In Honor of the Bumble

a personal mythology

My mash-up of the Bumble, post-operative, and the Kong still linked in the post below. Unfortunately, I think Herbie looks more like a Skrull in a Santa hat than an Elf. Maybe I thould make him green.

I loved the Rankin-Bass stop-motion holiday specials as a kid. The first Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was probably my favorite. Herbie the Dentist Elf and wacky prospector Yukon Cornelius were great characters. But it was the giant monster, the Abominable Snowman, which Cornelius could never pronounce correctly, that scared the crap out of little me. It wasn’t as bad as the Salt Vampire from Star Trek,

Ten Things that Scare Me

but here was something wrong about it. The jerky movements, the wild hair, the oversized teeth and claws, the spinning googly eyes — all those jokey elements that were probably designed to mitigate the fright somehow just made it worse. I was not especially prone to nightmares, but I did lose a lot of sleep to late-night waking thoughts (as I still do, sometimes, he said, typing at 4:40 in the morning).

During the 70s schools handed out individual newsprint catalogs from Scholastic Books to students. We would take them home, fill them out, and bring our money back to class (early lessons in capitalism!). In amongst the shark and dinosaur books, I would get stuff about the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, and later more detailed accounts of the Honey Island Swamp Monster in Louisiana or the Nandi Bear in Africa (I think that one was actually a library book, but whatever). Later I got into historical accounts of werewolves and vampires from Europe, as well as those orange-backed movie monster books with the black & white promotional stills. We did not have cable TV, and I never saw the inside of a movie theater until I was 16, so these books were valuable pop-culture lifelines that allowed for some amount of cultural camouflage.

I never saw the stop-motion Kong until I was an adult, but his rippling rabbit fur reminded me a lot of the Bumble. And Kong ate people.

There was one image, though, in one of my older brother’s paperbacks, that haunted me. It was a painted reproduction of a still from the Patterson / Gimlet film, which famously shows a hairy figure striding across a creek bed. This was decades before the various hoaxer confessions, and anyway I was a little kid, so the fact that the painting was far more detailed than the film itself did not give me pause. Whether the details were made up or not, at that point in time they were impressive. There were other artists’ renditions that I avoided looking at, because they were too creepy, but they were also obviously just drawings. There was something compelling about that one photorealistic rendering that I could never forget.

Today there’s a whole industry devoted to pumping out Bigfoot content. I posted about one recent documentary here, which combined the legend-lore and true-crime genres.

Stalking Monsters

The best non-documentary I’ve seen was the REI production of The Dark Divide, starring comedian David Cross as a clueless lepidopterist who got a Guggenheim fellowship to spend two weeks collecting butterflies in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington state. The movie is actually much more a meditation on loss and our disconnection from nature than it is a horror flick. His wife (played by Deborah Messing, shorn of that famous curly red mane) has just died of cancer, and he heads off into the woods by himself to grieve (by killing insects). There are lots of colorful human characters, and a lot of really beautiful location shots, but no fur suits and no CGI of bloodthirsty man-apes, except for the movie poster on Amazon Prime, which I can’t find a copy of online.

The book the movie was based on had a new edition out in 2017. I haven’t read it, but here the author recounts a follow-on trip with a Japanese film crew, and summarizes some major happenings in the more serious Bigfoot Believer community.

“Ichnotaxonomy of giant hominoid tracks in North America”, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 42, was the first Bigfoot paper to be published in a peer-reviewed mainstream journal.

and

Bigfooters can no longer complain quite so loudly that scientists never take a close look at the evidence. These scientists did just that, and they encourage enthusiasts to keep trying.

There were also some sequences in Reservation Dogs, where it seems that the local Bigfoot might be the ghost of their friend Daniel, whose off-camera suicide is just the latest major tragedy in their young lives, but it is the one that precipitates their plans to go to California. Online chatter suggests some other explanation for The Tall Man in later episodes, but I haven’t seen those and won’t speculate.

Merry Cryptid-Mass, y’all.

REFERENCES / FURTHER READING

Relict Hominid Inquiry

• Jeff Meldrun’s clearinghouse for Bigfoot science. Oddly, his own peer-reviewed paper from 2007, linked above, is not included in the list of articles.

Behind the paywall this week is the first article I ever sent to ParABnormal Magazine, which very briefly follows Western depictions of the Wild Man archetype all the way back to Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh.