Quarantine entry #10 - March 31

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and sometimes it sucks because of something that you have done – everything was more or less fine before, and then you do something stupid, and clog one of the sinks in your home. Idiot. Yeah, talking about dinosaurs is just what you need – not. End irony. Today I got to revisit another miniseries, called ‘Beast Legends’. It consisted of one six-episode season and was never rebooted. Why?

Well, for one thing, it was supposed to be a reboot by itself – of MonsterQuest, another show that ended a long time ago. MonsterQuest itself raises mixed feelings in my chest – it was a show about all sorts of cryptids; an episode would begin with a CGI depiction of the cryptid in question – an alien, a giant shark, Chupacabra, and beyond – and then for the next hour or so a group of experts would go someplace where the cryptid in question was seen most recently, and do everything in their power as to not to find anything at all that would upend the status quo. They would not just laze around, but everything they did was so perfunctory and minimal that it became evident eventually that they were just killing time there and making it look convincing.

By contrast, ‘River Monsters’, which also got cancelled, never had JW go for the minimal – rather, JW did his best to be, well, JW, and to sell his show as best as he could – which was pretty damn good. Sadly, in the latter seasons, ‘River Monsters’ jumped a shark that had little in common with real-life fish…and so I lost interest in it, sadly… Where do ‘Beast Legends’ fit?

They never did. Rather, each episode was dedicated to recreating one or another mythical monster – whether a potential cryptid, like the kraken or the Vietnamese analogue of a Yeti, or a pure myth, such as the gryphon episode. Why? Because it was the most well delivered. However, the reason as to why it was the most well-delivered was because the biggest part of the BL’s budget went into it, leaving the last two episodes, dedicated to the Native American thunderbird and a dragon, (eh, maybe more about it later), with much less cash. I am not saying that BL blew its’ budget on the gryphon episode, (named the ‘Winged Lion’, if I remember correctly), leaving the last two episodes with much less cash. Budget issues are important issues in production of TV series and movies, and it may be why BL vanished after a single season slash six episodes. It just never had a defined audience, a defined niche for itself. The gryphon episode was quite fun to watch though. Anything else?

Sadly, not. Unlike the dragon, which remains a popular mainstay in fantasy, the gryphon…also does, but is more secondary and less popular than the dragon is by far. Pity, because it is an impressive-looking mythical monster. And yes, part of the reason as to why I have watched the gryphon episode of BL is because we’ve talked about the Protoceratops in the past, and its’ fossils may’ve been a partial inspiration behind the gryphon myth, so I thought that I should mention this dino, (a distant cousin of the more famous Triceratops, remember?).

Another bit of trivia is that the gryphon was a primarily Middle Eastern s (Asian) mythical monster (yes, the Ancient Greeks and Romans had adopted it, but only slight), unlike the dragon, which was found on all continents, except for maybe Australia and New Zealand, and even there are some dragon-like creatures to be found in their myths… Gryphon and its relative the hippogriff could never top that.

…Yes, both gryphons and hippogriffs were featured in the MLP: FIM cartoon, but if the gryphons were depicted quite canonically, then the hippogriffs were shown to be shapeshifters of sorts, shifting between a bird-horse and a fish-horse mode, with the latter being named the hippocampus instead. 

Yeah, someone in MLP: FIM had hit the obscure mythical monsters quite hard, which brings us back to the gryphons – kind of. In one of the episodes, the viewers saw some sort of a one-eyed monster harassing the gryphons – it was supposedly an Arimaspian. In real life, the Arimaspians were a race of one-eyed humanoids who constantly fought with the gryphons over gold, which the gryphons hoarded just as the dragons did. Fair enough, though I do not know as to why the Arimaspians were not classified as just variant Cyclopes, but the MLP: FIM’s Arimaspian had distinctly goat- or ram-like features, especially the horns. This, again, implies, that the final season’s Discord-as-Grogar story arc was the result of some sort of a reboot, just a behind the scenes one. Well, fair enough, this cartoon incarnation of MLP: FIM is over now, and we just got the last bits to pick over in the form of various comics and what not. Anything else?

Nothing, save that I just might be turning back to DW after all this Middle East discussion that we did in regards to the gryphon. (Yes, the name can be spelled in several ways in the English language and all are correct. Live with it). Consequently, this is it for now, see you all soon!