Aquatic Humanoids, Part 1

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 and Joe 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
First you will come to the sirens, who enchant all
who come near them. If anyone unwarily draws in too
close and hears the 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

(00:25):
heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the
flesh still rotting off them. They meant the things on
the little island with the queer ruins, and it seems
them awful pictures of frog fish monsters were supposed to
be pictures of these things. Maybe they was the kind

(00:48):
of critters has got all the mermaids stories and such started.
They had all kinds of cities on the sea bottom,
and this island was heaved up from thar of my
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from How Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow

(01:14):
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. That's right. The
first was from Homer's the Odyssey the Samuel Butler translation.
The second was from HP. Lovecraft The Shadow Over Ins
andet Now, there is always an alluring quality to the

(01:36):
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. Martin books, there's
this character. Do you remember this guy Robert, who's like
a court jester and the in stanis Bathians court who's
always singing about what happens under the bottom of the sea. No,

(01:58):
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 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 a bell. Now. Well, you know, before even

(02:20):
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 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,

(02:42):
the sirens. It's fascinating the humans have seemingly always dreamt
up humanoids from the deep, not just monsters, but humanoids. Yeah,
I mean, because you can certainly expand it and get
into the whole realm of sea monsters and various animal
fish hybrids. But there's something particular cular about those humanoid
or partially humanoid creatures that a mirror world beneath the waves,

(03:06):
and people of some sort that occupied to depths. Yeah,
I mean, even before you had somebody 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

(03:26):
the ocean. That was like sort of the first outer space.
It was the original alien world. Yeah, indeed, 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 you know,
partially rotted away on the shoreline, whatever you were able
to pull up with with line or net. Dude, the

(03:49):
stuff that washes up dead on the beaches of the
Earth is terrifying and crazy now, even though we have
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

(04:11):
old maps. There's a book by chet van Duzer Sea
Monsters of Medieval and Renaissance Maps and and he he.
It's filled with wonderful illustrations. But you get to look
at at all these various creatures. You know, that's 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

(04:32):
is essentially what you might see if you saw the
put partially decomposed body of a whale, something enormous, but
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 King

(04:53):
Sargon the second early eighth century BC that clearly depicts
to Assyrian morment. And it's great because if you've 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 writing. I mean, they're mentioned in

(05:15):
ovid Ovid's writing The Metamorphosis. Ovid lived forty three b
c E To seventeen or eighteen CE, and he described
the gates of the Palace of the Sun is containing
all of these images of mirror people. The dark blue
Sea contains the gods melodious triton shifting Proteus uh Aegean

(05:35):
crushing two huge whales, together his arms across their backs,
and Doris with her daughters, some seen swimming, some sitting
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 her two thousand one paper Hans Christian Andersen's

(05:56):
Fish out of Water, the Babylonians recognized God's with fish
features or fish hybridity. Yeah, you can sort of see
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 fresh water and the salt water,

(06:17):
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
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

(06:39):
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
was made out of fish emoticons. That's pretty great, that's amazing.
And get this, the ziggurat where people would worship Inky
was known as House of the Subterranean Waters. Well, that

(07:01):
seems to sort of complete the ziggurat trinity because we
we've talked about zigarattes before the Ziggurata Etemenanki, which 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 zigguratte as if there's another kind of

(07:22):
zigguratte right now, additionally we have this is just kind
of a humble zigguratte. Yeah, there's no such thing. If
it's gonna be a zigguratte, it's gonna be a zigaratte. Now.
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

(07:43):
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 power and womanly allure
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,

(08:07):
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 anciency gods. Yeah,
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

(08:27):
versions of religions. Yeah, the old trope of the former
pagan god becomes a demon in medieval Christian traditions. Yeah.
So obviously we're talking about mr Folk water dwelling humanoids
of 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

(08:48):
mr Folk mythology and all of the different ideas of
humanoids living in the deep and what that says about
us culturally and where where these ideas come from. And
then in the next stepisode, we're gonna focus more on
the 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,

(09:12):
one of the first ones you mentioned was the sirens,
that's right. Yeah, and 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 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

(09:35):
of development merged them with the Northern mermaid in Christian Europe,
but medieval best Area's stuck to the bird hybridity though
up through at least twelve twenty and then you had
this gentleman Isidore of Seville who lived of five sixty
through six thirty six CE, and he attributed them with
scales and webbed feet and sometimes tales and wings as well.

(09:56):
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 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

(10:17):
accustomed to, mainly through the Time Life book series of
myths and monsters and myths and legends, 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

(10:39):
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 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 drowned. I

(11:00):
guess the basic underlying reality of the myth is the
ocean is a dangerous place, right and if you go
out upon 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,

(11:23):
which is that he has his men lash him to
the ship's mast so that he can't control you know,
he can't drive the ship into the rocks. But all
the other men plugged 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 but yeah, they're they're all

(11:45):
plugged up. He's the one that's a that's their rope
to the mast, begging to be let free, and their
under strict 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 mythology, the Triton so Triton was

(12:05):
originally a specific murr person. But Ariel's father, right is
Was that his name in 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

(12:26):
don't think her father ever showed up in it. Okay, yeah,
I think that's his name. I remember this from childhood,
the guy with the big beard and the trident, 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 Amphathrite.

(12:50):
They had humanoid bodies covered in scales, and then they
had dolphin tales maddi 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 Avinity. And our old friend Hestiodd said that

(13:12):
they inhabited Golden palaces under the sea. Now it sounds
like 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 ick Thos. Right,
it's got the scales and the fish like characteristics, but

(13:32):
then they've also got dolphin tales, So there's this melding
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 that we just mesh it all
up under miscellaneous sea beasts. And also in medieval times,

(13:53):
Triton's were made the male counterparts of sirens, the male counterparts,
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 of one
dares to get too technical with your your mythological people's
under the waves, and I think this will be very

(14:13):
interesting later on when we discuss modern treatments of mermaids
and fish people. Okay, so fangs, scales, dolphin tales, humanoid characteristics.
That's not enough hybridity 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 atho centaur. Yes,
so you had something called a centauro triton, which is

(14:36):
basically what occurs when you have a triton that's depicted
with like like a definite dolphin esque hind quarters of ocation.
But then the ichio centaur takes the hybridity to a
whole another level. So we see this and around the
third century Common Era, and this is found in the
Natural history text Physiologists. Uh, and this each year the

(15:00):
ichthio 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 triton, 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 of

(15:21):
a horse and the tail of a dolphin. H 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 Ichthio centaur according to the resources I was looking at,

(15:43):
but 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
Ichthyo centaur, they become just part of medieval likenography 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 depicted Uh,

(16:07):
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 not properly disciplined

(16:29):
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 just and cease to pursue this foolish pairing.

(16:52):
But yeah, that's an interesting parallel, like that they both
go back to this idea of the sinner 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 individualist 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 around the world. Alright,

(17:16):
we're back. So not every mirror person in mythology and
legend is a villain. Uh. Sometimes you see some that
that have beneficial aspects as well. There's, for instance, the
the the Neno of Japanese legend. This is essentially less
of a mermaid and more of just a fish with
a beautiful woman's face, and it's protective and warns of

(17:38):
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 the lower body of a fish, and
they'd warn fishermen of coming storms or invoke storms if

(17:59):
they were distrest spected. 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 from Merman. You've
looked up images, right, I did. I was not familiar
with this, and I had, of course heard of the
Fiji Mermaid. And I've never been to Bath, but I'm

(18:20):
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, but
it has lakes, and so in these lakes, I guess
one might expect to find some kind of hybrid humanoid

(18:43):
aquatic creature. And so inside this business in Banff 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 gremlin and it
looks like, I don't know how would you describe it.
Like the back of it just looks straight up like

(19:04):
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 taxidermine creation. I mean that is
what it is. Yes, it is a fish and probably

(19:25):
some sort of a small monkey that the remains of
which we're we're sewn together, yeah, or the I think
it's also possible that the top half of it could
just be artificial. I 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 nineteen fifteen, when it

(19:45):
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 shoeoddity sort of thing. Yeah, except it
stays right here in this uh, in this store or
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,

(20:06):
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 this. I've got to check that out when
I finally get up to ban. Now, speaking of Canadian

(20:27):
we can sort of extend that and think of French
traditions as well. Uh, there is a mermaid in French
traditions known as Melo scene 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 thought you're

(20:47):
gonna say Starbucks, 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 crafty in 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

(21:09):
like violent fish people movies. But what about Starbucks Starbucks, Well,
it 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

(21:29):
I don't think anybody ever pays attention to that logo
unless 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.

(21:54):
Why is this the classic Well, you know, because when
you when you really think about mermaids, you think of
like Hans Christian Anderson, you think of Northern Europe. Oh, so,
to be clear, Hans Christian Anderson is the author of
the Little Mermaids 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.

(22:15):
Oh yes, it's a bit a bit more violent. But
but over in Denmark they did have to have frou
and uh. This is a that's 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.

(22:36):
And of course I have to mention the monk fish.
Are you 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 waters,
described in Ambrose Pare's sixteenth century work on monsters. It

(22:57):
had the head of a human, the tonstered air style
of a monk, 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, you know
what you're talking about. It sounds I've seen the medieval drawings.
But the cool thing is that there's a very strong

(23:17):
case to be made that these were based on descriptions
of dead giant squid, 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. Uh. That
would have been the two extremely long flippers of the

(23:39):
monk fish. Yeah, I'm looking at the comparisons right now.
I can see why that 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 uh, 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

(24:00):
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 about that, and then that person
told another individual who illustrated and wrote it in in
a medieval baster area. It. Uh. These are just a
few of the possible excuses for many of these fantastic creatures.

(24:21):
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 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

(24:42):
that they come from another world. The aquatic humanoids do. Yes,
they are familiar yet yet foreign. They are something there.
There are people 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 in fiction, they don't usually seem to be

(25:04):
like party hard kind of gods or party hard monsters
or humanoids. They usually seem kind of sad. Ye, there's
a kind of melancholy that we associate with the underwater
life and the ocean that may them 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,

(25:26):
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, 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

(25:49):
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 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

(26:11):
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 just what filters down
through the through the membrane of the water surface. Yeah,
but then sometimes there are depictures again the golden cities

(26:31):
of the Triton's. Yeah, I guess that's true. So there
is a sense of of the glorious, but also this
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 just the the aquatic habitat,
knowing that it is such a place of of intense competition.

(26:54):
You know, when I think of the the ultimate melancholy
underwater humanoids, like I go to the Universal Monster movies,
it's the gil Man. Yeah, the gil Man. I mean,
I imagine most of the people listening to this podcast
grew up with the gil Man, right, creature from the
Black Lagoon nine fifty four, part of the classic Universal

(27:15):
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 gil Man was the
synthesis of many of these human mr fult kind of traditions,
was not from like a novel that existed. It's uh,

(27:37):
there are other interesting talks about it too, like, for instance,
unlike Frankenstein or Dracula or the Money, the gil Man
was a was a product of the natural world. It's
just a product of the natural world that no longer
had a place in the modern world. And that's why
it often gets classed as a science fiction movie instead
of a horror movie. Yeah, that the science discusses is

(27:58):
rather rather sketchy. Oh they this 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 monster, 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 dad's that had all
these universal monsters and some horrible jokes on them. You

(28:19):
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. So
the first one shows the gil Man. On the front
it said, did you say fish for dinner? Anyone I know?

(28:40):
And then on the back it's got this first ghost Colin,
we just had a baby. Second ghost colon, congratulations, Was
it a ghoul or a boy? See? That's that's some
that's some straight up crypt keeper humor right there. That's
that's pretty good. I got an even better one. So
the front is the creature, but that's from the third movie.

(29:01):
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 the cowardly skeleton? A boned chicken? That's probably a
joke that we would get if this were the early

(29:22):
nineteen sixties, but I do not get it. But chicken,
oh man. That 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

(29:42):
the creature, 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

(30:05):
I don't think we're ready. Yeah, that really. I mean
Gamma del 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 log Right. No, I'm talking about like the
Tom Cruise Mummy Universe remakes where it would be like

(30:25):
what Benedict's cumber Batch as the Gilman and then take
a good go man who would play the lugs who
show up in the Lagoon and start poking and with stuff. Oh,
I don't know. Just you can just point a scatter
gun at an IMDb page. I guess you 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.

(30:46):
I was introduced to it in two. It came from Hollywood.
That's a great one. Yeah. So basically just a bunch
of old movie trailers, uh, stitched together with some at
times delightful jokes at times cringeworthy jokes and very as
a celebrity guest spots from like Cheech and Chong, Dan Ackroyd,
John Candy, they were principles on this project. They highlight

(31:09):
a great brain attack scenes. Yes, yeah, there's a whole
section on guerilla movies. It's it's, it's, it's. 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 Bell of the Ghostias version of

(31:31):
Dracula or the Frankenstein 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

(31:51):
when you start teasing the gil Man apart, there's some
really unsettling dimensions to the creature. The same can certainly
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

(32:12):
like a proto creature short story. 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

(32:35):
I first read this story, I read it in n
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 it's
a little more disturbing the more one reads about it,
and the one the more one knows about Lovecraft and

(32:58):
his his 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 was

(33:21):
definitely a man with some very problematic views on race,
especially from modern modern readers. Absolutely, 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.

(33:42):
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 debilitative 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 Evan Lampi discusses in

(34:05):
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 Lovecraft's earlier story The Dunwich Horror,
which presents a town with a quote degraded population of ignorant, backward,
physically stunted villagers. This again en capsuling his Lovecrafts uh

(34:27):
anxieties concerning not only other races, but even just like
other like classes of people within the United states. But
Lampy points out the quote the fall of Dunwich 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

(34:48):
via Atlantic commerce that serves as their undoing. So Lampey 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, it's ideas and its people. So
in some ways the creatures from the sea here are
standing in for contact and intercourse with other cultures, right yeah.

(35:13):
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 of of other cultures,

(35:35):
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 and Lovecraft's work, especially since Lovecraft is

(35:59):
so pop peeler 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 and vibe,

(36:19):
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 that

(36:40):
some of the same themes can be poured 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, he's ready to g for for goodness,
say the first one anyway, maybe the other two as well,

(37:00):
but I distinctly remember seeing 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 Wood,
and 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

(37:24):
horrendous 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

(37:47):
itself 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
certainly is more ambitious makeup wise than I mean, Harlow's
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 Black Lagoon sure does. It starts

(38:10):
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 the Devonian period from sixty

(38:32):
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 least
as back then, that's right. And then they spend a
lot of time talking about the long fish. Uh. They
sort of throw a lot of science at the screen
early on to try and trick you into thinking that

(38:53):
this is a like 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 the fight.
They filmed the first two of these films in three days.
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

(39:14):
I actually rewatched 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

(39:35):
origin of the creature? So the producer of Creature from
the Black Lagoon was this guy named William Aland 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, and he was part of
the infamous War the World's radio broadcast. But he was

(39:56):
also friends with Wells and so sometimes sometime in the
nineteen forty 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

(40:18):
Welles partner at the time, and a Mexican 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

(40:40):
in the Amazon River near a certain village, and, according
to Figaro is 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 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

(41:02):
and he started getting worked up because he 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

(41:22):
at Universal, he decided to make a 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 Figaroa, followed by an expedition to the
Amazon with a fishman creature, and of course he wanted

(41:44):
to have a gorgeous blonde that would 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 him, bring him back to civilization, he'd
escape and you know, run him up in the at
ease and it's this basically the territory they explore in
the three Creature of movies. Yeah, if you put together

(42:07):
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 they are tied to it, such as Wakoula Springs,

(42:29):
which I mentioned on the show before of a fabulous destination.
That's where they shot a lot of the underwater stuff. Yeah,
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

(42:50):
like weird Florida places like the wiki Watchie uh Mermaid Show. Uh.
Julie Adams stunt double from the first film was a
mermaid swimmer at the wiki watchy 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

(43:11):
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 yeah, it was a crazy story there. I go

(43:33):
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 previously. No,

(43:53):
Oh my god, when was the last time you saw Thunderball?
I was a child watching on TVs. Okay, yeah, it's
one of those Sean Connery on so it has parts
that are kind of fun, but the underwater fight scenes
are just in termn uh bull go on forever. But there.
I'm sure they're very well choreographed, especially for the time.

(44:13):
I mean, shooting underwater back in the fifties 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 contrasted

(44:37):
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
filmed that does to me make the creature kind of
a sad, melancholy, sympathetic sort of character, unlike say Dracula,

(45:01):
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 messing

(45:23):
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.

(45:45):
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think this is something
I picked up on as a kid, especially the more
I learned about and unultimately when I saw the third film, Uh,
the creature walks among us because in this one they've
captured the creature horror really burned it in the process,
and then they treat the creature and there's this there's
this hokey scientific explanation basically Lamarckian evolution where the creatures

(46:11):
scales fall away and it has human flesh underneath, and
it's becoming more man like. And they're all these just
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, and it does. And uh.

(46:32):
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. Yeah, generally the

(46:55):
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 and
he floats to the surface, stunned, and then they take

(47:18):
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
is and then runs around and yet again it's like

(47:39):
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 are you upset
about Jaws attacking people? You're going where Jaws is, like
you should you should only be upset if Jaws is
attacking people in the city where where you are, Like

(48:01):
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 alright, we're back, al right.
So I mentioned earlier that I used to to think
of the creature as being this mostly pure thing that

(48:22):
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 about some of the history of of
African Americans and horror movies. So I ended up looking

(48:45):
up Coleman's book. It's titled a Horror Noir Blacks in
American Horror Film from an eighteen nineties to the present
and uh and she she shares the following read on
the creature quote. The gil Man is cal long and
Gus from the Birth of the Nation rolled into one
impossible body. Bodily, the monster resembled a racist caricature. Its

(49:09):
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 in side note, if anyone's not familiar Gus,
who she mentions here, is the antagonist from the nineteen
fift movie The Birth of the Nation. Uh. The film

(49:29):
attributed to the revival of the klu Klux 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, and, as
Coleman points out, the Creature from the Black Cogoon, the

(49:51):
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 p irish,
and 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

(50:11):
do that. 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

(50:31):
this ambiguity in 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 the world in which the white race alone

(50:54):
has evolved and the rest are static. She points to
the work of Patrick Gonder, 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,

(51:17):
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

(51:38):
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 mishandled
film in my opinion. But it's interesting how that this
this read of this racial read of the creature um

(51:59):
which 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 of Rin 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

(52:21):
masculine version 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,

(52:42):
this read 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 and 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 of ths that this is what the filmmakers consciously

(53:03):
had in mind. I think it's probably not, 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 to just some of the
trends that we've identified and skirted around. Uh, were concerning

(53:25):
the various myths and fictions of aquatic humanoidse like what
do they what do they represent? What do they convey?
Obviously the mirror world, that's right, Yeah, Uh, the unknown
depths as well as the dangers of the sea, the
feature we so often see in Legends of Monsters, which
is hybridity, you can bringing together different features of different

(53:47):
animals 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 effect 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

(54:09):
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 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

(54:31):
that 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 represent

(54:52):
the idea of commerce with the rest of the planet. Yeah. Yeah,
and you see again, you can think of the Golden
Cities and which Merrorpy Bowler said to live, or you
can just think of dark, depressing depths. Um, yeah, it's
a it's 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,

(55:15):
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 Cathulu 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

(55:39):
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? Yeah? 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,

(56:00):
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, and
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,

(56:21):
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

(56:43):
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(57:05):
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