Dragons: As Real as Mermaids

Dragons are like mermaids in that they're not real. And that's about where the comparison ends. Learn all about dragons today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh.
There's Chuck, Dragon Slayer Bryant and well that's it. It's
just the two of us. We can make it if

(00:22):
we try, Chuck, just the two of us, dragons and
us and the great Bill Weathers? Was that Bill with?
You didn't say that this straight say? We just had
the same conversation like two months ago. I'm not doing
it again. Oh about Bill Withers. Yeah, I didn't realize
that that was a Bill Withers song. It was a

(00:43):
good song. Lean on Me though, Man is just I
cannot take it. Grandma's bad? What does that is that
a Bill Withers? I did not know that. It's good.
He's He's great. And we probably had this exact same conversation.
I don't know if we had that one or not.
But you know who else I like, Um, who's a
little bit like Bill Wether's not quite as cool. I

(01:05):
guess if you're like a cool person. But um, George
Benson was amazing and still is. I think he's still around.
Do you ever listen to his stuff? Yeah? But now
I'm realized, I uh maybe I should just not correct
myself and let people be send in a bunch of emails.
Oh I love that. I love that. And when we
get a million of the same emails, it's Grandma's hands.

(01:28):
I was getting it. John Denver's Grandma's feather bed kind
of just was in the ether. So as we just
talked about John Denver about Grandma's bad follow up, to
use me up. So dragons, Yeah, let's talk about dragons.
Let's have a pleasant conversation about dragons, shall we chuck? Yeah,

(01:48):
dragons aren't real. And you'll notice by the title of
this episode, which is dragons colon as real as mermaids.
And it's funny because I think the week before this
comes out, Mermaids is a is our pick for the selects,
the select episode, so it aligns perfectly. That is perfect.

(02:10):
The dragons aren't real. Well, okay, I please stop saying
that because you're crushing my dreams. Sorry. Um So, when
we when we talk about dragons, we have to stay
right here at the outset that there's a lot of
different kinds of dragons. Um And typically when you think
of like the the flying winged, usually long, maybe scaly,

(02:32):
fire breathing fire breathing dragon, often with a long kind
of serpentine tail. Sometimes it's even um pointy like the devil,
which will see why. Um that's considered a Western dragon, UM,
and that is its own thing that kind of evolved

(02:53):
from a number of different traditions. But there's also the
Asian dragon UM, which you know has variations among different
Asian countries, but it's generally seems to be kind of
the same ancient Chinese thing. UM. That's a totally different thing,
and it evolved on its own in isolation as well.
And so UM. Because you've got these different traditions of

(03:16):
dragons that seem fairly similar in a lot of ways,
there's a lot of people out there who say, wow,
this is astounding. Every culture in the world has some
sort of tradition of dragons, and that's kind of true.
But at the at the UM, like throughout this episode,
we'll see, UM, that's not really accurate like that. Nowadays

(03:38):
it seems that way because we have overlaid the idea
of dragons over everything. But if you really kind of
dig into the past and and look into the nuance
of some of these things that we term dragons, they're
very different. So it's a lot more accurate to say that,
like every culture in the world has mythical beasts, some
of which share a lot in common with our modern

(03:58):
conception of dragon. And that's probably where our modern conception
of dragons came from, was all these different ideas of
it in the ancient past. Yeah, there's a book called
An Instinct for Dragons written by an anthropologist named David E.
Jones about dragons and and dragons throughout cultures and across cultures.

(04:20):
And there's the theory he's got going, which is humans
evolved in primates. H evolved with the fear of three
predators basically um snakes, cats which are big cats, house cats,
and eagles, and that a dragon. It sort of makes
sense that every culture sort of has something like a dragon,

(04:43):
because in folklore and myth and storytelling, you might combine
the three scariest things into one super scary thing, and
that is a dragon. Right, And you might say, like, well,
wait a minute, Like I think eagles are kind of cool.
I'm not at all scared. Number one, have you ever
been around an eagle and it was loose, but you'd
be kind of scared of it? Because those talents are serious,

(05:04):
or one that dive bond you, I think exactly more
to the point though, or more toys, I should say, Um,
David Jones point, um, that this would be this fear,
this innate fear that humans have, would be based much
more deeply in our evolutionary past when we were monkeys
and you actually could be killed by certain kinds of
eagles like the harpy eagle. Remember we talked about the

(05:26):
harpy eagle and the sloth episode. Because they can mess
a sloth up, they can mess a monkey up too.
So this guy's premises, like, we have these ancient fears
of these things, and as we evolved and became humans
that started telling each other's stories, these things combined, like
you were saying, into this one fierce mythological monster, which
was basically the the sum of all of our most

(05:48):
primal fears. Yeah. And then of course, if you look
at ancient cultures, they always had sort of mythical stories
in folklore to explain you know, everything from weather phenomenon
to things like volcanoes. Uh. And if they happened upon
maybe dinosaur bones or whale bones, then a story might

(06:09):
go along with that. To explain it away, like you know,
this was clearly some huge lizard like creature or maybe
a snake like creature, and there was probably a story
around it and why they should fear it or usually
some sort of a sacrifice that they needed to make, um,
you know, sort of in lock step with those stories.
But that's just sort of another theory on maybe how

(06:30):
the dragon might have come about as far as folklore goes.
One of the most interesting theories that I saw, and
we should say, no one has a widely accepted answer
for this, which I love, is always um, but that
it was the b that the that the description um
often um in ancient cultures they used to use like

(06:52):
riddles and exaggeration and metaphor to um discuss and and
talk about and describe actual things. And that the the
b um a description of a b or I should say,
a swarm of a bee is what actually became the
dragon in in mythology. And at first it just like

(07:14):
that doesn't doesn't make any sense at all, But some
of the points of these people made. There was a
journal article in it um and I think like a
journal on Tolkien studies or something like that. But they
say that um, a be swarm moving together. It doesn't
necessarily resemble or dragon, but it makes a lot more
sense along those lines than it doesn't when you're talking

(07:35):
about an individual b exactly it can do. It can
point an air, It can make an arrow to point
a direction, you know, where somebody's hiding, that kind of thing. Um.
And then another one is that the fire, the idea
of of dragon breathing fire is a metaphor for the
feeling of like your skin burning from a be sting
or the intense pain. And then lastly um in the

(07:58):
Western tradition, a lot of dragons protect like mounds of
gold or treasure, and that this is a metaphor for
honey and gold, like the honeycombs that ancient people would
have basically considered gold not just you know, um food,
but also it was used as medicine as well. So

(08:19):
if you kind of put all it together, it's it
seems like a pretty interesting theory. At least it makes
a lot more sense than a bee, you know, when
you really kind of dig into it, Yeah, totally. The
word itself is um. Well, you can look back to
the Iliad when Homer wrote about the d R. A. K.
O n uh. The drecon, which supposedly is the first

(08:43):
known use of the word uh in ancient Greek, is
sort of has some uh confusing etymology behind it, but
basically Homer uses that word to describe snakes, like like
unequivocally yeah, and not you know, huge, flying, fire breathing snakes,
but just snakes. Yeah. Yeah. He even says, no, I'm
just talking about snakes, everybody, not dragons. To get ahead

(09:06):
of yourself, These are snakes, and I mean they say that,
like he points out that he's talking about snakes because
he even says um a chimera, which is um uh
I think ahead of a lion, the goat body, a
serpent tail, and bats wings. He even says the serpent
tail that the back portion of the chimera is a dragon.
So he's talking about just regular old snakes for sure. Yeah.

(09:28):
And other writers and other classical stories did the same thing,
whether it was uh, dracontis or draconis, using all these
words sort of interchangeably with other words for snake. But
then we go to the history of not the history
but just history of animals, and that's the first sort
of scientific take on the draccone which is an enemy

(09:52):
of the eagle because uh, an eagle as a bird
of prey would eat snakes obviously, and different people got
a little more specific and later writing system what kind
of snake, but it's still just snakes. Yeah. So over time,
like that's that's where the word dragon came from, was
to use the it was a word for snake, that's it.
And then over time as people, um started to exaggerate.

(10:15):
Here they're conflate different types of snakes and different behaviors
that aren't found in snakes, but saying that they were,
and they all kind of put that under the umbrella
word for snakes. Dragon. Um, it seems like the legend
or the myth, the mythical version of dragons started to
kind of plump up and grow. Yeah, and this, um,

(10:36):
this is a point ed the grabster put this together,
put this together for us. But need points out something
I kind of never really considered back in the day.
In the classical period, writers were writers. There weren't like, hey,
I'm going to write h only about you know, natural history,
and I'm only gonna write fiction and myth and storytelling
like writers just wrote. So there were people that wrote

(10:59):
natural history to homes and also myth and storytelling legends,
and so a lot of this stuff could get kind
of mixed up and confused. Exaggerated mistranslation is a huge,
huge deal. Oh yeah, and a lot of this is
sort of where the sort of the myth of the
dragon came from. I just think of like some writer
getting confused what they were working on that day, and

(11:21):
now we have the myth of dragons. You know, it's like,
was this real or not? I can't remember? Who cares?
So um yeah, like you you really hit upon something
really important. Mistranslations are at a different way to put
his lazy translation have really kind of changed um our
idea of what people were talking about in the ancient world.

(11:42):
And I can't imagine how much nuance and understanding has
been lost and how probably dumb in a lot of
ways ancient people seemed compared to how they actually were
because of this tradition of like, um, p, poor translation
that was passed down over the year people. Yeah, that's

(12:03):
very cute. And the reason why it's kind of lazy
translation is it seems like anybody who came across an
ancient text or a text in another language, um, who's
translating something into English. Um, and they were seemed to
be describing anything even remotely dragon like, any mythical beast,

(12:23):
anything that might have wings, anything with a serpent tail,
anything that breathe fire, boop, dragon, it's a dragon. And
then now those of us who have a certain compartmentalized
idea of what a dragon is, everything was a dragon.
And now we reached that point where it's like, this
is how we got this idea that every culture has dragons. No,

(12:45):
we just kind of lazily translated what other cultures we're
talking about into dragons along the way, right. I think
that is a great first act. Thank you, thank you.
I'm bowing, I'm throwing roses at your feet. Thank you.
And uh, we're gonna take a little break and Rooney
and be right back. So the rose petals I sent

(13:36):
you arrived in time, just in time. Thank you for
throwing them and not saving them for something else. I
also realized I just went on ned Flanders with the
break of Rooney. I've never said that before in my life.
I liked it though. It was refreshing. We need that
kind of wet behind the ears, you know, wholesomeness right now. Chuck, Yeah,
in your fourteen No, not just us, I mean the world. Okay,

(14:00):
you know, yeah, up up with Flanders? Yeah, up with Flanders.
That's right. So my favorite thing always about Flanders is
when he would be really buff, like every time he
shirt good sexy Flanders. I know, it's hilarious. He he
ascribed it to a healthy dose of vitamin Church. Oh man,

(14:25):
I love it all. Right. Where were we here? Giants snakes, Yeah,
we talked about them. We're talking about miss translations were
a big problem, and I think a good place to
start with that is back in Sumeria. Yeah, the Sumerian
legends wrote about something called the use um u s
u m um also called dragons or you know, at

(14:45):
least referred to as dragons now. And these were kind
of like you said at the beginning, these were just
sometimes just large monsters, large scary things and not necessarily
a dragon, but was sort of just translated as dragon. Yeah,
and I should say sumer not Humeria. But um, they
they were. These were like their gods that they were

(15:05):
talking about. These were, you know, the like the god
of the goddess of water who gave birth to the world.
Like they had this incredibly detailed cosmology that explained, you know,
where they came from, where the world came from, where
the sun came from. Um, and we along the way
translated that to dragons. You know. So luckily there are

(15:29):
scholars who have learned to speak Acadian. I guess the
world's oldest UM spoken language A K K A d
I An not the the Canadian group that the Cajuns
come from. This is different, um. But the so we
understand now that there's much more nuance, much more detailed

(15:50):
to it. But I think the upshot of this is
that there there were conceptions of like fire breathing and
like flying serpents and like potentially malicious, malevolent, evil mythical
beasts that would resemble kind of what we would understand
as a dragon dating back thousands of years. Yeah, and

(16:12):
you know, this course goes straight to the Bible as well.
In Revelations, UM, there's a lot of talk about the archangels,
archangels battling a great dragon. Uh. In this case, the
dragon is Satan. But again this is sort of a translation,
like Satan was always sort of the serpent, at least
in Genesis, at first appeared as a serpent, and so

(16:34):
in the end, Satan is also a serpent, but spelled
you know, with the d r A k O n
like the ancient Greek. But yeah, but there's you know,
I mean not in the King James version and stuff
like that, obviously, but again you know pre translation uh
and you know, there were uh sort of renderings of
this of the big war for heaven and this is

(16:56):
when we see, you know it kind of what we
would see later on, which is metaphor for good versus
evil in a big battle. So that's what William Blake's
Paradise Lost is about, right, I've never read it. I
haven't either, I'm just familiar with it from that movie
Red Dragon. Okay, about the silence of the Lamb's prequel,
I think, yeah, um, he's like, do you see you

(17:21):
remember when Ray finds has got poor Philip seymore often
strapped to that wheelchair that I had spoiler coming. I
didn't love that movie. It was okay, but that was
that shot of that burning wheelchair and body going down
the parking deck is one of the most sort of
chilling images I've seen in movies. I know. The thing

(17:43):
that chills me about it though, is it's an antique
wicker wheelchair, which is the scariest thing I've ever seen
in my life. I hate those You don't like this,
huh No, I think we just talked about it recently,
and I every for the rest of my life, I
will be creeped out by those things. I'm gonna get
you one slide whistle this Christmas. Next Christmas, you're just
gonna get an ancient quicker wheelchair. And I don't want

(18:05):
I don't want to be wasteful, so I won't throw
it away and I'll just have to live among it.
It's gonna be terrible, like I'll never get used to
it either. You could make a uh life size Chuck dummy,
put it in there and set it on fire and
roll it down to parking. Oh I wouldn't do that.
I'd make a life size version of Chuck and just
talk to you and be like, listen, I got a

(18:27):
lot of stuff to say to you that's even creepier.
But and you're gonna sit there and listen to it.
I'll be wearing nothing but an apron, just like a
real doll with a big fake beard. Oh man, Okay,
so yeah, good versus Evil is sort of how a
lot of these um tales and folklore play out and

(18:47):
also incorporating stuff that you would see time and time
again in literature later on, Like there's a dragon that
lives out by itself near a village, and it's a greedy,
eventful dragon, and we need to a piece of dragon
with sacrifice once a year or else it will come
down and like rain fire upon everyone. Yeah. So, um,
all of this stuff, like this idea, this western dragon

(19:10):
that you're describing, like that's taken from like um Bao Wolf.
I believe that the dragon that killed bo Wolf in
the I always thought it was a Norse legend, but
apparently it's English, Old English. It's just set in Um
in the Netherlands, or in Scandinavia in the north, I think,
I think somewhere. I don't remember exactly where it sat.

(19:30):
It's just set there. It's not written by them. Um.
But that like that dragon was malevolent, and I believe
it was guarding treasure. I think the reason it went
berserk and Beowulf had to kill it was because somebody
stole one of its golden goblets a k. A honey,
because they're really talking about a b But so you
have an idea of a a greedy, murderous dragon that

(19:53):
protects treasure like that comes from an ancient tradition, but
that's a pretty pretty standard feature of dragons. You were saying, Yeah,
so all this is going on for many, many, many years.
Finally the rubber kind of meets the road as far
as Western dragons are concerned. With the legend of St.
George Um, who was a Christian saint, a real Christian saint,

(20:17):
maybe a real person who may have been a Roman
soldier who was you know, tortured and killed for converting
Pagans to Christianity. This is sort of fourth century a
d and because of stories getting passed around like a
game of telephone. Um the actual first name of that

(20:37):
story when it was told with Saint Theodore, but it
was really St. George. So I saw that they're both
possibly known as dragon slaying saints. Okay, it's not necessarily
like George took that from theater. They're both known for
having slain a dragon. But what's interesting is if you
see um St. Theodore depicted with his dragon, it's very

(20:57):
clearly a crocodile, and the the the origin story um
of either one, but particularly St. George is that there
is a town in modern day Turkey or possibly Palestine,
I'm short, but in what would have been called Anatolia
back then um where they had the spring. Like this

(21:19):
town got their water from the spring, and it was
guarded by a giant, massive crocodile, and that the townspeople
would sacrifice as sheep to sometimes to a day, basically
to distract the crocodile so they could go get the
water and then get out of there. And then they
ran out of sheep, so they said, well, what's what
comes after sheep? How about maidens? So they started throwing maidens,

(21:41):
sacrificing maidens literally throwing them to the crocodile to to
distract it so they could get the water. And eventually
they came upon the king's daughter. They drew straws to
see what maiden was good would go next, and St.
George apparently arrived just in time to slay the dragon
a k a. The crocodile. But that that that's this idea,
that that's where this story of somebody slaying a dragon

(22:04):
could have been rooted in reality, that over the years,
this massive crocodile, which was so fearsome and so murderous
and killed so many people, was converted into a dragon
over the years, and so St. George slew the dragon,
and that's where that came from. And that was a
real crocodile that lived by a real spring. Right. That's
pretty cool. Yeah, I thought so too. I'd love it

(22:25):
when something that seems totally legendary had was rooted in
some sort of fact. It's just people in blished or
exaggerated over time totally. If you want to go with
the sort of real great first image of what we
think of as a Western dragon, you can go to
twelve sixty eight D in an illustration in a medieval

(22:46):
beastiary called MS. Harley. Uh, great title. I think Ed
said it was probably a catalog designation. Yeah, I think
the real title is peral this is theological miscellany. Yeah,
which is that's an actual great title. Yeah. I like MS. Harley.

(23:06):
It's it's cool looking. Though. You can if you're near
a laptop or something, you can look this thing up
and it is you know, you look at it and
this is exactly what you think of as something from
like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or whatever. Yeah,
it's like it's a dragon. It's how a scene starts,
you know. Yeah, um so so oh sorry, I see
what you're saying, Like the dragon that that shows up

(23:27):
in their specifically the red one. Well, no, I just
mean sort of the dragon that we all think of
in in sort of literature and folklore, like this is
clearly that. Yeah, and supposedly it's the first one from
around twelve sixty Did you say that? Yeah? So um
and yeah, when you see it, you're like, yes, this
is probably the basis of the Western Dragon as we

(23:49):
understand it. Um, and it would have spread to Europe,
which it did. I think that was English. Um. It
was by a guy named William Perrault, and I believe
he was English. So it would spread from England to
the rest of Europe, and that that kind of um
set the stage for at least the visual version of
the Western Dragon from that point on. Thanks to England Dan. Right,

(24:14):
I think we said English Dan. It's England Dan. Oh?
Is it English Dan? Makes way more sense? Yeah, England
Dan's a little weird. Yeah, but hey, England Dan was
a little weird. But your nickname is America Josh. Sure,
how about all American Josh? Uh? Should we take a
break now and talk about Asian dragons. Yeah, let's all right.

(24:36):
We'll be right back with a kinder, gentler dragon right
after this. Okay, So, Chuck, you mentioned something, you said, kinder,

(25:14):
gentler dragon. It's true, like Western dragons are generally in
the tradition murderous, greedy, wealth hoarding jerks boo who maybe
pure evil personified in Asian dragon, which everybody is seen
at the very least in like a photo of a
street parade or in some sort of um uh like

(25:36):
a Chinese silk screen or something like that. Um. An
Asian dragon is typically much more benevolent than that um
and usually is associated with rain uh water, that kind
of thing. And so when you see those like a
dragon being paraded around where it's a bunch of people
like under like a dragon costume, that's actually based on

(25:57):
a very ancient um ray dance, essentially a ceremony to
invoke rain, because these dragons were associated with that. Yeah,
and this is far far, far older than in the West.
Thinking about six thousand b C. There were people in
China that were carving little dragon jade figurines, and there

(26:22):
was art back then, I think as far back as
four b C. Where it's clearly some kind of dragon UM,
but again supposedly independent from the sort of u evolution
of the western dragon. Yeah, and so UM all of
this was based on some of the early like Chinese religion,

(26:43):
UM was based on animism, and not just Chinese, but
a lot of ancient religions are based on animism, where
like an inanimate object is um is a symbolic of
like a larger thing or like a god, like the
god of wind or the god of rain. And so
these ancient dragons were considered gods of rain, and there

(27:03):
were different um. There's different types, there's different kinds. But again,
like the fact that they are generally um beneficial humankind
rather than harmful, I think is is it's it's interesting,
It's I wonder what that says about the two different
cultures if anything. You know that dragons are harmful and
they're gonna kill you, and they're gonna steal all your gold,

(27:24):
or they're gonna bring the rain that's going to grow
the food that saves your family. You know, where did
that diverge or did they just they just don't have
anything to do with one another. Yeah, that's interesting. UM
sort of a side note, I'm playing. I've been playing
video games some during the pandemic, which I'm usually not
a big gamer, but I've been playing a game lately
called Ghosts of uh Sushima, which is uh you play

(27:47):
a Samurai warrior that's sort of traveling through Japan and
ancient times. And it's really interesting to compare that to
like the analog for the West would be like Red
Dead Redemption in the Old West with gun slingers, and
it's just such a different game design and everything. It's
the one in Japan is ur The Ghost of Seshima

(28:07):
is so peaceful. It's one of the most beautiful games
I've ever seen. And instead of like a map telling
you where to go, you press a button and the
wind guides you. And if you see a fox, you
follow the fox up to a shrine and you uh
and you pay your respects to the shrine, and it
it doesn't really get you much other than it's not

(28:27):
like you get like a million points or something for
doing that. It's just it seems like they really tried
to honor Japanese traditions, and so much of this game
and the motivations are always pure, like even when you're
slicing guys up with your katana. It's because you're rescuing,
you know, some old lady in a village, whereas the
other game is just like, hey, just go and just

(28:49):
pillage and murder and do awful things. Yeah, it's really interesting.
I'm much more enjoying this game. Well, you said something
that that struck a memory and me about dragons. And
there's a commonality between um Asian dragons, particularly Chinese dragons,
which are called long or long l U n g Um,

(29:10):
and Western dragons, and typically they live in isolated areas
away from everybody, and in Asia, the Chinese dragons usually
live in old, ruined temples like that's where you'll find
them dwelling. How interesting exactly so are their dragons in
that game? Not yet, but now I'm kind of wondering.

(29:31):
Oh yeah, look at it's pretty early because I did
run across the Japanese type of dragon that um that
is malevolent, not not very nice. I don't remember the
name of it, so I guess beyond the lookout for
all of them. Interesting. Yeah, so far, there's nothing supernatural.
It's uh mongols that are the bad guys. I got
you and then there's another type of Japanese dragon I

(29:53):
ran across called Ryu, and this one actually bears a
lot in common to the intelligent Western dragon, and that
it um writes poetry. Yeah, it uses um shed scales
from its belly his paper and you and um. I
don't know what it uses for ink, but I think
it uses its tail as a pin and quill poetry. Yeah. Yeah,

(30:17):
it's super super nice except for that one thing. Yeah,
we could just get it some ink. Right, There's something
else I should think people should look up here if
you're looking up images, which is um. An artist named
chen Wrong g E n R O n g very
famous painter in Asia of Dragons, and this was like
thirteenth century a d. And if you look up some

(30:39):
of the stuff, it's really really neat looking. Yeah. About
the same time as um uh paraldis is theological miscellany
was was done with that first Western dragon. Chen wrong
was making these mate just amazing works of art. I
think one of them is in the Boston Museum of
Fine Art. It's called like nine Ragons or something, but

(31:01):
it was um. It reminded me of the artwork in
the original Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series.
I never read that they do that artwork and there
is just amazing, but it has like all these weird
kind of splotchy clouds of ink and chin chin wrong
makes use of that as well. It's it's really kind

(31:23):
of startling how how closely that to resemble. I wonder
if the artist from Scary Stories of Telling the Dark
was inspired by that in some way. Yeah, nothing wrong
with that. No, No, that's not ripping off at all.
I don't know why I would even say that. Why
would you even bring ripping off? Yeah, So we should

(31:46):
probably talk about famous dragons at this point, because we've
thrown a couple out, like the one from BeO Wolf,
who apparently doesn't even have a name. Yeah. I mean,
you know, there are so many stories in literature, uh
and movies obvious lee that have had dragons throughout the years.
Certainly Tolkien uh in the mid nineteen thirties when he

(32:06):
wrote The Hobbit Um this was a really evil dragon
and um, you know, drawn from that Western sort of
influence of evil dragons. Yeah, s m A U g
Um Dungeons and dragons in the seventies was a very
big um sort of you don't know how much dragons

(32:29):
had fallen out of the sort of pop culture I
but it really brought it back in if it did
fall out, because in the game there were different kinds
of dragons. There were a couple of different sets who
were indicated by different colors red, green, black, white, and blue.
I think we're evil. And then there were the bronze, brass, silver,

(32:49):
and gold, which were for the most part good and
they all had different things they could do in different
temperaments and UM. Something that we talked a little bit
about is the fire breathing thing they were. There are
lots of different theories as to how that came about,
maybe the tide of Satan with fire UM. Early on
when they were just serpents, perhaps they were drawn spitting
venom and that could have looked like fire. Yeah, that

(33:11):
makes sense, But there's always some sort of breath emitting
weapon going on. It seems like, Yeah, over time it's
translated into UM. I think like the white dragon in
Dungeons and Dragons blue like basically ice like cold um.
Some dragons uh blue out electricity UM, which you would

(33:34):
think would be kind of new, But apparently the Leviathan,
which is mentioned in the Bible is a sea dragon
basically supposedly spit electricity out. Um. But there's something weird
coming out of the dragon's mouth that's probably going to
kill you. Yeah, you don't want to you don't want
to test that no. Um. And we were saying also

(33:55):
that the first visual depiction of dragon shows up in
in uh Harley. Um. The first mention of the dragon,
and like a story, like a fictitious story, supposedly comes
in Spencer Edmunds The Fairy Queen. Oh yeah yeah. And
then it shows up after that a little while later
and um, Marie Catherine Dull Noise the Green Serpent, and

(34:21):
then it just kind of takes off from there. You know,
you have a connection to Pete Dragon. I do. My
friend Toby was a producer on Pete Dragon. Yeah, for
the remake obviously, yes, um, which was really really good
and and touching and tear jerking a little bit. I
never saw the remake. I need to check that out.
It's it's very good. They did a really good job

(34:42):
with it. But you know, if you haven't seen the
movie Rain of Fire, just stop what you're doing and
watch that, because that is the king Daddy of all
dragon movies. I have not seen that? Do we? Should
we pause, come back and finish the episode after. It's great.
It's one of those movies, is that. Um. I don't

(35:03):
know how well it did at the box office. I
don't think super well. But it's one of those that
has really become sort of a cult classic since then
with McConaughey and Christian Bale. It's so over the top
and just so fun. Uh, it's really really good. So
it's kind of like the Pacific Room of Dragon movies. Yeah,

(35:24):
or Starship Troopers of Dragon movies. Oh man, that's another
great movie. Um. There's also Puff the Magic Dragon. Don't
forget him God, the saddest song of all time. My
mom taught my daughter that it's the worst. Who. Yeah,
it has nothing to do with pot so just you know,
forget that hippie. It's just sad. It is a very
sad one. And then also I think our younger UM

(35:47):
listeners would be really mad if we didn't mention Dragon
ball Z right, And there's you know, I didn't watch
Game of Thrones, but I know there was there were
a little trained dragons in that one that grew. Yeah,
and Chuck is just so satisfying to look over all
of the different depictions of dragons that you see in
all the differences and all the similarities, and realized that

(36:09):
all of them are talking about bees. Yeah you know. Yeah.
Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? There's
a dragons. Well, if you want to know more about dragons,
head out to a ruined temple, or maybe go search
for gold in a cave and you might encounter one yourself.
And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. Uh,

(36:31):
this is a story about corn and poop. Go hey, guys,
here's my corn story. When I've repeated often throughout my
lengthy life. I just turned seventy. Nice this from Mary
Mary seventy. Well, not happy birthday, but happy happy decade turning? Okay,

(36:52):
what I think birthday still works? No, but it wasn't
her birthday necessarily, but happy decade. Yeah, like when you
hit seventy or sixty or fifty. Sure, no, I know
exactly your time. It's a rich history of saying happy
The song happy decade turning? What song is that? Happy
happy decade turning? Is that a Bill Weather's song? You

(37:16):
made it another ten years? Lean on me there, man,
I think I awkwardly got my way out of that
really awkward sentence. You did. It was really good. I
grew up in Houston, Texas. Guys. One blazing hot summer
day when I was about three or four, is out
in the driveway standing around, kind of checking out the
neighbor kid who was in her driveway, who was about too.

(37:39):
It's hotter than the blazes. Her name was Bianca. She
was younger than me and still in the diaper phase
of life, but it was so hot she wasn't wearing
a diaper or anything else. Nature called to Bianca and
while a couple of little poos were deposited on the summit,
being a curious child, and went over to check it out,
and lo and behold, they're in the poop embedded securely
but definitely visible. Were core colonels, unmasticated yellow against the

(38:04):
brown corn colonels. Right. Yeah, no, we've we got it,
just the corn crenels. Uh, fussily. I've never been able
to look at corn, nor God forbid, eat corn literally
in any form ever since. Yeah, I could see that
happen if I hit you in just the right way,
especially at a certain age. Yep, she says, not even

(38:24):
corn pone, which I had to look up. I didn't
even know what corn pone was. It's like corn bread,
I think, yeah, yeah, not even corn pone. God, how
have you lived seventy years without corn pone? A great
emotional scar was born that day. The only benefit of
that experience is that whenever I want to cross I'm sorry,
gross anyone out, I just pull out the corn in
the poop story. All adults hate it, all children are

(38:47):
gleefully grossed out by it. I love your show, guys,
especially when y'all wander off topic and then wander back.
I think in the Chili Pepper episode, y'all wandered over
to Yoko oh No, which was interesting. And that is
from Mary Foy in Issaqua Washington. Well thanks, well, yeah,
I guess, thanks in quotes Mary for that one. But

(39:09):
thank you also for listening to us. Uh. If you
want to write in and kind of gross us out
like Mary did, We're always up for that kind of thing.
You can take your best shot, UH, send it off
to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.

(39:29):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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