152: The Allure of the Creature

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Way down among Brazilians Coffee beans grow by the billions So they've. Got to find those extra cups to fill They got an awful lot. Of coffee in Brazil What's up, and welcome to Movie Meltdown. I'm Brian. I'm Fred.

I'm Greg. And once again this week, if you were here last time, we had both Steve and Dave with us, and they are here once again. Hello, we're back. Hey, it's Dave. Again, I'm slow on the pickup, but I actually just forget my name.

It takes me a minute. That sounds about right, actually. All right, so once again, and it's time for another session of the Caffeinated Movie Geek. Cappuccino my butt. I still drink coffee.

The last fucking thing you need is another cup of coffee. It's time for Decaffeinated Movie Geek. We're coming to you live via digital recording from Nancy's Bagel Grounds, where we're going to hang out, drink coffee, and, I don't know, figure out how the world works via movies. So, once again, this should be fun. Steve, I ask you, what blend of coffee are we drinking this week?

We're drinking Oregon Dysentery. I mean, Oregon Breakfast. I told you we already did that joke. That wasn't... Yeah, I know.

We just love Jason Terry. You implemented it. You stuck it in my brain. It doesn't take much to jam things in there. It's been a difficult day.

It's a big open space. It's fun. So, with that, we can get into the geek activities. This time around, we have Steve and Dave to do it. So, what have you been doing, either watching or geeking? activities of any sort i saw the.

Greatest 3d movie of all time a herald in kumar christmas oh god it was phenomenal there was actually a giant ring of pot smoke that drifted out into the audience and hovered. Above our heads and it wasn't the primus concert that i was at a But it just drifted up. It was the most gratuitous. Use of 3D technology I have ever seen. And it was wonderful.

It's sad when you can say it's the best use of 3D technology since Jackass 3D. No, no, no. But it sure did it a hell of a lot better than Avatar. Well, that's not saying much. Yeah, I know.

But, okay, they had. I think he was, they had a guy just pointing at the camera and his fingers came out and hovered over the audience. And it was not a $ 5 million flower floating horizontally across the screen. Or, wait, there's Harry Potter where it's only the first eight minutes of the movie that's in 3D. But it's still full price for the 3D glasses.

Look, we can't afford to shoot the whole thing. Come on. What do you think we are? The most. Greatest selling book series of all time.

The most successful run of films ever? What the hell? So, anything other than that? Alright, I guess that's it. Should we move on then?

I was just going to tell you about Harold and Kumar. It was just phenomenal. They shot Santa Claus. Or re-spoiling that. He's a menace.

That bastard. I know. But okay, we'll move on. Unless you have anything else. I really don't have any other geek activities.

I've been locked. In my studio for a week working on non-movie related. Stuff, damn me. That's still geeky though. You're carving away on leather.

That's pretty geeky. Yeah, I've been working on leather for a week and I have a show up the street at Caviar Gallery. And no one listening to the podcast will know what any of that is. And it's over by now, so. No, it's over.

You guys missed it. Well, yeah, probably, because, yeah. You won't. Suckers. Tough luck.

Oh, you missed that show, people listening. It was fantastic. It was. I did a pure carb leather corset. And now, I wonder.

What you think. That's pretty geeky, though, I have to say. It is totally geeky, but I haven't, I've had no other life. What? So, yeah.

We all fall into that category quite often. Sleeping's overrated, I'm telling you. All right, continue. All right, Dave, do you have a more active lifestyle? Being a geek is all I do.

Me too. Professionally, casually too. I've been working on lining up stuff for this year's Wonderfest, which of course I'm not allowed to talk about. It's all secret. It's the first of January.

It's all secret. We're going to be celebrating the summer of 1982. which was like the biggest genre summer ever. Yeah. And I think still is. As far as really cool movies coming out in one summer, you know, Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, E.T., Conan the Barbarian, all those pictures hit in one summer.

And it's been 30 years, which is hard for me to believe. So I'm looking at spotlighting that in this year's show. It should be a lot of fun. Very cool. We're working on guests and working on themes right now.

And as far as movie watching, I mean, I don't get out. I've been spending the last... six years in the child care cave, which I love. You know, it's great being a stay-at-home dad. It just changes things. You know, I watch what my daughter Allie watches, and luckily she has my taste.

Whether she likes it or not. Yeah. She doesn't know what most conventional kids watch, which is great. It's going to suck when school's good. When she was three, you know, we watched Tarantula every morning for breakfast.

Jack Arnold. I love our parenting style on this show. Yeah, Jay takes his kid and watches Mystery Science Theater every week. That's cool. Yeah, we dragged out Destroy All Monsters the other night, which she loves.

She's a big Godzilla fan. Had a ball with that. Can't wait to pick up the new Blu-ray. It's coming out, or it just came out, so it's on my Christmas list. I got the Criterion Island of Lost Souls, which was great to see again.

Haven't seen that since it was on TV, I think, back then. In the early 90s, AMC used to run those Universal and Paramount classics, so that was fun. I had great running commentary. I think Rick Baker and Bob Burns were on there. John Landis.

It was fun to see. The print was pretty good. There are no great prints, but that was pretty cleaned up and nice to see. Most of my movie viewing now is via DVD. I've got Netflix, but I so rarely have time to sit and download or watch something.

It's just one of those things. It's generational. I'm just Just don't think about it. Don't think about being able to watch movies on my computer. It's weird how quickly I've changed.

It's still a novelty to me. I think a lot of it shifted with the show. I think I started watching things differently because most of the time it was, oh, we have to watch this for the show or I need to get a copy of that for the show. So I think that changed my approach. Otherwise, I was pretty– I mean, I didn't have Netflix for years until they started the streaming.

Yeah, when they started the streaming is when I bought in. Yeah. It was because I'd hear about a movie that would bypass this market, or I didn't get out to see it. So I think it was one day I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about Antichrist, Lars von Trier. That's the moment I signed up and downloaded it.

I was horrified watching Antichrist. But there it was. That's cool. It's accessible. It was nice to be able to get a movie that way.

But so much of what I watch is the stuff I grew up with. Yeah. And I'm of that generation where I saw so much on TV, and I'm a genre fan, so I'll watch a lot of old movies and share them with my kid. I think the only newer film I picked up on DVD was Tree of Life, which I do love. I like Tree of Life a lot.

It's kind of controversial. We have someone here that's not a fan, but I'm not. A big fan. You know, a lot of people think it's pretentious. Yeah, I do.

I don't even know how they fit a three-hour-long Discovery Channel special into the first 15 minutes of a movie. Oh, but I cry when I watch the dinosaurs. I do. That's the best part. For me, it's like there are so few filmmakers that make films outside of, I guess what you call the mainstream.

Conventional conventional that i don't mind subsidizing them i used to feel that way about lynch yeah he was one of the only surrealist filmmakers working but now he's gone a little too far in the other direction. Sometimes He's not in his right mind regardless. Yeah. I still respect what he did and what he continues to do to some degree. Well, I thought the.

Parts of the movie were very good. They just didn't fit together for me. It's truly this odd kind of spiritual thing. For me, it worked because of the age I am and the fact that I've got a kid who's six years old. We kind of could share some of those feelings.

I thought the kid stuff was the best stuff. In the movie. It's almost hyper-realistic, the way it captures those little moments of growing up and watching your kids change. It's very good. And I like those kinds of stories.

So it is odd to see it thrown in with, you know, a 2001 Dawn of Man type thing. Was the one thing, was that a cosmic vagina? I couldn't tell. Was it a cosmic vagina? I rented that once.

That was not near as good as I was expecting. Oh, yeah. It was not what I was expecting. Did you have to look at the printed list from the back? There was one of those in Star Trek, the motion picture, if you look closely.

It wasn't near as good as 2069, but. That's like a Doug Trumbull trait because they brought him out of retirement for this, the guy that did the effects for 2001 and Close Encounters and Blade Runner. I mean, he hasn't done much work in years, and Doug Trumbull was brought in as a consultant. So there's a lot of, being an effects geek, there's a lot of what they now want to call organic effects work. Humans did it.

Humans? Chemicals did it. What the hell? It's not pure digital. There's a fair share of digital.

So it was a claymation cosmic vagina. Ooh, I like that. You can see the fingerprints. A pasta vagina. What a wonderful phrase.

It's our motto. What's our motto? I don't know. What's our motto? Sorry.

So I did watch that a couple more times. I just get into that a lot. Everyone's getting into their feminist sitting around naked eating pomegranates moments. Yeah, that's about all I got to. Cool aren't well with that i guess we can take a break and we will come back with this week's movie.

Oh Far from the civil war, humans are marching in, war creatures taking in their days and years. Revenge is close at hand, a backlash over genius, in the jungle of the tribal war. When words collide, we're expanding. Black creature from the black lagoon Black creature from the. Black lagoon Black creature Black.

Creature Black creature With black blood. Golden, pure, creamery butter. Rich, flavorful, satisfying. That's what it takes for the finest buttered popcorn, and that's what we use. See for yourself why there's no showtime treat to equal the crisp, delicious flavor of hot popcorn that's bathed in real melted butter.

It's at the concession stand now. In the near future, in the shadow of Saturn's rings, stranded beneath the surface of the barren moon called Titan. scientists find the one thing they never expected. Is anybody here? Was expecting them. Oh my God!

And suddenly, those who had traveled across the galaxy had run out of space. Creature. We found someone's Collection of life from all over the galaxy, like a child's butterfly collection. Only some of these butterflies are not so friendly. Who wants to keep us here?

What's that? It's opened one of the doors. This thing is using it for food. It's using our own man to kill each other. Now!

Creature. It kills to live. And it lives to kill. Hey, this is. Tom Woodruff Jr.

I'm the man inside the alien suit, and you're listening to Movie Meltdown. I'm going to groove tonight. Just came back in love. Now I'm a growth man too. Mummy and the creature from the black hood.

We need silver foot. We need wooden sticks. Normal stuff won't stop because they live on hate. Speak some magic words from a virgin's lips. Maybe that'll shake.

It's time for Sofa Theater. Up from the depths of the mighty Amazon comes a creature to astound and terrorize the world. No! Creature from the Black Lagoon. Shocking in the realism of the screen's first underwater three-dimension thrill.

Sounds incredible, but it appeared to be human. I tell you, it's the greatest find yet. Nothing compares to it. Grimly, men of daring venture into a dread world underwater, stalking a creature of frightening fury, a creature stirred to strange emotions by its first sight of a woman. You'll see the most amazing underwater photography that the screen has ever known in this strangest of all science fiction adventures.

Creature from the Black Lagoon, starring Richard Carlson and Julia Adams, even more amazing in three dimensions. Well, I'm a teenage zombie, I'm a forever, well, I'm the creature from the Black Lagoon. Well, I'm a big picture movie star, living as long as my head is full of blood and I roll. And when the script is over, the actors. Go, my brain's just fire and brawl.

I'm not a. Fucking I actually have notes on this one. Cool. If you have to leave, we'll just read through your notes. Here's what Steve does.

I have notes. I'm like, who was the kid on Welcome Back, Cotter? I've got a note. Which kid was he? It wasn't Horseshack.

It was Epstein. Epstein. Epstein always had a note for every occasion. Lord. All right.

Welcome back to Movie Meltdown Sofa Theater. This week's Sofa Theater feature is Creature from the Black Lagoon. The year is 1954. Director Jack Arnold. The plot, according to IMDb, a strange prehistoric beast lurks in the depths of the Amazonian jungle.

A group of scientists try to capture the animal and bring it back to civilization for study. That's not too bad, I guess. Spoiler alert. It's what you've had since 1954. For God's sakes, just go watch Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Right. All right. Normally I'd say, where would you like to begin? But this is one of the few monster movies that starts at the beginning of life on the planet. Right, right.

Hell, 2001 doesn't even do that. They at least wait until the dawn of man. No. This is like when, you know, amoebas get together and we kick off this movie. But they fast forward it.

They do very quickly. They really fast forward it. It's like time begins. And people. Next thing you know, we're in the 50s.

I'm assuming it's the 50s. Here's a McDonald's. This is our society now. Well, I loved how when you look back on this, back in 1954, you were having that space race is coming, we've ended the war, everything's going great. For us as the United States, and There was questions about where we were going and who's the bad guy and what's going to happen.

But there was no question about, at least presented in this movie, this happened. We evolved, man evolved, science, it was this exact amount. Now today, you couldn't put that out in a movie and say, this definitively happened. We definitively evolved and we came from the waters. If you said that now, there would be people boycotting your movie.

Probably. It is funny how much they didn't question that in 54. They didn't question it at all. This is progress. What's really curious about that is how conservatism is progressive.

Right. Yeah. Right. What was conservative enough decades ago is not conservative enough now. It's now.

That's like progressive. We also fast-forwarded that. Yeah. We've gotten very conservative slash PC. Right.

I thought, you know, I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. Yeah. Didn't remember a whole lot of it. I thought it was pretty good. I did, too.

I really liked it. It was really pretty good. It's a very solid movie. I fell into that category. I saw it as a kid and... loved the character at the time, but it had been a long time since I've revisited it.

I was really hesitant to participate in this movie review because I had never seen this movie. And if I had, I did not remember seeing this movie. Right. And he first told me. Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I'm thinking, there is no.

Way I'm going to give this an objective look. I'm going to look at it and I'm going to go, oh my God, this is so boring. And that was this morning. So I decided I'm going to watch it on my iPhone this afternoon. Speaking of moving into new formats.

I'm watching this thing on my iPhone and it's like it opens up and you just see this giant explosion and all these things. It was made for 3D. So, you know, it could have been as good as Harold and Kumar's Christmas. Back in the day. I'm sure it was.

I'm sure it was awesome. It was still awesome. I don't think Harold and Kumar is going to be that cool in 66 years. No, probably not. No, probably not.

But this one really withstood the test of time. But I was watching it, and I just kind of got the progression, and I started asking myself, because I do a lot of writing, and I started to ask myself, who's our protagonist here? Who's our main character? So I made a list of all the people who live and die in the movie. And I started to ask myself, what's this movie actually about?

And basically what I got was. Let me read my notes here, because I don't remember. I heard them earlier. I'm going off cuff here. Extemporaneous.

Um.... Anyway, I can't read. What I think this movie was about, and the main character, our protagonist, was David Reed. But who do you think the antagonist was? Who was the villain?

His boss? Yeah, you got it. Exactly. Nice. Yeah.

Yeah. So... Not the monster. The monster was just kind of a back shadow, and I like that. Well, one was the science guy, the other was the money guy.

There's an inherent conflict there, because if science was really driven by money, you wouldn't publish your findings. You would keep your findings to yourself, and that's what the patent office works against. It's trying to bribe people into the scientific models. You have to write out an explanation... of. Whatever you discover, and that becomes a public document, and for that, they grant you a limited-term monopoly.

It's a thoughtful movie. What was that guy's name again, the boss? That was Mark Williams, Dr. Mark Williams. He was the guy who looked kind of like an intense.

Oh, who was. Fraser's brother, David Hyde Pierce. Kind of a David Hyde Pierce quality. A little manlier, but yeah, I'll give you that. A lot manlier.

David Hyde Pierce could be on steroids and not be that. Those guys were like old school in shape. They weren't like the puffy definition. They were like just actually in shape. There was a little beefiness to it, but it wasn't defined because nobody cared about definition.

Now that's all it is. Artificially induced. Yeah, that too. It was real activity. Pumping iron.

There was no machinery involved. Old man strength. You know, an 80-year-old guy who can open the jar and nobody else can. Where does that come from? The Korean War.

Oh, but. But that girl, Kay, man, she was a fucking encyclopedia of 50s ingenue gestures and looks. And I just couldn't quit. And, you know, you watch the creature from the Black Lagoon, and you can't help thinking what it would be like to have sex with that thing. And by that thing, I mean a 50s chick.

Right. A 50s chick. What were those things? And then she had, like, seams over her boobs in the bathing suit. They had those 50s torpedo boobs.

I don't know. What would a woman like that be like in bed? And sometimes I would watch her and I'd. Think, okay, now she's not being a 50s chick. She's just standing there.

Oh, wait, I'm wrong. It was part of a long-term 50s chick gesture. Stare into the distance for about 12 seconds. And then, think, in quotation marks, there's this, like, chick thinking. And it registers.

And then she sort of goes, huh? What was all that stuff? Man, I don't know. I was just fascinated by it. She worked as a plot device just the same as the creature did.

I mean, she was the tension between the two guys, like the physical manifestation of their tension. And. She was what the creature wanted to get off of. You know, monsters and other creatures and species, they like our women. They like our females.

And I've got to, like, grant that to them because we have, like, some hot females that humankind does. I can understand the attraction. You know, there's, like, King Kong. Fay Wray. There was a lot of similarities there, yeah.

Yeah, there were. And actually, I think when they were planning to do a remake, Peter Jackson was like maybe going to. Do it, but he decided no. I think they offered him a feature remake. It probably would have been fantastic.

He probably should have gone there. At one point, John Carpenter was poised to do a remake, and then Eddie Murphy was. Oh, my God. He walked out. Well, they are doing a remake of Preacher from the Black Lagoon.

It's supposed to be released for a while. Guillermo del Toro was up for it. I don't know if that's on his list. He could. Man, and then later in the movie, she gets this Gilligan's Island Mary Ann thing going with her little pants and a tied up...

There ain't nothing wrong with that. You know, she has a very. Or maybe this goes the opposite direction. But she has a very Jennifer Connelly look to her. Yes.

And, I mean, there was a time where I really dug Jennifer Connelly quite a lot. So I didn't mind looking at her. I probably would have acted just like the creature myself. And still might. Here's my question about the creature.

Okay, the first we see is he. Puts his hand up. Right. Like out of the water. Right. what's he doing?

I mean, what is he, is he down there like masturbating? And he's like, I think I'll risk my hand up here. You have to say something about that. Steve was trying to escape and he came back just for that. Because the hand kept, yeah, the hand kept, I think that was a 3D kick.

It was. It was a concession 3D, yeah. But at the same time, it's like, he, it, Was it the exact same clip, just over and over again? Did they just film the one hand? No, because one time the hand appears to have sight, because she's standing there, and the hand comes out and reaches toward her, but as she walks off, it's as if he can see that, and.

Goes, ah, fuck it. Yeah, the monster hand. I was just like, is he trying to sell something? Does the hand want to have a conversation with her ankle? Well, it's like the hand, and in a way the monster is like a reflection.

Of our fear of it. And he seems to kill based on, if you're terrified of me, I'm going to kill you. Because other times he's not really interested in getting out and killing people. But then he gets out and somebody sees him and freaks out and he's like, I'm going to squash your head if you're going. To do that.

I think he kills when he's caught. I think he is. This is the impression I got. Okay, Steve's out of here. He's got to escape.

I think he's the boy that is looking in on her and he's getting off on it. I think he's like a lawyer. And when he's caught, that's when he kills. That overreaction of I'm caught, I've got to do something. So it's sort of the same sort of weird stuff that goes into what would eventually be a slasher-esque kind of movie.

You've got the Peeping Tom kind of idea, which hadn't been invented yet. But you've got this voyeuristic character, and they only kill because they're sort of caught in their weird little... Subversion. Right. I mean, he was essentially spawning with her when he was swimming underneath her.

Yeah, it's like mirror stalking something. And that's a viable psychology because, you know, teenage kids. all you think about all day is sex. And here are all these people in there talking about science and how this could. This would add to our knowledge. And when you're like monstrous, like in.

Puberty, you're like, fuck humanity and knowledge and everything. And all you can think about is like the chick who looks like Marianne from Gilligan's Island. So the science scenes are kind of like school all day long. You're like, okay, I don't want to hear all this. Just get to the hot chick over there.

Yeah. I do like the. We're going to talk about sex. And you do feel kind of like a monster because, you know, all this stuff is going on. Everybody's living their normal lives and you're like, fuck all of this.

And another thing with adolescence, you feel ugly. Yeah, you do. I'm a freak and all I want to do is have sex. When I was a kid growing up watching horror movies, I identified with the monster. I did.

And that's why I wasn't scared of the monster. I think you do with most of them. All the classic... monster movies. Again when he was trying to name like the antagonist or protagonist or what I was just like in most of these movies by the end don't you identify like don't I mean aren't you on Frankenstein side and that you know maybe not as much in like you know the Dracula he's kind of more of a jerk but like The more misunderstood monsters, you know, Frankenstein and the Wolfman, they're almost victims by the end. Always.

And you do feel like that becomes your hero, whether they admit to it or not in the screenwriting. Kind of a classic, you know, anti-hero character. Yeah. And by the end of Creature. The thing that ruins, like, the Dracula vampire, I mean, that's sexual.

I mean, clearly. Definitely. It's sexual, but. He's just so suave and stuff, and you can't identify with that because you're not suave and stuff. He's kind of not a monster, is the thing.

He's not a mess. He's the guy you hate. He's like the guy you want to kill. You want to drive a stake through that guy's heart. Like in the movie, he's stealing your girlfriend.

Exactly. You don't trust that guy. So. I know, as we mentioned earlier, you've dealt with Wonderfest for years, Dave, so you've actually come in contact with a lot of the people. I remember I've seen half the people in the cast because they were at Wonderfest.

Yeah, we had them back in 2004 for the 50th anniversary. We had Julie. I do remember seeing Julie. She was great. Yeah, she's still there.

And Ben Chapman, the late Ben Chapman, who played the creature in most of the land scenes, in most of the major acting scenes. And Riku Browning, who did all the swimming. And it was kind of rare to get Riku out for a show, but he started doing more shows right around that time. And that's probably one of the last times they were all together. Ben Chapman passed away in 2008.

And Ben was just a really fun, fun character. I got to know him pretty well over the years, going to different shows. I'm kind of the opposite of a lot of the guys here in that I watch Creature all the time. It's one of those things where. We sat around talking about titles.

This is close to Thanksgiving, and I thought about comfort food, and there's such a thing as a comfort movie. Yeah, there it is. For me, Creature's a comfort movie. It's a movie I grew up with. It's a movie I still enjoy.

It's a movie I really don't get tired of watching. And I have a six-year-old, and she's always gravitated towards that film. She loves it. And I first saw it, I think, when I was around 11. We were on family vacation coming back from Florida and stopped off, and there was a late-night horror show, and Creature was on.

My dad was excited because he liked that movie, too, so we had that to share. And just being a monster nut, you know, the Creature is probably still the best man-in-a-suit design I have ever seen. Yeah. Even modern films. It still looks so good.

It's brilliant. It's a brilliant monster, and it's kind of the last great universal monster from that studio. Yeah. There's this big jump from the 40s into the 50s, and the creature's the last one in that whole little group. And it's timeless.

I don't think they can improve upon it. They've tried. You know, in a couple films like Monster Squad, they had a pretty cool new-looking creature, Steve Wang. Different shape, yeah. But that design is just magnificent.

And somehow the actor manages to kind of emote through all the rubber. You can still... catch a little bit of nuance in that film. Yeah, it definitely has issues with the eyes in this first one, but the suit itself, like the body looks so, like I was watching it in those final scenes in the cave, and I'm just like, it looks so good. It does. It's just so well put together.

The creature was designed by a woman, Millicent Patrick, whose name you do not ever hear much until recently. Because it was 1954, and God forbid you acknowledge a woman did anything. She was this gorgeous girl who worked in the art department at Universal, and then she designed the creature. And Bud Westmore, who was the head of the makeup department, got all the credit, but usually he didn't do much of the work. So between her and a guy named Chris Mueller, they built the creature scene.

It's funny, in the movie, don't they say the guy Ben, his career has benefited from her work? You're right. At some point. That's a little bit of a reflection of what was really going on in the studio. Because Universal kind of did a little press junket with her because she was so attractive.

Yeah. And she was so talented. And, you know, they kind of had her in magazines and had kind of a Beauty and the Beast theme going on. Bud Westmore got pissed. He was just like, no, no, no, no, I'm ahead of the band.

And he basically ruined her future career. Oh. So you kind of see that reflected in the script. I don't know if it was ever intentional, but anybody that knew Bud Westmore knew that's how he operated. He would invite the press in and send all the workers out to lunch, and then he would grab a sculpting tool and stand next to the sculptor so he could be photographed.

Nice. So this head, there's a classic picture of him with his casting, standing there with a sculpting tool, and he never touched it. It's just one of his workers designed it. Do you want to discuss the sculpture now? Oh, yeah.

Well, I brought a casting of a... This is... Ben Chapman's head, called the land creature. This is a rubber and polythene casting out of the original model. And these float around.

A lot of people have them. But it's much bigger than the one that was designed for Raku. He was a much smaller guy doing all the swimming. So they had to do a complete different sculpt for Raku to get it to fit. And then he also was wearing little goggles in there.

That's why they have these eyes in here so they kind of match. But it's a great sculpt. It's a great design. It was made out of foam latex, which got really heavy when it got soaked with water. And they basically had to tear it off the actor every day and just put a new one on him, which was a big mess.

That seems pricey. Yeah, it was. It was very expensive. And they'd just take it off in big chunks, except for a lot of the land scenes that Ben would do. But for years, Riku Browning was the only guy who got any press because he did all the swimming in the movies. a pretty talented guy, and Ben just wasn't very well known, at least to me growing up.

Later on, he's the guy who said, well, my career's kind of limited. I'm going to go ahead and capitalize on being the creature. And back in the 80s and 90s, he started coming out and doing shows, and Ben became kind of the public face of this monster. He's a really fun guy. I always enjoyed hanging out with Ben.

So yeah, for you listening, Dave is holding a... bust i suppose of of the creature himself. It's the whole the head with the part of the chest. It's yeah a sculpture taken from the original mold you say so i'm going to again uh being you know the audio medium we are i'm going to uh take some pictures and again we've been trying to get people to come on board for the you know the higher echelons of the secret circle here so i'm going to post them for people that are that are kind of helping us spread the word about the show i'm going to Send it to those guys and give them some of the visuals we've got here. But anybody else who wants to, hey, join up and you can get your cool photos of the creature we have here.

So, yeah, it's very cool that you brought it with you. How did you come about that one? A friend of mine in the effects business. There used to be kind of a little sort of gray market of castings that would move around Hollywood. Because people thought all this stuff was long gone, but a lot of these molds are still sitting around in studios.

This mold was still sitting around Universal, so a lot of guys back during the big boom of makeup effects in the 80s, they would pull castings, and they'd call it a toughy hat like this where it's latex with foam, and then you could pull another mold off and then make some more castings. I think this one's actually out of the original mold. See, again, this is kind of what I like, and like we were saying last week, this stuff could very well be lost to the ages were it not some geek. went, that's cool, I want that. The studios didn't care about this stuff for the most part. That's why Bob Burns has always been a perennial guest of Wonderfest.

He's a collector. A great deal of this stuff was just handed to him. He owns the original King Kong armature. It was just considered a tool at the time. It was a tool for anime.

A couple were built, and this one sat in the warehouse for decades and finally ended up with Bob. He's been offered about a million for it. Not taken it yet. Nice. Peter Jackson is deeply, deeply lusting after it.

But, yeah, so it's great that these things have survived, the suits have survived. It's been a staple of genre shows for years now, to have this stuff kind of make the rounds and go on display. When we had Ben and Julie and Riku, we did a 3D screening over at the Baxter. It was great to have it in 3D, because it is a good 3D film. Even though now it's shown in anaglyph 3D with... the blue and red lens.

That's not how it was originally projected. It was originally projected with the dual picture system where you used a polarized pair of glasses, and it was much better back then, but that's so rare. They screened it in L.A. and a couple of other places, but it still looks good in anaglyph. Well, speaking of which, I don't have anything as cool as the latex bust here, but I did dig out my original 3D glasses that I got from the Quickie March, wherever the hell they were selling these at the time. And you'll remember our local little independent station here, they decided to start playing them and promoted it pretty heavily for a while there and was selling these 3D glasses and Yeah, they're so ancient.

I mean, they're all wrinkled up and falling apart. Yeah, they ran Creature, and I think they ran Revenge of Creature, also in 3D, and they ran Guerrilla at Large. Yeah, I remember watching that one. And maybe it came from outer space, which is another really good universe in 3D. But yeah, these are beat to hell, because that's how long I've had them.

And still, again, geek that I am, hung on to them over the years, because that's, again, it was such a cool memory. And watching it even... on TV with the wrong kind of glasses. I mean, it still worked and it was still so much fun having that again, that experience of, of sitting there watching this creature reaching out to the TV and, uh, all their cheesy effects that they do for 3D still kind of work. They're cheesy for a reason, because they're fun. They're not so gratuitous in this film.

There's just some effective stuff. I was thinking that it's pretty reserved for something that was meant to be in 3D. They have a spear gun, and naturally it's going to shoot, and that's great. It's shooting at the creature, it reaches out several times. The underwater stuff looks great.

Yeah, the water shots. Very deep vision stuff. They spent a lot of time on those scenes. They did. Film time for an hour and 20 minute film.

It was fairly novel at that time to have underwater photography like that. It was really good. It looks good. Yeah, it's amazing. There wouldn't have been in South America... in the middle of an Amazon river.

There wouldn't have been a lagoon that deep. But, you know, it worked for the movie. What the hell are you saying? I'm not buying it. Movies are always right.

The lagoon was, I think, at Clearwater Springs, Florida. Okay. And then on the Universal backlot, it's still there. There's sort of a little river there. And then they shot, I think, a lot, maybe in the Everglades area, for the projection plates in the background.

At one point, I think Tom Weaver points it out here, If you look closely at one of those pan shots on the boat, you'll see a telephone pole. It's just kind of like in the middle of the Amazon. It goes by pretty unnoticed. Exactly as I found it. It's amazing.

It's incredible. Could it possibly belong to a Pleistocene man? The chances are much greater that that hand belonged to an amphibian, Mark. One that spent a great deal of time in the water. Well, then how do you account for the structure of the fingers?

Obviously for land use. What do you think, Dr. Mattos? We can be sure of one thing. Whatever it was, it was very powerful.

You say you have hopes of finding the rest of the fossil? As soon as I get a suitable expedition together. Well, why don't we make up the expedition? We're here now, and after all, it does come under the heading of our work, doesn't. It, David?

It certainly does. More and more, we're learning the meaning and the value of marine research. Well, I thought from the underwater stuff, I think what was so amazing is how attention to detail he was that he didn't want air bubbles coming up from him because he's got gills. Yeah. So he had him actually hold his breath through.

All of that. He was an experienced deep diver. He actually worked down there at Clearwater to train people for deep swimming. So he would hold his breath most of the time, or they'd have a scuba diver on the side with a hose. Whenever he felt he was running out, he'd go over and just get a gas bearer.

But you really don't see. No tanks in the suit or anything like that. It's him doing free swimming all the time. And there's a lot of, you know, it gets very physical when those guys are fighting underwater. I mean, that's some real tumbling going on in anybody without air.

That's pretty amazing. You know, I actually had that thought watching it this time, love. How did they, you know, because it looks fairly fluid. I know they cut back and forth a few times in there, but it looks almost like the same fight scene. Yeah.

And I was like, how is he getting air and still being underwater that long? He's a very fit guy. I think based on that, he got a lot of jobs. He ended up actually directing almost all the underwater stuff for Thunderball. Nice.

So he made a career. He worked on, I think, some TV shows in the 50s and things like that. Did pretty well. But it is a difference that I don't know if they just didn't care as much as time went on because by the sequels, I mean, they just put a tank in it. You can see air coming out of the creature.

Like all sequels. Yeah, a little lesser. Growing up, that's why I didn't see Creature until I was 11, and that's kind of odd because I grew up with Fright Night and all these other horror shows. But the Channel 3 movies, the 4 o'clock movie, would always run Revenge of Creature for some reason. It would always be the sequel. and the suit looks different.

It's a fun movie, but it's not nearly as good a picture. It just seemed to be the one they chose to run, I guess because it was shorter. It was important to get a 90-minute time slot at 4 o'clock in the afternoon back then. The less they could cut, the better. That's why that got run.

Well, I was going to go into the director, and it was funny because as I read through it, I was like, the name clicked, and I assumed it was probably from other movies, and granted, he's done some really important movies and genre movies back in the day. But then I got the other one on his list and went, oh, no wonder. Directed 26 episodes of Gilligan's Island. I saw that name as often as Sherwood Schwartz. So now it makes sense how much she.

Looked like Mary Ann. Right. And there was a lagoon, too. There was a lagoon. He really did have kind of that attachment to that kind of stuff.

Arnold was a great sort of workman-like director, but he was solid. Yeah. It turned out a good movie. I think the weirdest movie he did was High School Confidential. I saw that on the list.

It's a great, weird movie. That's another one that's, yeah. That's about as far out as he got. Incredible Shrinky Man and Tarantula. Tarantula.

Classics. A lot of the 50s classics are all Jack Arnold. Yeah. It's just a guy that you look at church and you get it done. Incredible shrinking.

Yeah. This, you know, this one to me watching it this time, and I'd have to go back and watch more universal. I mean, I think I've probably seen, I don't know about most. I don't have a list in my head of what level of all of them or anything, but to me, this almost epitomizes what one would be, you know, um, You know, you've got the whole society science talk. You've got the misunderstood creature.

You've got different people exploiting or using that creature in different ways. The visuals were fantastic. And to me, also, the... Well, and I was joking about it earlier. The music of it is almost like the brass notes.

Every time you see it or hear it, anything happens. That's so ingrained in, you know, when people, you know, Scooby-Doo or just whatever. In pop culture in general now. In pop culture, yeah. And I know there were movies before it and movies after that had it, but it contains every element of those.

Yeah. Of those films and. And then you add in the layer of, you had to shoot so much of this underwater, and you had, you know... And I think it might be the one that maybe I always passed off as, like, the Aquaman of the monsters. Like, oh, yeah, and then there's that one.

But when you watch it, you're like, wow, this is, you know... It's got substance to it. It's got... Technically, it's pretty well polished. I think I was, you know, had that thought of, yeah, I've seen it, and yeah, you know...

I probably had more in the back of my mind of, like you said, of the revenge, um, or is it return or revenge? You know, it's just a monster on the loose kind of thing. Right. And so it was definitely not, this definitely is, is, is on a higher level, I think, than, than I had remembered. I'd misremembered, I suppose.

And it, it, It really is, it has almost every element of, and done well, of the universal monster movies. And maybe it's because it came at the end of their run, because they'd had 20 years of doing this, and they sort of, on the one hand they knew the formula to put in, but at the same time they also had worked up to that technical expertise that maybe they didn't have in the 30s that, it sort of gives you, plus they're kind of working in, you hit that 50s science element that became way more important in all the sci-fi movies. So it could be like all of that sort of convening in one specific area there when these movies started coming out. Yeah, I think a lot of horror fans, classic horror fans, don't really pay enough attention to the movie because it is really finely polished.

I mean, Dracula's a classic, Frankenstein's a classic, The Mummy, which is basically Dracula all over again, The Wolfman, and then after that, Universal got into kind of a B-movie cycle, which I still enjoy those movies, like the Monster Rally pictures where they throw all of them together. But they're definitely B-level. Yeah. But just, you know, the meshing of the techniques and budgets and the soundtrack for the. Yeah.

The action on the screen is represented by the music as well. That didn't go on a lot in the 30s. You watched Dracula, and you got Swan Lake playing occasionally in the background. Or so many old movies, it's just dead silence. In Frankenstein, there is no music.

King Kong was the one that kind of revolutionized everything. It revolutionized a lot of things, but King Kong, with Steiner's score, is the one that almost every movement, there's a musical movement that goes with it. That was really unheard of for the most part. Creature theme kind of brings that all back. And you've got those stingers where they come in with that music, and it's just great stuff.

It's very dramatic. It was used in a lot of other Universal pictures. You hear that music pop up in other films, but that's what it was done for. So it's funny now, watching it, how much it almost seems like a cliché move, but to think in 54, yeah, nobody had really kind of. It's one of those kind of progenitor movies where everything that came after borrowed a little from it.

Yeah. Yeah, the thing that strikes me, even just when we talk about the musical, the swimming or whatever, and they'll do the oboe runs that you can hear. I don't know if it's oboe, it's a reed, like a clarinet or an oboe or something like that, and you can hear that fluid runs. And it's in a lot of movies. I don't know if it was the originator of it, but it's used a lot in Creature.

Yeah, I think most of the score was composed... especially for Creature, but then Universal kept using it. Mancini did some of that. Hans Salter, and there was a third musician, but I know Mancini did some of the quieter pieces, and it's really effective stuff. And they had the synthesizer creep in, or the theremin creep in occasionally. Yeah, nice.

I mean, you definitely get a little more, I mean, it's got a little more to offer, just artistically. I mean, looking at that mirror swimming scene, I mean, that shots kind of amazing. And the fact that they got it and thought ahead of time that that's, you know, that they really did think out, that's exactly what I want and think how much trouble it was to get that shot. But the fact that they wanted it, same thing with the, uh, the shot from inside the fish tank was like amazing. Like that's, that's so much extra work than just starting the scene right there next to her.

But it's so, I mean, it's just so much more artistic and then you would give credit to, you know, a B-horror movie, you know, I think it was way more impressive visually than you would expect going into a movie like this. There's one moment, oh, who was the boyfriend? David? Richard Carlson. Richard Carlson, yeah.

The good scientist. Right, the good scientist. David. David, yeah. He, when he's about to.

David Reed? Yeah, I think so. He's about to go dive back down, and I don't remember, he gives her a hug or something, but then That's right before he gives her the hug. And you know he wants to say something to her. You know he is saying something to her like, this might be the last time I see you or I love you or something.

But it was a badass Han Solo move where he just looks at her and. Then turns away. He doesn't say anything, you know, but it's a nice little pause and you're like, He didn't need to say anything else. I was like, that was pretty tough. Most men or most guys would say something or be awkward or whatever, but it was pretty smooth that he just paused and then moved on.

Carl Stoll was a good actor. He's also in a lot of other 50s films. He's always really solid. He was a very smart guy. He was good at getting those little things across that weren't in the dialogue.

I just watched him in an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea last night. He was a bad guy, and he was a good bad guy, too. He had a lot of range, but I liked him a lot. Actually, when I met Ben, it was kind of a weird moment because you grow up with these characters, and all the other classic Universal monsters slash actors were gone. Yeah, yeah.

And Ben was still around, so it was kind of a neat moment to meet this kind of guy who played an icon, even though he kind of was like, oh, it's my job. It was just kind of special. And finally, he was really kind of a really down-to-earth kind of guy. It would have been nice to have met Karloff or people like that, but long gone. It is, yeah.

It was interesting to see those people at the show. I was kind of glad I did because, yeah, that's the last of that era. That's it. That's where it cuts off. But I know Boris's daughter, Sarah, and people like that, and Bella's son, but That's not the thing.

That's not the thing. I've never quite understood the fascination people have with that. I mean, it's cool. It's a physical connection, literally. It'd be nice to have them, like, come and speak, maybe, but when people, like, want their autograph, and I'm just like, she just was a kid.

Generally, the fans know more than they do. Yeah. It was just their dad's job. Yeah, talking to your dad. They'll smile and nod and.

Go, well, really, because they don't know as much as you do a lot of the time. Nice. But they're kind of a connection, and they're mostly really nice folks. Yeah. It's good to see them, but.

But it's cool to have the real, you know, the last of that era that showed up. Yeah, that was cool. Yeah, I met Ben at a previous show, and Ben's like this great, just laid-back, kind of doper surfer guy, you know, lived in Hawaii most of his life. Other guys knew him really well, and he was coming up to visit us in our room, and there was a running bet going about what would be his first word. Was it going to be fuck, shit, or piss?

Shit. And I don't know if it was the setup or not, but we heard him coming down the hall, and everybody got really quiet, and the door opened, and he just said, he said, oh, fuck, shit, man, I got to piss. That was the first sentence that came out of his mouth. We all just broke up. He was just this really down-to-earth guy.

Hilarious man. That's always cool. I mean, that's sort of what I've taken from interacting with these people is how much you kind of do get a sense of who they are in the real world. cause it is just a job. And I kind of like talking to the real person as much as they have to create this persona. It's kind of cool when you actually get to meet them and you get a little more of that.

You get a little more of who they really are. Especially good at that. Yeah. Just connect with people on a very basic level. Real nice guy and a strong guy too.

I mean, big man had to pull off a lot of physical action in that picture, which was kind of difficult. And Julie seems really down to earth. Yeah. What? Yeah.

Really sweet lady. Yeah. Um, Always pleased to have someone bring up something besides creature. Which most people that are known for. The End of the River or something, it's another film she was in.

She was always delighted to hear people talk about the dramatics of her career. But yeah, really, really sweet, really nicely. Seems very cool. Well, I've always had an attachment to this movie, and I said I'd seen it as a kid. It also falls into another very specific category that we probably all had as kids.

It was one of the handful of costumes that I was for Halloween. I had the Ben Cooper mask, and not even to go with the cheap vinyl suit. My mom actually made an entire green suit, had a hooded piece to cover up your head, just kind of cut off with the mask, had gloves that went with it. She actually went all out. I'll give her credit.

She did that, and she did an awesome Dracula cadence. Over the years. So, yeah. I've just, I don't know. There's always been this weird connect with him because of that.

Because, you know, you only get, like, you know, 12 costumes as a kid that you either remember or that it becomes sad that you're still dressing up. So you've got a very short window of, like, cool costumes that you get. And it's funny that, you know, I look back and most of them were, you know, like, universal monster creatures. I was. Yeah, I had the wolf man.

Yeah, I was a wolf man. With the fuzzy flocked hair. I've still got that mask on. I was a wolf man. I was Barnabas Collins.

I was Dracula. So, yeah. Creature, I never got that ambitious. I used to look at the back of famous monsters and lust at the latex non-post mask. Oh, yeah.

Forty bucks. She might as well have been, you know, a thousand dollars. For kids. Always wanted that. You know, my mother made.

She's pretty good at sewing, and she made a Batman cape with, you know, bat emblems on the corners. Nice. And an actual mask, you know, with the pointy ears and Adam West-looking Batman. Which would be fitting at the time. Right.

And I. Adored that costume. I mean, and to me, still, there is no better superhero than Batman. Yeah. You know, it's funny how your mother, something like that, And it's almost like they.

Key into where you are. Anyway, yeah. I had a Batman costume in, I think, 67 or 68. I was like four. That my mom made.

And then I had that utility belt that Ideal made, which is now worth like $ 16, 000. That you wore every day. Of the week. I wore it to school. I wish I still had that.

It's just awesome stuff. It is funny how much you, as a kid, attach yourself to that handful of characters that you got to. It was such a big deal to what you were going to be for Halloween that it's funny that it still sort of is attached to you, geeks that we are. I remember the smell of each latex mask. I could only get those when we went out of town because Bowling Green didn't have novelty.

There was probably a few times we were in Louisville that I wound up getting you know, I had a thin latex Frankenstein that I had to be careful with or it would tear. But it was a pretty good mask. And I had a wolfman that was like a heavy, it was almost like a helmet. But, yeah, I didn't have the creature. I saw it sometimes.

I remember that. And it was back. When women used to wear wigs, and my mother not so much because all of them had holes I had cut into them trying to make a good werewolf mask. And I always thought, you know, I could sort of like live in this... between two worlds where she wouldn't notice, maybe. I could cut out the eyes.

If I put it right at the top, she'll never see. If I put it at the top, I could get the eyes in there, and maybe I could sort of style it back later. Nice. Yeah, my grandma's wigs kind of suffered that same fate at times. She always wore wigs.

When I had that flock mask, we cut the rest of that and had a full head of hair on the back to make it a little better, but I used to cut hers up. That's the difference between, you know, these kind of monsters we grew up with is that we all connected with them. Yeah, yeah. We kind of wanted to be them. That's the whole identification aspect.

For me, that's gone with modern horror. I don't see too many people... I've lost interest. In horror after a while when I grew up. It all became human beings, you know, running around with knives and chainsaws.

And we have to backstory the hell out of them in the newer movies, so now we understand why they're so troubled. That's why I hated the remake of Halloween. I don't want to sympathize with Michael Myers. Well, it's more important when he's just evil. All I had to realize, I had to understand about his terrible childhood.

That's the opposite of his history. That's what was so awesome about him. It really was that boogeyman aspect. You didn't know where he came from. You didn't know why he was killing people.

He just was. He was evil. Unstoppable. It went from the blonde guy in Fargo who's just evil. And he's slow moving, but he always catches up with people.

Then the monsters became the funny looking guy. And you can just see he's just got issues. He's got problems. He gets in arguments with parking lot attendants. It becomes so small.

You just have to stab people. I'm so angry. You should see the other guy. The kid that's scared in bed of the boogeyman coming to get them. doesn't give a damn about the boogeyman's background, why. They're doing it.

They don't care. They just know they're going to come and get them. And that's why it works so much better. The creature, that's the way the creature works. I mean, you can't really understand what he wants.

You start to, but then it seems like he doesn't know what he wants. I think he's a teenage creature. At the same time, he doesn't know what he wants. You start to identify with him too, though. So I think it's like both.

It's like you don't understand his motives, but at the same time, you felt like that. Yeah. I do like the teenager-like analogy we've got, that it really does sort of seem a little more fitting than when you stop and think about it. The awkwardness, the lustfulness. As far as you can tell in the film, he's the only one of his kind.

And suddenly these other creatures are introduced into his world, and there's nothing but lust and horror going on. And he suffers for it, constantly. And that's another really cool thing about the script, is David Reed understands that at the end. Other monster movies, well, they just blow him up or they just kill him. He just holds the guy back.

That's enough. Just let him go. We've done enough to him. He knows the damage they've done. Which is, again, kind of different.

You don't see that. You don't see that. Because normally it's the monster attacking. Much like we said on the sequel, it's a monster attacks the town or a monster. We invade his space.

We attack him in his habitat and then wonder why he's, you know, getting upset coming after our women, you know. It's because they're hot. Well, they are. Julie's definitely hot. It was our fault for taking a woman.

Yeah, well, I do worry about taking a woman. Although, if they are none of his kind, he may have just found one of the men to be attractive. Either way, you need somebody to hook up with. Damn. Look.

Look over here. This lungfish. The bridge between fish and the land animal. How many thousands of ways nature tried to get life out of the sea and onto the land. This one failed.

He hasn't changed in millions of years. But here, here we have a clue to an answer. Someday, spaceships will be traveling from Earth to other planets. How are human beings going to survive on those planets? The atmosphere will be different.

The pressures will be different. By studying these and other species, We add to our knowledge of how life evolved, how it adapted itself to this world. With that knowledge, perhaps we can teach men to adapt themselves to some new world of the future. So Dave has brought a few other items. Would you like to mention what we've got here?

Yeah, that's a Marx plastic creature figure, which is probably the oldest possession I have. Wow. This was created in 1963, just like me. And it's a really cool little representation of the creature. Mark's Plastics used to do these little figures.

They had soldiers, and they had astronauts, and they had Disney characters. They did a series of monsters. And this, I think, is the best. It looks a lot like it. It's massively detailed.

And it's far more detailed than that Aurora model kit that they did around the same time. I had these memories. I mean, I had this toy when I was probably two or three, and I was scared of it. It was down at my grandparents'. I don't know.

They bought it at a Ben Franklin store or something. And I remember having this memory of a toy that I was kind of spooked by as a kid. And I remember the color. It's this sort of odd, sort of turquoise blue. And I retained these memories.

It went away. And I retained these memories for years and years. And when I was a teenager, I was down visiting my grandparents and just decided I'm going to go up in the garage attic and look around because I said some of my old toys were up there. And I found them. And I was like, wow, this is evidence of my past.

And it was the same color. And did it click at that point? Oh, yeah. I mean, I remembered him vaguely, but at the time, this was before the Internet or anything, you didn't know about the history of toys or these other things that I'm into now. He said, well, I think they used to make these monster toys, but I don't really know if it was a dream or if it was real.

That's kind of why he means a lot to me. It's like this literally is one of the oldest things I have in my life. It is awesome. It is the creature. Like I said, it's a monster I've always been obsessed with.

It's a cool piece. They've done lots of figures, lots of models, toys over the years. It's kind of a perennial favorite, but I think they're doing a really cool new styrene kit that's going to be out at Wonderfest this year. It's the creature holding jewelry. It's cool because it's an old-fashioned model kit where you glue it together in styrene plastic.

Wait a minute. You've got to do stuff? This is a new one. That's one of the things. Remember that the pieces would come in those elaborate.

Sprue things and you'd take them off. The Universal, there's a whole series of monsters. They've been re-released over the years, but they're starting to do new ones. And for years, Wonderfest, that's kind of what we're founded on is the resin kit business, but it was all these expensive resin kits. Very pricey, basically art pieces.

But suddenly there's been this surge. I don't know if it's nostalgia or if it's production. They're able to do it now. and bringing back styrene kits. So there's a new creature kit coming out. There's a gorgeous Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein kit coming out.

There's a great Lugosi Dracula kit already out. So there's this resurgence of fairly affordable plastic monster models, which we haven't had in years. But this guy's been recast over the years. They just call him Dark Merge and others, but that's one of the original Mark's pieces. I love how he's in chains.

Yeah, I think that's from like Revenge. Yeah. Because that's when he's in the bottom of the tank in Revenge. And I think the face looks a little more like the Revenge face, but it's a really nice sculpt. It's very cool.

Did you have other ones you wanted to bring out? Let's see. Back in the early 90s when the whole Halloween market began to take off again. They had these. Motionettes figures.

I wish I had some batteries because he makes a really ridiculous noise. Whoa, take a turn. Nice. It's kind of fun. His head turns and his arms go up and down.

They're called an emotionette figure. I guess these are worth a little bit of money now. Walmart actually produced those. Strictly for Walmart. You'd see those everywhere in windows again.

Halloween was kind of lost for a couple of decades, I think. There wasn't a whole lot of Halloween celebrating In the early 90s, it all seemed to blossom again. You've got Halloween superstores. Kicked it back in. I think it just took nostalgia.

I think that's what it was. It was that Generation X kind of thing kicked in and it became cool again. I think that's when everybody sort of latched on to it. One guy, one Halloween with the whole razor blade thing. That all went back to just one dude.

That's an urban legend. I've looked into it. It's like they're really never happy. Yeah, but there was somebody who started like a. Rumor, and it freaked everybody out.

This was like in the 70s, and it's like suddenly, I don't even know if we're going to have trick-or-treating this year. It was all because of that whole Razor and the Apple story, which to my knowledge never really happened. It was that damn candy man. You know, I think, I've talked about this, I don't know if it was on here or with you, Brian, before, but I swear those rumors were, because when I was little, it was just transitioning out of that. You'd go and somebody would have cookies or candied apples or homemade good stuff or caramel corn or whatever.

And then all those rumors came out, and then, nope, you have to have store-bought packaged candy. I swear that was done by the candy manufacturers. Because the only people you can trust are corporations. Making sugar-filled candy. So you're gone from eating something that was homemade, took some time.

Well, you can't trust those people. You can't trust the people that make stuff for you. You can't trust your neighbors that make homemade cookies. Right. Well, if you can't trust them, then don't send your kids out.

Yeah. If that's what it comes down to. It's interesting. I really think it has to have been a conspiracy. Because I, you know, I...

It's fun with conspiracy theories, but I wouldn't put it past it. I mean, I'm sure we as a country and as the corporations within this country have done way more evil things than that as time's gone on. Well, you know, the whole food pyramid thing that I was taught in school, it was just advertising. It was incoherent. I remember in health class trying to get this down and coming to the realization that It is impossible to put together a single meal that does everything you're supposed to do without mostly overeating.

And it was because it was an incoherent conglomeration of... advertising, thinly disguised advertising from the Beef Association and the dairy, and it just made no real sense. But you were supposed to just go, oh, and then move on and not really. But, yeah, and then when I was reading, like, books to my kids, I was reading, like, the Ramona books, the Beverly Cleary books from the 50s, and Henry Huggins couldn't have white bread at school. It's like, nutrition information was not something. We didn't know.

They knew it. And they forgot it over time because there are people interested. But I still to this day do not understand when they talk about the school lunches and just like a few weeks ago they decided that pizza was a vegetable. I don't know if you've heard about that. That's my kind of vegetable.

I still don't understand why it's more profitable now. To have unhealthy food. Can't they figure out a way to make a profit off of good food? The unhealthy food is the stuff that they can manipulate. I guess.

And they subsidize that because those monies give money to the government. It's all money. Yeah. Well, I understand that it's money. I just don't understand why it's necessarily more profitable.

But... Well, the kids will also eat it. Yeah, that's the thing. They'll eat the junk, and then it'll. Be gone, and they'll have to buy more.

Because the good food is made by hippies, and hippies don't understand the capitalism involved to make that kind of food accessible and make kids want it. It's an evil, greed-fueled thing that hippies don't understand. And I'm sure all of this is contained in the movie The Creature. Yes, of course. Let's look at it.

Sure. Corporate exploitation. It is kind of contained in there, because the guy says, well, that's a nice speech about knowledge and humanity, but. But really, we just like hot girls. Having an institute is very expensive, and we have to.

That is what he says. It's a little too close to home sometimes. It's like, how can we exploit this? So. I don't know.

I guess my final question was going to be, as you've said, the creature is still one of the most beloved characters. What do you think it is that's sort of given him the staying power over the years? Some of the others, like Frankenstein has still got that power, but a lot of the other lesser creatures, you're lucky if normal people could ID them. So what do you think it is about the creature that's been so appealing? I think it's that he's not human. in a way, and yet he's more human.

Yeah. Because all the other classic universal monsters are humans, or once were humans. Or reconstituted humans. Dracula was vampirized, and the Wolfman is a man who transforms, and he's in a way kind of the closest figure. The mummy is a reanimated human.

Frankenstein is made from dead humans. Recycled humans. So the creature was the one that came along that Evolved on his own. It's almost like the old thing in the swamp thing, comic books. He's less than human but more than man.

Because you can empathize. People naturally empathize with animals almost more than people. You can't stand to watch an animal being murdered or tortured, but you can watch a guy getting executed if he deserves it. That's my thinking. So for me it's always been that.

He's different, but he's It's the same. It is interesting that they sort of play with that almost missing link element. Instead of us trying to figure out what became monkey into human, now it's like we go all the way back to crawling out of the sea and how that leads to humanity. It's sort of this middle ground where he is. It's almost like this divergent evolution.

Everything was moving towards the human form, but he went off in this direction. Well, you know, and the other ones are all supernatural. You know, you've created a human out of, you know, a human has become more than human, whatever. Yeah. Whereas this is completely natural that there are things that we don't understand about our own world that are perfectly normal.

They don't take some kind of bite from some mythical creature. They don't take some kind of, manipulation of science to create a human being it is there it was there it's down below and we're scared of it yeah and we don't know what it is and it's not us and they. Do bother to point all that out with the whole lungfish speech and they're just like this is this could happen i mean we we went how long and didn't know this thing existed so maybe there's other stuff which is still true i mean we're still stumbling upon weird versions of It's usually not giant creatures, but even if it's just plant life or weird little microscopic life, it's like we're still kind of figuring stuff out on this planet.

Except there's still stuff left in the world to be found. That's a mystery. There's the woman who works with apes now. She's convinced that Bigfoot is real. Oh, James Goodall.

Yeah. She's just convinced. She's heard too many versions of it, too many descriptions. There's No reason not for it to have existed. Well, when people first found apes, you know, people who hadn't seen them yet, oh, come on.

Oh, the gorilla was a mythical creature for years. Yeah. I mean, I could go on about Bigfoot, that's a whole other show. We'll do a different show on that. But I was going to point that out.

It is sort of the first cryptid movie where it's this unknown creature. Yeah. It's there, and it exists in nature. It inspired, I think, Nigel Neal, who's a great writer, did a lot of the Hammer films. He did the, I think in 57, he did Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, and so brilliant movie with kind of a silly title.

And it's the closest movie to this. Yeah, because it's a natural creature. Yeah, it's about people invading its territory, although they find out that in many ways it is superior. And it's just kind of biding its time. We're going to wipe ourselves out, and then it'll come down.

And I think Carpenter actually hired Nigel Neal to write the screenplay for his version, which is an interesting script. So there's that idea that it's kind of based on things people really experience. Mm-hmm. So maybe that is why he's still got that appeal, and maybe it's the mystery element to him that has killed him. Well, sure, one of my closest friends is a Bigfoot and doesn't mind being called Bigfoot.

She knows her feet are big. Would you please take a cast out of her feet? She figures her mystery is like the main thing she has going for her. She says, well, I'm not really very attractive, although. You know, she kind of, I like her look.

Hey, there's a fetish for everything, believe me. That's what the Internet's for. Yeah, so she figures, you know, if she went out and, like, hung out with people, you know, eventually they'd just get tired of her and she'd have no aura. She'd have no mystery. She'd just be like, you know, oh, there.

So that's, you know, we're always trying to come out, have a beer. She's, no, no, and she'll just disappear. Working what she's got. Yeah. Mystery is what sells it sometimes.

Just a clear photograph. Well, do you think there's anything else we need? I mean, is there anything else? You've got a pretty good history with creatures. Anything else you feel we need to pass along in this one?

We covered a lot. Yeah, I think so. All right, we'll take a break and come back with the rest of the show. I was shooting a pipeline just the other day. And a great mass of water came swirling my way I could feel it all around me as the sea began to swell Feeling real uneasy, what was next is hard to tell But the creatures don't must serve, boy Yeah, the creatures don't must serve, boy Hey, the creatures don't must serve, boy Yeah, the creatures don't must serve, boy He was slippery, he was slimy, seaweed hanging from his arms.

I had a funny feeling it was cause for some alarm. He kept squatting at my feet, knocking on my board. When I serviced, he was hanging. Dead, headed for the shore. Yeah, the creature stole my surfboard.

Yeah, the creature stole my surfboard. Hey, the creature stole my surfboard. Yeah, the creature stole my surfboard. The crowds are thinning out at the snack bar, folks, and there are still three minutes till showtime. You can easily make it for something that'll just hit the spot.

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Just go to tweakedaudio.com, and when you check out, enter the discount code MELTDOWN. Then you'll get 33% off and free shipping. Tweaked Audio. Sounds better. Okay, Carol, now you take these notes, and then we're about ready to begin.

Okay, sure. What are you two doing here? We don't record until tomorrow. We're making a new promo for All Games Considered, since you were dragging your feet getting one written. Hey, she's right, though.

It's been too long, and a lot has happened since the last promo. Yeah, like winning the gold NE for Best Gaming Podcast for 2009. You mean the one you try to work into the conversation every other episode? Hey, now, now, there's more than that. There's the new format.

You mean the main show every two weeks and the assortment of other features in the meantime? Right, like games you may never have heard of, the review in new shows. Don't forget the RPG buffet. And on the main show, we have more time to focus on gaming topics. Like board and card games.

And RPGs. And the people who play them from the old school to the newest of the new. But no changeling. Hey! Find out more at agcpodcast.info All games considered, because there's more than one true way to play.

You better ask my mama how to make a monster. I'm a creature from a black little lagoon. And I'm a beautiful. Monster from outer space too. Learn how to shake my hips.

I am a man of the same. I'm safe and get me tips. And then I'm like a creature from a black little lagoon. I tell you what. The fall that she makes when she's on land and it comes after her and she turns to run.

She hesitates, then starts to run and trips over nothing. I laughed. I was like, that's really bad. Twist and ankle fall. What's actually awesome is that when he is on the boat and grabs her and jumps off, that was an amazing shot.

She was a good screamer and she was kind of unique in that she does that cool thing where she kind of covers her mouth and muffles it. It's more real. It's like a real scream. That's, yeah. They did a good job.

I will admit, again, I was expecting revenge. I don't even know that I ever even saw this one. And I was expecting revenge and thought, this is going to be campy. And then saw it, and I was very pleased. It's funny, I've kind of lost the other two, the memories of it.

I remember images from it. I remember I did see it, and I remember that I liked it, but I didn't really remember. The story unfolding. I just remembered, like, certain images. And I remembered her.

I remembered her, like, you know. Definitely. The third film, Creature Walks Among Us, which is actually pretty good. Isn't that where they're experimenting? Well, yeah.

I mean, he's burned up badly at the end of the second film and they got him alive and he's hospitalized and they realize that under his scales there's like flesh and they actually are trying to push him forward in an evolutionary way. Turn him into a human. And they kind of do turn him into this kind of weirdly hulking human, which he's not hulking. He's a smelt little figure. But it's pretty good in that he's kind of cut off from his element.

He's just a prisoner. It's kind of a thoughtful movie for a sequel, but it's not one that I ever had the patience to watch. What was that movie? Is it Iceman? Yeah.

It's like a Neanderthal guy. Yeah, you would expect. There was kind of a cool essay about it. It was David Mamet's wife was the girl in it, and so he wrote an essay about being a stage husband at that movie, and it was kind of fun. The big question was, is the guy going to be able to act as this guy, and there was a scene where he realized he couldn't trade anything for the woman, and he was just devastated.

He's like, now what the fuck do I do? And that's when they felt like, yeah, it'll work. It's still not as good as Encino Man. Well, yeah, you would expect that movie to go horribly wrong, but it's pretty solid. I haven't seen that in a long time.

It was a cable staple years ago. Yeah, it was all in there. No kidding. All right, we are back. And it's time to wrap things up.

Okay, kids, get out your decoder pins. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. It is time for the movie lockdown secret circle reveal of the next exciting feature. I can tell that tonight's message was really important. This one is sort of epic in its own right.

Next time we should be, assuming all goes right, we should be back with, now listen to this, The fourth annual Movie Meltdown Holiday Special. And I'm doing that in quotations there. Because it's pretty damn special by the time we're done with it. So, yeah. Four years we've been cranking these.

It's pretty amazing. So, we will be on top of that. It will feature a sofa theater discussion about the infamous Black Christmas. with which we just talked to John Saxon. So we will get a nice One from the Vaults memory from Mr. John Saxon.

So that should be interesting, and we'll figure out what sort of ridiculous Christmas-related activities. I'm still trying to decide if we should officially dub it, if you remember the title from last Christmas. Oh, yeah. I don't know if we should continue that. It was the Fuck Me Santa Holiday Special. because we watch bad santa so i'm trying to decide if it should continually from this point forth be the fuck me santa holiday special i think.

It's strange when someone sees your ipod and sees the fucking santa special on it as a track listing but you know. Uh yeah itunes doesn't like when i use though i i've had to keep abbreviating much like i just did recently it It's taken a lot of weird words off, too. Little did I know that iTunes would not like when I worked bestiality into a title. Who would have guessed it? But, you know, they didn't like that.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the bestiality fuck. They didn't like when I worked in pedophile. Yeah, I have fun titling. iTunes does not agree with my titles. So, yeah, we can still take a vote whether we want it to be the Fuck Me Santa Holiday Special, but. I did like every time you, you know, welcome back to the. and you get to hear her.

Oh, Lauren Green. Lauren Green. I like Lauren Green. So, yeah, that. I haven't listened to it.

That will be the next episode. Lord knows what will come from that, so... All right, to round this one out, I thought... There is no other way for me. And it's funny, now there's a lot I've found of music.

Well, there's tons of horror-related music now anyway, because it's become its own sub-genre. But to me, geek that I was, getting my horror... Every Halloween they do those compilations. I'm sure you have many, Dave. Again, I accumulated a lot of them over the years, and I loved the Dave Edmonds Creature from the Black Lagoon song.

It's just sort of a staple... I figure, you know, we're only doing the original movie once, so we should go out with that. So, this will be The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Otherwise, that about does it. We will return next week.

Same geek time, same geek feed. Thanks for listening. All he wanted was a lady That at night came up from the deep. He was feeling like Decided to take one while the city was asleep The thoughtless fashion maiden Was clutched from where she lay. And taken away to a hole.

Down under The borders of the. The creature from the Black Lagoon A strange to see him back so soon After his last. Intended in the dirty on him Didn't last. Five minutes in the swim With the creature from the Black Lagoon Missing him again. Real soon After his last intended in the dirty on him.

Only a surface or a companion. Cause of that he's never been seen Just a big footprint in the eyes of his baby In a quiet terror, a honeymoon scream The unsuspecting maiden Will be cursed from where she. Sleeps And take him. Away to a home down under. Water and that's the key While a creature from the black lagoon Had.

A strength to save my soul Soon after his last intent It did the dirty on him Didn't last five. Minutes in the swim. They're taking their way to a. Home down under the water. Black Lagoon, it's.

Strange to see him back so soon. After his last event, they did the dirty on him. Didn't last five minutes in the swim. Where's the creature from the Black Lagoon? I'll be seeing him again real soon.

The sand. We'll see you next time. Thanks for bringing your toys. Yeah, definitely. Some cool stuff.

Yeah. A lot of fun. I enjoyed it. I love toys. This episode is a production of Movie Meltdown, produced and edited by the Oddity Studios, with opening music performed by the Empires.

For more on how to sponsor or support the show, email producer at moviemeltdown.com. Talk hard!