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!

AFO: Sperm whale vs. giant squid - July 20

The final episode of AFO, (but no, this is not the final time that I will talk about this series and shows that are similar to it), was something special indeed – ‘sperm whale vs. giant squid’! Wow!

Indeed, and for several reasons. Not unlike the ‘polar bear vs. walrus’ or ‘African lion vs. Nile crocodile’, the ‘sperm whale vs. giant squid’ episode was based on real life footage – as much as possible, for, unlike the African savanna or even the Arctic, the ocean depths still aren’t readily assessable to the humanity – and that is where the sperm whale and the giant squid dwell.

Next? The giant squid, (and its’ cousin, the colossal squid, of which even less is known than about the giant squid proper), is a squid, of course, meaning that it is a mollusk, a close relative to the smaller species of squid, octopi and cuttlefishes, and a distant relative of the snail, the mussel, the oyster and the nudibranch. The sperm whale, meanwhile, is a toothed whale, meaning that it is, technically, a dolphin, and its’ closest relatives are the so-called pygmy sperm whale and dwarf sperm whale, each being a fraction of the sperm whale’s size. They are shy, timid, retiring creatures who don’t behave anything as the sperm whale does, and some scientists, who specialize in classification of animals, wonder if the three species of sperm whales are actually related to each other or not. But for now, they are classified together, period.

What of the actual face-off? People who traveled the seas saw the sperm whale fight the giant squid irregularly, but they did see it. Plus, many sperm whales, especially the bulls, show the scars caused and created by the beaks and sucker-claws of squids, (though not just the giant ones), so the battles between the two orders of animals happen on a regular basis – the humans just usually aren’t there to see them.

And when they do, it is one of the biggest, not just the rarest, spectacles on Earth – the Biblical Leviathan battles the Kraken of the pagan Norse myths! Ladies and gentlemen, make your bets!

(Note: Jormungandr the World Serpent, while also a Norse monster, is not the Kraken. The two are separate entities, and when ‘Clash of the Gods’ TV series tried to rationalize Jormungandr as the Kraken/giant squid alongside Scylla of the Greek myths, it didn’t work. However, there are reasons why ‘Clash’ failed and did not go beyond a single season, and this is one of them.)

Where does this leave AFO? Well, they know that the sperm whales usually win this fight, so they adjust their CGI face-off accordingly. Their approach was to technically define and experiment with the physical properties of the two combatants, and this was what they did in their last episode. Since the sperm whale and the giant squid have nothing in common, the result was an epic (in scale) examination of the two combatants, because you cannot really compare the sperm whale to the giant squid: the two have nothing in common, not even convergent evolution! As such, AFO’s approach to their combatants transformed from a comparison into a study, two separate studies of the duo, with the show’s scientists studying and figuring out how each element of either combatants would fit into the face-off. AFO had plenty of authenticity and realism in it, and the last episode had showed it to the max. The major aspects of the sperm whale and the giant squid were shown in the most professional light possible…

Yet AFO got cancelled. Well, that is life. JFC, too, lasted for only 12 episodes and 1 season. The aforementioned ‘Clash’ – for just 10 episodes. ‘Beast Legends’, which also featured the Kraken as one of its monsters – 6. AFO didn’t do so poorly in the long run, when you think about; ‘Beast Legends’ wasn’t exactly a bad show in itself, but it was still worse than ‘MonsterQuest’, and RM is a better show still, (though lately it may be preparing to jump a different shark)… yet this is another story that we will talk about at another time.

As for the sperm whale and the giant squid in the real world? They are still around, though the human-based pollution of the environment, as well as of the global oceans and seas in particular, is slowly killing them off; the sperm whales have to deal with the issue of whaling too – nowadays it is less intense than how it was in the centuries past, but it is still there, and still a problem. People are trying to resolve it, (as well as the pollution issue), but with mixed success. I, for one, hope that in the future, they will succeed, before all that is left of the sperm whale and giant squid are live footage and CGI.