hey, you welcome to
stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And if you recognize what those
sources were, you probably can tell we're gonna be talking
about some mirror creatures, some sea folks, something like that today.

(03:31):
That's right. The first was from Homer's the Odyssey, the
Samuel Butler translation. The second was from HP Lovecraft The
Shadow Over in Smith. Now, there is always an alluring
quality to the idea that there's stuff happening down at
the bottom of the ocean that has more than just
an animal quality, but some kind of intelligence or organizing
principle to it. I think of in the George R.

(03:53):
Martin books, there's this character. Do you remember this guy, Robert,
who is like a court jester and the in stand
Barathians Court, who's always singing about what happens under the
bottom of the sea. No, I've forgotten about this. Well,
he like falls in the water at some point and
gets rescued, and after that he's always saying, like under
the sea that I don't remember what he says, but

(04:13):
it's like they have feet, you know, people people walk
upside down on their hands. And then he always says,
I know, I know, ho ho ho, And it's kind
of mysterious. Oh yeah, this does ring about now. Well,
you know, before even before we had proper mirrors, the uh,
the ocean was kind of the looking glass, right, it
was kind of the mirror world. Yeah, so any of

(04:34):
those stories where you wonder if there's actually some kind
of creature living on the other side of the mirror,
if that's another universe we're peering through. Into. All of
that applies to the water as well. Yeah, I mean,
it's interesting when you think of all the various specimens,
the Mermaids, the Gilman, the sirens. It's fascinating. The humans
have seemingly always dreamt up humanoids from the deep, not

(04:56):
just monsters, but humanoids. Yeah, I mean, because you can
certainly expand it and getting the whole realm of sea
monsters and various animal fish hybrids. But there's something particular
about those humanoid or partially humanoid creatures, a mirror world
beneath the waves, and people of some sort that occupied
the depths. Yeah, I mean, even before you had somebody

(05:18):
like Giordano Bruno imagining that there could be other planets
with surfaces like our planet that could have creatures dwelling
on them. You know, when people didn't really have that
conception of the sky, you could still definitely wonder about
something like that under the ocean. That was like sort
of the first outer space. It was the original alien world. Yeah, indeed,

(05:38):
and without a real means of exploring it or understanding it,
you were just left with whatever happened to swim up
with within view, whatever happened to wash up dead and
partially rotted away on the shoreline whatever you were able
to pull up with with line or net. Dude, the
stuff that washes up dead on the beaches of the
Earth is terrifying and crazy. Now, even though we have

(06:01):
like photos and modern science. Can you imagine that happening
in a world where you know, the New Jersey beach
monster washes up, but it's in the Middle Ages, in
China or something. Yeah, it's actually really fascinating to look back,
particularly at a lot of the sea monster illustrations and
old maps. There's a book by a Chet Van Duzer
Sea Monsters of Medieval and Renaissance Maps, and and he he.

(06:25):
It's filled with wonderful illustrations. But you get to look
at at all these various creatures. You know that some
fairly realistic you can look at and say, well, that's
clearly supposed to be a walrus. That's supposed to be
a whale. It just has too many blowholes. And some
of them you look at and you realize, well, this
is essentially what you might see if you saw the
put partially decomposed body of a whale. Something enormous but

(06:45):
a little more beaked looking. Now. In that book, Van
Duzer points out that few maps survive from antiquity, but
there are map like mentions and map like artifacts, such
as there's an Assyrian freeze from the Palace of Kings
saga on the second early eighth century BC that clearly
depicts two Assyrian merment. And it's great because if you've

(07:07):
ever seen Assyrian reliefs or carvings before, they've they've all
got the same head, you know, it's all that same
guy with the same curly beard and the hat. And
these mermaids are like that too. Yeah, And then you
you look at other ancient writings, I mean, they're mentioned
in ovid Ovid's writing The Metamorphosis. Ovid lived forty three
b c E To seventeen or eighteen CE, and he

(07:29):
described the gates of the Palace of the Sun as
containing all of these images of mer people. The dark
blue sea contains the gods melodious Triton shifting Proteus uh
Aegian crushing two huge whales together his arms across their backs,
and Doris with her daughters, some seen swimming, some sitting

(07:49):
on rocks drying their sea green hair, some writing the
backs of fish. And you can you can keep going
back in time too. I mean, as Nancy Easterland pointed
out in your two thousand one paper Hans Christian Andersen's
Fish out of Water, the Babylonians recognized gods with fish
features or fish hybridity. Yeah, you can sort of see

(08:11):
this as an extension of the way that early creation
myths and ancient gods often had water aspects, like like
Tiamatta Nabsu, you know, the freshwater and the salt water,
or the idea of the creation stories which almost always
involve waters, right, you know, the chaos hover or the
being hovering out over the waters. Yeah, calling back to

(08:33):
our Order out of Chaos episode. And we've talked about
Inky as well before. The Sumerian water god, which is
sometimes described it's sometimes described as having a cloak of
a fish or scaled skin. Wait, a cloak of a
fish or a cloak made out of multiple fish or
one of the images I saw it looked like a
cloak of little fish icons like it, like the cloak

(08:54):
was made out of fish emoticons. That's good, pretty great,
that's amazing. And get this. The zig Rot, where people
would worship Inky, was known as House of the Subterranean Waters. Well,
that seems to sort of complete the Ziggurat trinity because
we we've talked about zigarattes before, the Ziggaratta Etemenanki, which

(09:15):
was sometimes believed to be associated with the historical idea
of the Tower of Babel. I think that name means
something like the house of the foundation of heaven and Earth,
very regal sounding zigaratte. As if there's another kind of
zigatte right now, additionally we have this is just kind
of a humble ziggaratte. Yeah, there's no such thing. If
it's gonna be a zigaratte, it's gonna be a zigaratte. Now.

(09:37):
Additionally we have we have fish tailed gods and water
dragons found throughout the cultures of India, China, and Japan.
And uh Nancy Nancy Easterland sums up a lot of
this nicely. She says, quote, some of the mythological sea
beings and deities, such as Poseidon and the Sirens were
not originally associated with water and piicine anatomy. The sirens
were originally birds, indicating that divine our and womanly allure

(10:01):
became combined with the power and promise of the sea
when ancient cultures undertook maritime war and trade. So she
argues that the that mur folk and mermaids, all these creatures,
they're ultimately the descendants or in her words, the scale
down descendants, which I like because of scales. Uh, these
are just the scale down descendants of ancient sea gods. Yeah,

(10:23):
that seems like one example of the principle that displaced
gods or or fading gods of older theologies often appear
in sort of lower status or demoted roles in newer
versions of religions. Yeah, the old trope of the former
pagan god becomes a demon in medieval Christian traditions. So
obviously we're talking about mr Folk water dwelling humanoids of

(10:46):
various kinds today, and this is going to be the
first part of a two part episode. The first one
here we want to discuss the sort of global mr
Folk mythology and all of the different ideas of humanoids
living in the deep and what that says about us
culturally and where these ideas come from. And then in
the next episode we're going to focus more on the

(11:08):
science of aquatic humanoids. Yeah, so this is gonna be
the mythology and fiction episode, and the next one will
be the Science and Speculative Science episode. Now, Robert, one
of the first ones you mentioned was the sirens. That's right, Yeah,
I mean when we we had the reading from the
Odyssey at the start of the episode that refers to them.
But one thing you'll notice is that there was no

(11:28):
description of the sirens. Yeah, what do they look like? Well,
we don't know, because Homer never actually describes them. Uh.
They were later described though, as being half bird, much
like the Harpie, and later periods of development merged them
with the Northern mermaid in Christian Europe, but medieval Beast
Area's stuck to the bird hybridity though up through at

(11:49):
least twelve twenty, and then you had this gentleman Isidore
of Seville who lived of five sixty through sixty six,
and he attributed them with scales and webbed feet and
sometimes tales and wings as well. But from the Middle
Ages onward, that's where the sirens really took on the
mermaid look. And it's stuck. I'm trying to think of

(12:09):
depictions of them I've seen in movies, but I don't
think I have. The only thing that comes to mind is, oh, brother,
where art thou, but in that they're not hybrids. They're
just humans that are. But they are in a creek bed,
that's right. I feel like a lot of the depictions
that that I'm accustomed to, mainly through the Time Life
book series of myths and monsters and myths and legends,

(12:31):
and there was there were some siren images in there,
and a lot of them were just basically beautiful women
out on rocks, luring the the the wide eyed Greek
sailors to their doom. Now, of course, if you're not
familiar with the story, it's that the sirens would sing, right,
and that they're singing was so lovely that it would
drive men mad. And it would and they would want

(12:53):
to come ashore to meet the sirens, I guess, or
be drawn to the singing, but instead their vessels would
be dashed upon the rocks, right, Yeah. And various accounts
of the sirens that they vary, like maybe you'd starve
to death, or you perhaps you'd drown. I guess. The
basic underlying reality of the myth is the ocean is
a dangerous place, right, and if you go out upon

(13:13):
the ocean, you might meet your do I always thought
that what Odysseus does in the story of his encounter
with the sirens was an interesting sort of metaphor for
the ways some people experiment with mind altering substances, which
is that he has his men lash him to the
ship's mast so that he can't control you know, he

(13:35):
can't drive the ship into the rocks. But all the
other men plug their ears, and he wants to hear it.
They're all the designated drivers. Yes, though in a sense
he's the designated driver because he is the only one
who can tell them when they're out of the sirens range.
But but yeah, they're they're all plugged up. He's the
one that's a that's their rope to the mast, begging

(13:57):
to be let free, and their industrict orders that the
more I begged, the more you need to wrote me
to the mast. Now another interesting uh individual or race,
depending on how you look at it, from Greek Mytholity,
the Triton. So Triton was originally a specific mirror person.
But Ariel's father, right is was that his name in

(14:17):
the cartoon in the Disney movie, wasn't it? I thought
you just saw a little mermaid themed show, and I did,
But it was at wiki Watchie, which is the long
running mermaid show there. And the underwater dancing is a
very limited storytelling medium. And I don't think her father
ever showed up. Okay, yeah, I think that's his name.
I remember this from childhood, the guy with the big

(14:38):
beard and the trident. Okay, the mayor man king. He's
King Triton. Okay, I definitely remember him, but I didn't
remember his name. Well. Uh. The Triton's eventually became seen
as just a class of murr people in Greek myth.
They were the sons of Poseidon and Amphitrite. They had
humanoid bodies covered in scales, and then they had dolphin

(15:00):
tails matted green or yellow hair. They had gills as
well as pointed kind of elf ears, wide mouths things,
and then they typically would serve as escorts for the
Nereid sea nymphs as well as general attendants for Seed
of Entity. And our old friend Hessiod said that they
inhabited golden palaces under the sea. Now it sounds like

(15:22):
King Triton, Yeah, exactly. It's it's that this is key
to so many of our our myths and legends of
my people. Now I'm wondering This is kind of interesting
that it's combining features of the house of Ichthos. Right,
it's got the scales and the fish like characteristics, but
then they've also got dolphin tales, So there's this melding

(15:42):
of aquatic mammals and fish. Well, of course you have
to remember that for the longest time, this was not
a clear distinction, the idea that the dolphins were not fish,
So it makes sense it just mesh it all up
under miscellaneous sea beasts. And also in medieval times, tritons
were made the male counterparts of sirens, the male counterparts,

(16:03):
as in like they were the same species, or like
they were just friends or what. My understanding is that
it's like they were of the same species. If one
dares to get too technical with your your mythological people's
under the waves. And I think this will be very
interesting later on when we discussed modern treatments of mermaids

(16:24):
and fish people. Okay, so Fang's scales, dolphin tales, humanoid characteristics.
That's not enough hybrid City for me. I want you
to mash in some more stuff. Well you're in luck, Joe,
because there there's another creature to consider here. The a
theo centaur. Yes, so you had something called a centauro triton,
which is basically what occurs when you have a triton

(16:45):
that's depicted with like like a definite dolphin esque hind quarters.
But then the atho centaur takes the hybrid city to
a whole another level. So we see this and around
the third century common Air. Uh. And this is found
in the natural history text Physiologists. Uh. And this creature,

(17:06):
the echio centaur, was said to have the torso and
head of a man, the four legs of a horse
or lion are the hind quarters of a dolphin, and
unlike the centaur o tritan, they had scale. Now I'm
so imagining what kind of habitat this creature dwells in.
When would it be useful to have the four legs

(17:28):
of a horse and the tail of a dolphin? Well,
I mean, you could really tease that apart and get
into I guess the symbolic meaning of the things, or
you you end up coming back to your idea of like,
here's something washed up on the beach. Makes sense of it,
and well, this is kind of the story that ends
up spreading about it. There are no classical accounts of
the Ichthyo centaur. According to the resources I was looking

(17:49):
at button that they remained a decorative motif, which is
kind of the ultimate fate of a lot of these,
like the mermaid and the Uh and the triton and
the Ethio centaur, they become just part of medieval iconography
going forward, and they come to symbolize other things, the
Mermaid particular becoming to symbolize to sort of the the
the evil and monstrous nature of the female Uh sometimes

(18:13):
depicted Uh, I believe with a with a fish to
show that she is entrapping the Christian soul. Yeah. I
often think of the tradition of the mermaid as being
one of temptation. Like that, it it establishes kind of
like a foolish and weak willed sailor that will give
in to the temptation of the mermaid because he has

(18:34):
not properly disciplined his spirit to resist sin. It reminds
me a lot of the incubi and succubi legends we've
discussed in the podcast before, where the feet would be
a giveaway. The feet would be the feet of a beast,
and therefore any any rational believer would notice the feet
of the creature and and just and cease to pursue

(18:56):
this foolish pairing. But that's an interesting parallel, like that
they both go back to this idea of the center
as someone who's oblivious to difference. Yeah, like they can't
see all the warning signs here, the main warning sign
of course, being that the individual is part fish. All right, well,
maybe we should take a quick break and then we
come back. We will discuss more aquatic humanoid legends from

(19:19):
around the world. Alright, we're back. So not every mirror
person in mythology and legend is a villain. Sometimes you
see some that that have beneficial aspects as well. There's,
for instance, the the the Nno of Japanese legend. This
is essentially less of a mermaid and more of just

(19:41):
a fish with a beautiful woman's face, and it's protective
and warns of misfortune on land and sea. And then
there's also an interesting one from the Micmac people of
eastern Canada. They were known as the halfway people. Uh,
these particular mr folk they had the upper bodies of
a body of a human and a lower body of

(20:01):
a fish, and they'd warn fishermen of coming storms or
invoke storms if they were disrespected. Now I have to
add another North American or Canadian entry, a less fulkloric
and more of a one off. But I'm adding it
because I've seen this in person, Robert the Bant Merman.
You've looked up images, right, I did. I was not

(20:22):
familiar with this, and I had, of course heard of
the Fiji Mermaid, and I've never been to bath, but
I'm familiar with it. You know, you've talked about your
adventures there, and it does not seem like a likely
mermaid destination. No, not really. I mean, so this is Inland, Canada.
This is in Alberta and Bant National Park. So this
is a mountainous region, not a not a coastal region,

(20:43):
but it has lakes, and so in these lakes, I
guess one might expect to find some kind of hybrid
humanoid aquatic creature. And so inside this business in ban
f in Alberta, there is a little store called the
Indian Trading Company, and in the back of the store
there is a taxidermy creature that's half fish, half humanoid

(21:05):
gremlin and it looks like, I don't know, how would
you describe it, Like the back of it just looks
straight up like a fish. It's a fish with the
head cut off, and then that fish just goes straight
into some ribs with with like human baby arms but
with claws on them, and a scary looking head that
has hair. I mean it looks like a taxidermied creation.

(21:29):
I mean that is what it is. Yes, it is
a fish and probably some sort of a small monkey
that the remains of which we were sewn together. Yeah,
or the I think it's also possible that the top
half of it could just be artificial. Think it could
be a crafted artifact. According to a write up on
Atlas Obscurity, it was probably bought by a man named
Norman Luxton, who is the proprietor of the shop around

(21:51):
nineteen fifteen when it was when it first showed up there.
It's very much in the traditional of like the P. T.
Barnum kind of thing that the Fiji mermaid. Yes, so
some kind of a side shoe oddity sort of thing. Yeah,
except it stays right here in this uh, in this store.
I don't know how long it's been totally stationary there.
But yeah, if you go to bamp and you go
to the store and you go into the back room.

(22:13):
You will see lots of oddities. There is like a
giant taxidermy bear I think, and some moose heads and
other local stuff. But yeah, this thing is in a
glass case. It's got a mirror behind it, and they
sell postcards. It's like I saw them from Herman. Interesting.
Well that's that. I've got to check that out when
I finally get up to ban Now, speaking of Canadian

(22:34):
we can sort of extend that and think of French
traditions as well. There is a mermaid in French traditions
known as Melosne, and much like a kidna, the mother
of monsters in Greek myth, the French mermaid here boasts
a two pronged tale. Oh you know what that reminds
me of Dagon? Well yeah, I think you're gonna say Starbucks.

(22:55):
But yes. Also the movie, the Stewart Gordon movie Dagon
that came out in two thousand and one. It's kind
of a mixed bag. Not not a great movie, but
there's some things to like about it. Yeah, it's a
love craft Ian like it's basically an adaptation of shadow
Over in Smith, but they lean into the mermaids a
little more. They lean into the sex and violence a
little more. Uh, it's worth checking out if you like

(23:16):
violent fish people movies. Yeah, but what about Starbucks Starbucks, Well,
just coffee basically. But but that that logo with the
mermaid with the two pronged tail, uh, with going up
on each side of the creature, Like that's basically melocene
or a kid not, depending on how you want to
look at Robert. I hate to say it, but I
don't think anybody ever pays attention to that logo unless

(23:39):
they're trying to get mad about it or not having
a Sanda hat or something. It would be interesting if
people started getting mad over that, is, like, why does
this mermaid have two tales instead of one? We want
an American Mermaid, not a French Mermaid. One tale, one country,
one tale. Well, they're probably, you know, pining for the
classic mermaid the have for the Danish Mermaid. Why is

(24:02):
this the classic? Well, you know, because when you when
you really think about mermaids, you think of, like Hans
Christian Andersen, you think of northern Europe. So to be clear,
Hans Christian Anderson is the author of the Little Mermaid
story that the Disney movie is loosely based on very loosely,
because in his version there's a lot more like blood
and cutting off feed and stuff. Oh yes, it's a

(24:24):
bit a bit more violent. But but over in denmarkt
they did have to have frew and uh, this is
a that that's a pretty helpful mermaid because it can
also tell the future, and it allegedly foretold the birth
of Danish King Christian the fourth of Denmark. So that's
a that's a beneficial mermaid for you, okay. And of
course I have to mention the monk fish. Are you

(24:46):
familiar with the monk fish or perhaps it's kin the
bishop fish. Well, I know of the monkfish, like the monkfish,
but you're not thinking of like the monkfish that you
would eat right. This is this was a creature widely
reported marine creature in Northern European w described in Ambrose
Pare's sixteenth century work on Monsters. It had the head
of a human, the tonstrated hair style of a monk,

(25:08):
monks cow and cape, and two extremely long flippers. It's
it's a ridiculous looking creature. It looks like you drew
a monk as a fish. It's what we're talking about
it sounds I've seen the medieval drawings. But the cool
thing is that there's a very strong case to be
made that these were based on descriptions of dead giant squid,

(25:30):
because you have this kind of you know, thick, lumpy
body that kind of tapers off on one end and
then has what a number of tentacles and then two
very long additional arms that would have been the two
extremely long flippers of the monk fish. Yeah, I'm looking
at the comparisons right now, I can see why that

(25:51):
would have been the case. And there was also a
Chinese variant of this, the Hi Ho Shun, which was
the sea Buddhist priest. So again we're getting back to
the idea of when when you're talking about a mythical
sea creature, there are a number of different ways to
look at it. You know, is it a former god
that's been demoted. Is it a dead sea animal that
that someone has misinterpreted, and then someone else has heard

(26:14):
about that, and then that person told another individual who
illustrated and wrote it in in a medieval baster area. Yet, uh,
these are just a few of the possible excuses for
many of these fantastic creatures. So is there anything that
seems to unite all of the legends we've looked at
so far? Or are aquatic humanoids as diverse as real

(26:37):
humans or as diverse as other gods and monsters. Well,
there's always the sense of the familiar yet alien. Yeah,
and the sense that it's uh, well, lots of lots
of monsters are familiar yet alien, but that they come
from another world. The aquatic humanoids do. Yes, they're familiar
yet yet foreign. They are something, they're there are people

(26:57):
from the other side of the mirror. Yeah, I've got
another one. Maybe, let me know what you think about this.
When I think of ocean dwelling humanoids in mythology and fiction,
they don't usually seem to be like party hard kind
of gods or party hard monsters or humanoids. They usually
seem kind of sad. There's a kind of melancholy that

(27:22):
we associate with the underwater life and the ocean that
may come from the sad faces of fish is. I
don't know if that's too crazy of a stretch. When
I look at fish faces, I tend to project emotions
on them, and those emotions are never like happiness. Fish
faces always look a little bit sad, like they're disappointed
in something, like they wish things were going better. Well,

(27:46):
it comes back to the old saying a fish out
of water as well, Right, there's nothing more awkward than
a creature that has been taken from its natural habitat
and thrown into another. The fish out of water is
a thing that is vulnerable, perhaps doomed. Uh, it is
in shock and uh. And therefore I think we we
do see that a lot with our mur folk of

(28:09):
various designs, in our our myths and our fictions. Yeah,
sad fish faces and also also kind of a shadowy realm. Right.
The the the underwater world for these underwater humanoids is
another world, but it's the world that the sun is
on the opposite side of the barrier from. Like the
sun is all ours, and the sun they get is

(28:31):
just what filters down through the through the membrane of
the water surface. Yeah. But then sometimes there are depictures
again the golden cities of the Triton's Yeah, I guess
that's true. So there is a sense of of the glorious,
but also the sense of just sort of alien hard
work as well. Like, I mean, maybe I'm projecting more
about what what we know from covering aquatic biology and

(28:55):
just the the aquatic habitat, knowing that it is such
a place of of intent competition. You know, when I
think of the the ultimate melancholy underwater humanoids, I got
to go to the Universal Monster movies, it's the gill Man. Yeah,
the gil Man. I mean, I imagine most of the
people listening to this podcast grew up with the gil Man, right,

(29:18):
creature from the Black Lagoon nine four, part of the
classic Universal Monster movie canon. Except the gil Man was
different from a lot of the others in that unlike
Dracula or Frankenstein, which had been the subject of novels
of horror and science fiction at the time, the gill
Man was the synthesis of many of these human mr

(29:38):
fult kind of traditions, was not from like a novel
that existed, right. It's uh, there are other interesting facts
about it too, like, for instance, unlike Frankenstein or Dracula
or the Mummy, the gil Man was a was a
product of the natural world. It was just a product
of the natural world that no longer had a place
in the modern world. And that's why it often gets

(30:00):
classed as a science fiction movie instead of a horror movie. Yeah,
so the science discusses is rather rather sketchy. Oh, the
science is even better in the sequel, Revenge of the Creature.
We should get to that in a few minutes. Yeah.
I grew up with it with this Sponster like I'm
sure you did. I remember having I had the little
glow in the dark figurine of it. As a kid,
I had these Universal trading cards that had been my

(30:22):
dad's that had all these universal monsters and some horrible
jokes on them. You people at home, Robert has brought
these cards in. I think we should read a couple
of the jokes on the back of them. Okay, you
go for it, Joe, I'll play along. Okay, joke on
the first one. This so the first one shows the
gil Man. On the front, it said, did you say

(30:42):
fish for dinner? Anyone I know? And then on the
back it's got this first ghost Colin, we just had
a baby. Second ghost Colin, Congratulations, was it a ghoul
or a boy? See? That's that's some that's some it
up crypt keeper humor right there. That's that's pretty good.

(31:02):
I got an even better one. So the front is
the creature, but it's from the third movie. The creature
walks among us when he sort of gets turned into
a regular human, and the back has a joke that says,
what's a cowardly skeleton? I don't know, Joe, what's a
cowardly skeleton? A boned chicken? See that. That's probably a

(31:27):
joke that we would get if this were the early
nineteen sixties, But I do not get it. Chicken. Oh man,
there's this whole world of butchery jokes that we just
said don't have access to. But it's great, you know,
because this is a joke that no longer fits into
our time, and that's basically the idea of the creature,

(31:50):
And I think one of the it's telling that the
creature continues to be celebrated despite the fact that there
has not really been a creature from the Black Liogoon
movie since the original trilogy, but he's taken on this
sort of outsider icon status. Yeah. I'm really mortified for
the time when they come into remake Creature from the
Black Lagoon, I don't want it. I don't I don't

(32:12):
think we're ready. Yeah that really, I mean Gama de
Toro's The Shape of Water, which just came out Christmas.
That's really the best possible creature from the Black Lagoon remake,
even though it's not officially creature from the Black Looking right. No,
I'm talking about like the Tom Cruise Mummy Universe remakes,
where it would be like a Benedict's cumber Batch as

(32:34):
the Gilman and then take a good go man who
would play the lugs who show up in the Lagoon
and start poking in with stuff. Oh, I don't know.
Just you can just point a scatter gun at an
IMDb page, I guess get some candidates. So when did
you first see the Gillman on screen? Um? You know,
I think before I saw any of the movies. I
was introduced to it in two. It came from Hollywood.

(32:57):
That's a great one. Yeah. Basically just a bunch of
old movie trailers, uh, stitched together with some at times
delightful jokes, at times cringeworthy jokes, and various celebrity guest
spots from like Cheech and Chong, Dan Ackroy, John Candy.
They were principles on this project. They highlight a great

(33:17):
brain attack scenes. Yes, yeah, there's a whole section on
guerrilla movies. It's It's, It's, it's a it's a wonderful film.
It's hard to find these days because I think that
some of the rights issues prevented from being properly distributed. Yeah,
but you don't see the gil Man showing up in
repeated uses throughout other films the same way you do
like Bello, the Ghosties version of Dracula, or the Frankenstein

(33:39):
Monster exactly. Now. One of the things though about the Gilman,
to really to bring it back to some of these
themes we're discussing here, though, is that that outsider aspect,
you know, the the idea that there's something sympathetic and
yet other, or depending on how you're looking at it,
threatening and yet other. And when you start teasing the

(34:00):
gil Man apart, there's some really unsettling dimensions to the creature.
The same can certainly be said of HP Lovecraft's story
The Shadow Over in Smith which which is which of
course was published before The Creature came to our cinemas. Uh,
And it's kind of like a proto creature short story.

(34:22):
It's got a quatic humanoids, right, it does. It has
a whole race of aquatic humanoids that end up interbreeding
with this rural uh fishing and trade community. Uh. And
and that is like the horror of the piece. It's
the idea that they're fish people and humans are breeding
with them. And you know, I I first read this story,

(34:44):
I read it in nine for the first time, and
uh and I remember being like, really, um, just blown
over by it. I thought it was just such a creepy,
um atmospheric tale. And uh, it's a it's a little
more disturbing the more one reads about it, and the
one the more one knows about Lovecraft and his his

(35:07):
uh sentiments towards other people's and other races. Yeah, Lovecraft
was very imaginative, but he was not a nice person. No. Uh.
You know, sometimes excuses are made from this is a
guy that lived nineteen thirty seven, and some people defended
by saying, oh, you know, he was a product of
his time, as as we all are. But he's definitely

(35:29):
a man with some very problematic views on race, especially
from modern modern readers. Absolutely, yeah, I mean, even if
we're to leave out his personal letters and so forth,
his fiction often falls back on the trend of championing
a white English culture over everything else. And we see
the other races sometimes depicted as is just outright monstrous.

(35:49):
You often get the sense for him that any non
Anglo ethnic groups are sort of allied with the monsters. Yeah,
there's something like threatening and debility of about them in
his work. Um, you know, there's a lot to unpack
in in Smith and again in many ways it is
a tremendous short story. It was highly influential. But as

(36:11):
Evan Lampi discusses in his paper in praise of the
in Smith Look Nautical Terror and the Specter of Atlantic
History and HP Lovecrafts fiction, you can compare it to
Lovecrafts earlier story, The Dunwich Horror, which presents a town
with a quote degraded population of ignorant, backward, physically stunted villagers.
This again encapsulating his Lovecrafts anxieties concerning not only other races,

(36:36):
but even just like other like classes of people within
the United States. But Lampy points out the quote the
fall of dun which is a result of racial decline
brought on by isolation, which is a source of terror
in the narrative, But in in Smith it's not isolation
but contact with distant lands via Atlantic commerce, that serves

(36:57):
as their undoing. So Lampy says quote in Smith's degradation
is a result of its worldliness, not its isolation. Even
if the city became a backwater, it looked out to
the Atlantic for much of its history, open to the world,
its ideas, and its people. So in some ways, the
creatures from the sea here are standing in for contact

(37:17):
and intercourse with other cultures, right, Yeah, And and that
sort of works for the sea because the sea is
traditionally like a way for cultures to come together. It's
the you know, the trade routes through the sea. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And then that's what what makes the story so so ikey,
if you read it with all of this in mind,
is that it's a tale that's describing the adoption of

(37:40):
of of other cultures, and certainly with the the the
interbreeding with other cultures as being something that is inherently
monstrous that the white Anglo Saxon people should not venture out,
either you know, mentally or certainly physically or sexually. Yeah.
This is a really troubling strain in Lovecraft's work, especially

(38:05):
since Lovecraft is so popular with so many people today,
like for his monsters and his settings and stuff that
I feel like this is sort of like the part
of him that nobody really wants to think about. Yeah,
I mean it can be difficult because, like I said,
I grew up loving Lovecraft's work, and I still have
have a strong affinity for for for the love crafting

(38:25):
and vibe, but you know, for the weird fiction world
and many of the older writers from the day. But
I mean, you can't stick your hand in the sand
regarding the sensibilities that are they're not only president in
the individual behind the stories, but in the works themselves.
And so we got here from Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I'm wondering if this is leading to to you thinking

(38:47):
that some of the same themes can be ported it
over to Creature from the Black Lagoon. Well, you know,
I didn't used to think so. I used to think
that the Creature from the Black Lagoon was was somehow
separate from from any real world concerns. You know. It's
kind of this. I mean, it's rated G for for goodness,
say the first one anyway, maybe the other two as well,

(39:08):
but I distinctly remember saying the G rating on the
first film. It's essentially a Disney movie just with a
murderous monster in it. Well, but before we get into
any racial aspects of the Creature from the Black logan,
we should probably just take a moment to enjoy the
existence of the film on its own. Narrits quote from
Q magazine about Creature from the Black Lagoon. This horrendous

(39:32):
pseudoscience fiction melodrama revolves wildly in three dimensions and with
considerable excitement around a poor ancestral fish that never quite
made the grade to man. All Right, Well, that's that's
pretty accurate, I guess. I mean, it's it's generally it's
often looked. It looked at is one of the lesser
of the universal movies, though, even though the monster itself

(39:55):
is pretty great. Yeah, it might be the best universal
monster in terms of makeup and stuff. Uh well, I don't.
I mean, it's that's debatable. I guess it's more ambitious
makeup wise than I mean, Carlos Frankenstein is a pretty
amazing makeup creation, It's true. But does Frankenstein begin with
the big bang? No, it doesn't, And Creature from the

(40:15):
Black Lagoon sure does. It starts with a big explosion.
It's sort of the inverse of bride of the Monster. Uh.
Starts with the big explosion, and their idea of what
the big bang is is that it involved literally exploding
chunks of rock. Yes, yeah, it looks like a like
a like a mining detonation. And they get into this
whole narrative about how the creature is a product of

(40:38):
the Devonian period from sixty million years ago. Okay, that's
pretty old, the age of the trilobytes. Yeah, that's when
they went extinct, I think, right, yeah, yeah, and uh,
and of course you get the dunk last as back then,
that's right. And then they spend a lot of time
talking about the lungfish. Uh. They sort of throw a
lot of science at the screen early on to try
and trick you into thinking that this is a like

(41:01):
a scientifically accurate picture. Now, it was really released in
three D. Did you ever see it in three D? Robert?
I never did, But that's right. They filmed the first
two of these films in three D, but a lot
of people, even when it very first came out, saw
it flat because it was at the very end of
the early fifties three D craze that it was released,
so it was already becoming pass a. I actually rewatched

(41:22):
this movie last night, and if you ever get a
chance to check out the Universal Monster Movies set the
remaster of Creature, it's got a great commentary track by
horror scholar Tom Weaver, and I just wanted to mention
a few things I learned from it, some really interesting highlights.
Um one of them was where did this story come from? Like?
What what is the origin of the creature? So, the

(41:44):
producer of Creature from the Black Lagoon was this guy
named William Alland, who was the He was the producer
of the film. He was a Universal producer at the time,
and he made his start as an actor working with
Orson Wells in the Orson Wells Theater Group. He was
part of the Infamous or the World's Radio Broadcast. But
he was also friends with Wells and so sometimes sometime

(42:06):
in the nineteen forties, during the filming of Citizen Kane,
Aland was an actor in Citizen Kane as well. He
was he was the reporter who was hunting down the
meaning of the word rosebud and so Aland was over
at Wells house for a dinner party. Also in attendance
was Dolores del Rio, who was a Mexican actress who
was Orson Welles partner at the time, and a Mexican

(42:27):
cinematographer named Gabrielle figaroa who would go on to a
really stellar career. He was the cinematographer of things like
The Pearl and John Houston's Night of the Iguana. And
during this dinner party the story goes. Figaro starts in
on this bizarre story about a half man, half fish
creature that lived in the Amazon River near a certain village,

(42:50):
and according to Figaro's telling, once a year, the fishman
would come up out of the river and claim one
maiden from the village as its victim, and then it
would retreat eat into the water, and the village would
be safe again until it emerged the next year. Apparently,
at first the other guests thought Figaro was kidding, but
he insisted, and he started getting worked up because he

(43:11):
wasn't being taken seriously, and he claimed the story was
absolutely true, and that he'd seen a photo of the
Amazon fishman. So this was early forties, and despite how
awkward of a dinner it must have been, apparently the
story must have stuck in the deep inside the mind
of William alland and about ten years later, when he
was a producer at Universal, he decided to make a

(43:31):
version of the Amazon Fishman story into a new entry
in the Universal Monster movie canon. So he wrote up
this three page treatment of the film, which was supposed
to start not with the big Bang, but with a
reenactment of his dinner conversation with Figaro, followed by an
expedition to the Amazon with a fishman creature, and of
course he wanted to have a gorgeous blonde that would

(43:53):
get kidnapped by the fishman. Uh. And then the rest
of the story was basically just a rip off of
the plot of King Kong, but with a fishman instead
of a giant ape. So they'd capture and bring him
back to civilization, he'd escape and you know, run him
up in the cities. And there's this basically the territory
they explore in the three Creature of movies. Yeah, if

(44:13):
you put together the first Creature from the Black Lagoon
and the second movie, Revenge of the Creature that came
out in nineteen fifty five the following year together, they
are the plot of King Kong. Now, one of the
other things I love about the creature from the Black
Lagoon is that you had. This is a product of Florida. Yeah,
and I've I've now been to some of these locations
in Florida that are tied to it, such as Wakula Springs,

(44:36):
which I mentioned on the show before a Fabulous Destination.
That's where they shot a lot of the underwater stuff.
I think maybe all of the underwater stuff. Well if
I'm if memory serves, they certainly did all of the
underwater stuff in the third movie there. I'm not as
sure about the first one because there are a number
of different spring locations that are used in some of
these these films. Uh. And then they're tied into other

(44:57):
like weird Florida places like the wiki Watchie Mermaid Show. Uh.
Julie Adams stunt double from the first film was a
Mermaid swimmer at the wiki watch Mermaid Show. Oh yeah.
That's a great fact about the movie is that anytime
you see the characters above water, they're played by different
actors than the people who played them below water. So

(45:18):
like the Gilman above water was one actor they had
in in I guess in Hollywood, and then below the
water the Gilman was always this other guy, Rico Browning. Yes, Yeah,
a fascinating figure who's also come up on the on
the podcast before because he worked briefly with John C. Lily.
But crazy. Yeah, it was a crazy story there. Go

(45:40):
back and listen to that episode if you want the
details on that. But he was also tied to Wiki
Watchee and I really had quite a career outside of
of the Creature from the Black Cagoon. Yeah. Did you
know that Rico Browning directed the underwater scenes that go
on for thirty seven hours in Thunderball? I I read
that the other day, but I wasn't aware of it obviously, know.

(46:00):
Oh my god, when is the last time you saw Thunderball?
I was a child watching on TVs. Okay, Yeah, it's
one of those Sean Connery bonds, so it has parts
that are kind of fun. But the underwater fight scenes
are just in term and um bowl go on forever.
But there. I'm sure they're very well choreographed, especially for
the time. I mean, shooting underwater back in the fifties

(46:23):
and sixties was not easy. Yeah, I mean, if you
accept them on their own terms, they're they're kind of marvelous.
It's just they don't necessarily match up to to modern
cinematic pacing standards. I guess another thing that's kind of
interesting to me about the Creature from the Black Calagoon
that Weaver mentioned in his commentary is that creature has
a lot of monsters I view shots, and this is

(46:43):
contrasted to some of the earlier Universal Monster movies and
some of the other movies that Alan and Jack Arnold
had done. I'm not sure if that says anything interesting
about how they thought of the creature, but there is
a lot in how the story was created and in
how it's owned that does to me make the creature
kind of a sad, melancholy, sympathetic sort of character. Unlikes

(47:07):
a Dracula, who is a predatory demon who arrives to
you know, to to consume people's souls and kill them
and turn them into his servants. The Creature from the
Black Lagoon is a is a sad creature who who
never really I mean like he lives in the Black Lagoon.
People come and invade his territory and then they start

(47:30):
messing with him and attacking him, and and he fights back. Now,
of course, he does try to kidnap Julie Adams, the
leading lady in the movie, presumably because he's wowed by
her beauty. Um, and so it's a King Kong kind
of thing. You know, he falls in love and wants
to carry her off to his cave. But you often
get the sense in the Creature from the Black Lagoon
movies that the real villains are like the human heroes.

(47:52):
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think this is something
I picked up on as a kid, is especially the
more I learned about in and ultimately when I saw
the third film, Uh, the creature walks among us because
in this one they've captured the creature horribly burned it
in the process, and then they treat the creature and
there's this there's this hokey scientific explanation basically Lamarckian evolution

(48:16):
where the creatures scales fall away and it has human
flesh underneath and it's becoming more man like. And they're
all these two sad scenes of the this now land
creature standing in this little enclosed area surrounded by barbed wire,
longing for the sea, but it can't even go back
to the sea because it will drown if it does.

(48:38):
And uh, in all these films, it's like the especially
the white leads in the film, like they're never really
in peril, like they're always in control. The creature just
lumbers about and uh, and the only reason it's able
to grab the lady is because she just stands there
and screams instead of like walking away from it. Right. Yeah,

(49:02):
Generally the human lead characters in these films are just
not very sympathetic that they're usually just coming into this
monster's domain or not. I mean, it's a creature. They're
coming into the creature's domain. And they're in the second movie,
they even they fish for the creature with dynamite. They
throw dynamite into the black lagoon. It blows him up

(49:22):
and he floats to the surface stunned, and then they
take him and they put him in a tank at
Sea World and chain him to the bottom. And there's
a great scene where somebody goes, I hope that chain holds,
and the other guy goes, I wouldn't worry about that chain.
So you see him like suffering and struggling and pulling
at his chain, and eventually he gets free and this

(49:43):
is and then runs around and yet again, it's like
the heroes of the movie or the real villains It
reminds me a lot of the late great Gil Scott.
Heron had a bit kind of a stand up bit,
like a spoken word bit that he did talking about Jaws,
and he was saying, like, why why you upset about
Jaws attacking people? You're going where Jaws is, like you

(50:04):
should you should only be upset if Jaws is attacking
people in the city where you are, Like you've gone
where you're not supposed to be. So of course there's Jaws.
All right. I think we need to take a quick
break and then when we come back, we'll discuss more
about aquatic humanoid legends and the creature from the Black Lagoon.
Thank thank alright, we're back, all right. So I mentioned
earlier that I used to to think of the creature

(50:27):
as being this mostly pure thing that was untouched by
the concerns of the real world. But then I was
turned onto the commentary of Robin R. Means Coleman, particularly
in particular, there was an episode of the NPR podcast
Code Switch about the movie get Out, and they talked

(50:48):
about some of the history of African Americans and horror movies.
So I ended up looking up Coleman's book It's titled
a horror noir Blacks in American horror film from an
eight nine to the present and uh and she She
shares the following read on the creature quote. The gil
Man is calng and Gus from the Birth of a

(51:10):
Nation rolled into one impossible body. Bodily, the monster resembled
a racist caricature. Its lips are large and exaggerated, Its
skin is dark, It is seemingly feeble minded. Its movements
are shambling, except for a swift adept move it displays
when stealing away with a white woman. And side note,
if anyone's not Fameric. Gus, who she mentions here, is

(51:32):
the antagonist from the nineteen fift movie The Birth of
the Nation. The film attributed to the revival of the
klu kox Klan terrorist organization in the United States. In it,
the Clan served as heroes as they lynch an African
American named Gus portrayed by a white actor in black face,
who chases a white woman off of a bridge. Coleman
refers to this as the first real racial horror movie,

(51:55):
and as Coleman points out, the creature from the Black Cogoon.
The film features a white female researcher who is only
there to scream and serve as the object of desire.
A team of local Brazilians who only serve to perish.
In the first portion of the film, Yeah, Uh, only
and then only the white scientific elite are able to
best the creature. And uh, and certainly best that they do. That.

(52:19):
These guys are supposed to be scientists, but instead of
studying it, they just destroy it. Uh, for the crime
of making eyes at this white woman. Yeah. Again, that's
what we've been saying. I mean that they just show
up in its lagoon and then they start attacking it essentially,
and we're it's like we're supposed to feel bad for them.
I don't know. I mean, there's always this ambiguity in

(52:41):
the monster movies of old, like King Kong, Creature from
the Black Calagoon, where you get the sense that maybe
you're supposed to feel some sympathy for the creature. It's
not quite clear how much. Yeah, and then I mean
this additional um like racial read on everything just makes
everything all the more problematic. She argues that the film
presents a world in which the white race alone has

(53:02):
evolved and the rest are static. She points to the
work of Patrick Gander, who argues that the film isn't
just about reinforcing white superiority and non white inferiority. It's
a film that taps into racist fears of desegregation. Quote
as the Black Monster, in leaving its proper place in
the water and attempting to integrate among those on land,

(53:25):
is a Darwinian reminder of why segregation is necessary. So
and I would argue that this is all the more
unsettling if you go into the third Creature movie and
watch it with these scenes of this this even more
human looking creature, like just behind barbed wire, just trapped,
treated treated like an animal, even as you have these

(53:46):
two characters that are engaging in these monologues about the
It's the jungle versus the Stars, about how how we
need to be kinder to the creature instead of violent
towards it. It's it's it's a very flawed and handled film,
in my opinion. But it's interesting how that this this
read of this racial read of the Creature um which

(54:07):
some of you might not care for, but I think
on one hand, it meshes with with with what was
going on in the Shadow over in Smith. I think
it also echoes a lot of these ideas that we've
already discussed of the the aquatic humanoid as being this
this other, this uh this uh this creature that I mean,
think to the triton and the siren. Like the siren
is beautiful and desirable. The triton, though the masculine version

(54:30):
is to be feared, is more more brutal. And that
that lines up with with various racist depictions in which
the female of another race is is an exotic object
of desire and then the male counterpart part is depicted
as something brutish. I'm not trying to ruin a classic
film for anybody, but I do think this, this read

(54:51):
is really worth considering. We need to start thinking about
about the era that the film came from and uh,
the attitudes of the of the time, uh, and what
that the film is supposed to say to a modern viewer. Yeah,
I think that is a totally valid interpretive. Lens I.
I don't know of any evidence that this is what
the filmmakers consciously had in mind. I think it's probably not,

(55:13):
but that you can certainly see how these sorts of
themes come out from, you know, the unconscious forces that
guide our creativity, right, very much so. So as we
begin to close out this episode, let's let's return into
some of the trends that we've identified and skirted around.
Uh were concerning the various myths and fictions of aquatic humanoids,

(55:35):
like what do they what do they represent? What do
they convey? Obviously the mirror world, that's right, Yeah, the
unknown depths as well as the dangers of the sea.
The feature we so often see in legends of monsters,
which is hybridity, bringing together different features of different animals

(55:56):
and humans. Yeah, and just mysterious biology as well, animals
again washing up on the beach, and also humans with
birth defects such as uh siren o'melia, which is a
birth defect that involves the fusing of the legs together.
It's a really depressing topic, but I have I was,
I have read a couple of papers making the argument

(56:17):
that some mermaid legends might be based on these defects. Also,
we've mentioned mermaids as harbingers of doom as well as
sources of divine aid. There's the idea that it's the
erotic other, it's the monstrous other, that the evil or
monstrous feminine and uh, and just the idea too, that
it can be depicted as a racial other to that

(56:39):
does not belong in our world. It's amazing that water
has so much power to carry so much symbolic weight
and and to project so many different symbolic meanings. Like
I'm thinking about the way it's this mirror world in
the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but then also the
way in shadow over in Smith that can reper reason

(57:00):
the idea of commerce with the rest of the planet. Yeah. Yeah,
and you see again. You you can think of the
Golden cities and which people are said to live, or
you can just think of dark, depressing depths. Um. Yeah,
it's a it's it's just put a proof positive again
that there there are no simple monsters, no matter how
shallow you think a particular fictional or even mythological creature.

(57:23):
Maybe when you start teasing it apart, there's there's a
lot going on there. There's a whole legacy that it's
built upon. What's the name of the cathulic city, the
city under the under the ocean where he's where he
hangs out. I believe it's really a or something to
that effect. I wonder how that compares to the to
the Golden Palace of Triton. I'm thinking it's might be
a little darker, a little less less well lit, a

(57:46):
little less golden. Totally random thought. Have you ever seen
the coins that are the currency of Iceland? No, do
they have mermaids on them? Now, I haven't made it
to the mermaid coins. Maybe it really high value they do.
But the coins, I remember, they are great compared to
our coins because our coins have like politicians on them,

(58:07):
and their coins have all the children of Dagon, so
they've got crab coins, they've got trout coins, like all
of the sea creatures make it onto the currency. That
has to be better for teaching kids about money. Like
my my son would would would be far more into
coins if they each had a cool animal on them.
So take note, uh, Nations of the World. Alright, Well,

(58:29):
on that note, we're going to close out this episode,
but there is going to be a follow up episode
in which we will discuss some of the science of
aquatic humanoids. Uh. And if you don't think there's any
science there, well just tune in and you'll be surprised.
In the meantime, check out all the previous episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's where you'll find the podcast. You'll

(58:50):
find blog posts, you'll find links out to our various
social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, you
name it big. Thanks as always to our audio producers
Alex Williams and Tory Harrison. And if you want to
get in touch with us directly to let us know
what you think about this episode or any other, to
request future topics, or just to say hi or ask
us a question, anything at all, you can email us

(59:13):
at Blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
it how stuff works dot com. Lovel lovel

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