This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports, and giving you the real story behind the headlines. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow Timbo Slice Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring woman in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can, like, I can do anything. Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what y'all say. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor IV. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to the Monster Fact Omnibus. My name is Robert Lamb. This is going to be another one of these episodes where we play a little catch-up and we take, in this case, four separate past Monster Fact entries and we cobble them all together in one episode. This is going to be audio only because the period of time that we're covering here includes both the Netflix video and pre-Netflix video era. So I think two are video, two are audio. So they're just all going to be audio. So these are going to be four more entries from the Marvel Universe. I can't quite get enough of the Marvel Universe in terms of its weirdness, characters I've never heard of, as well as characters that are quite beloved by myself and other comic book fans, video game fans, film fans, and so forth. So moving forward, if you would like to hear monster fact entries on additional Marvel characters, creatures, and so forth, write in. Give me your suggestions. Likewise for other comics, DC comics. I've done some of those in the past. Outside of Marvel and DC, I'm also happy to dive into those worlds as well. All right. Without further ado, let's jump into an episode that I recorded, I believe, last summer. This is going to be a discussion of the cosmic villain, Galactus. If you've seen the new MCU film, The Fantastic Four First Steps, then you've finally experienced a proper cinematic treatment of Galactus, the iconic devourer of worlds from Marvel Comics. Created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, this titanic space god predates the planet Big Bang. He survived the great collapse of the previous universe and entered into our own, hatching from the cosmic egg. His god-like abilities come via the power cosmic, which he sustains through the consumption of entire worlds. And yet Galactus is a lot more complex than your typical earth-destroying Elder God. While definitely an existential threat and a perpetrator of untold megadeaths, Galactus does not consume worlds with malice. As the latest MCU film accurately depicts, he himself is a slave to his own insatiable hunger, but is lawful and honorable, standing by the letter of pacts made for the survival of various planets. And such, while he's certainly a villain and a monster by many measurements, he is also beyond good and evil, a natural force that dwarfs everything he encounters. Sometimes he even acts in ways that might cast him as an anti-hero. In the Fantastic Four First Steps, Galactus is as close to his Silver Age glory as we could hope for. A giant humanoid being in purple armor and a great hat that might best be described as a papal mitre with cosmic horns. English character actor Ralph Ennison provides his voice and likeness. The presentation is delightfully over the top, as it should be, but the entire Galactus scenario, in which a ravenous cosmic power sends its harbingers out in search of worlds and civilizations to dine on, actually isn't entirely the domain of comic book science fiction. Humans have wrestled with the Fermi paradox for 75 years now. If other intelligent life forms exist in the universe, perhaps even in some abundance, then why haven't we encountered them, heard of them, seen any signs of them? why is the universe so silent? Hypothesized solutions vary from the possibility that Earth really is a rare commodity in the cosmos to the idea that we exist in a sort of space zoo or nature reserve. But while the latter concept entails benign alien beings that intentionally leave us alone, the dark forest hypothesis paints a bleaker picture. Named for the 2008 Lucy Shin novel of the same name, the Dark Forest Hypothesis states that the rest of the universe is quiet because its various intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations are understandably afraid. They remain unheard and unseen because they know to raise their voices or in any way broadcast their presence could attract the unwanted attention of dangerous, even more powerful forces. This could be threats known to exist or merely threats likely to exist and therefore worth remaining silent for. And this is where we get to the possibility of, if not an actual Galactus, then something close enough to terrify us. Something that hungers and sends its seekers and heralds far across the sprawl of stars in search of civilized worlds to harvest. First, let's think about that hunger. Galactus must consume worlds, this we know. The idea is far from ridiculous when we consider the Kardashev Scale which sorts potential civilizations by how much power they can harvest Type one the energy of an entire planet Type 2 the energy of an entire star Type 3 the energy of an entire galaxy Certainly by Type 3, we're contemplating Galactus-level power, and it certainly puts forms of planet and star harvesting, or even consumption, into consideration, both in terms of what we can imagine, such as the use of a Dyson sphere to enclose a star and collect the sum total of its energy output, and means that we can't even fathom yet. After all, we're not even a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale. Some of the aims and abilities of a Type 3 civilization, or even a Type 2, may simply exist outside of our context. And this leads us to another Fermi Paradox solution hypothesis, the Berserker Hypothesis, also known as the Deadly Probe Scenario. The Berserker name, by the way, stems from the 1967 Fred Saberhagen novel. The concept here is that the cosmos seems silent because thus far, all other sufficiently advanced intelligent forms of life have been destroyed by deadly seeker probes, self-replicating destroyers that are even now on their way to decimate Earth as well. In teasing this hypothesis apart, some have argued that humanity would have surely been discovered and eradicated already if this were the status quo in the galaxy. However, if we've not yet met the criteria for extermination, or if there's some hope of passing a civilizational test that ensures our survival, yeesh, then perhaps the sword of Damocles merely hangs above all of our heads, entirely dependent on how we conduct ourselves, or how solid the latest season of single female lawyer happens to be. Obviously, there are numerous ways to dissect this hypothesis, ranging from just considering the toll such self-replicating machines might take on the galaxy's available mass over time. You know, this would potentially spell a kind of gray goo apocalypse on a cosmic scale, as well as issues of detection or lack of detection here in our local neighborhood. Naturally, the idea has been explored in various sci-fi treatments, often as a means to explore our collective values as a species, our hopes and our fears that something else out there shares those values in either its dark or light extremes. And we see this with Galactus as well, that a herald is sent to judge us, save or condemn us based on our merits or the merits of those who stand as shining examples of what we aspire to be. And in this, we're reminded that Galactus is a comic book take on the divine, a God who sits in judgment, echoing a very long-standing note in human myth-making, such as in the Bible. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. In the Bhagavad Gita, I am time grown old to destroy the world, embarked on the course of world annihilation. Except for yourself, none of these will survive, of these warriors arrayed in opposite armies. And in Marvel Comics. Your planet is now marked for death. Your world will be consumed by the Devourer. There is nothing you can do to stop him, for he is a universal force. As essential as the stars, hold your loved ones close and speak the words you've been afraid to speak. Alright, for our next entry, we are going to discuss Lady Deathstrike. Wolverine enemy Lady Deathstrike has long been one of my favorite characters in X-Men comics. While I was never much of a comic book reader as a kid, I of course encountered her on X-Men the animated series and in the 1994 video game Wolverine, Adamantium Rage. A decade later, Kelly Hugh played a modified version of Lady Deathstrike in the film X2. The character's physical appearance is that of a Japanese woman with long reddish hair, a form-fitting samurai-inspired costume, and long, razor-sharp adamantium talons that extend from hands that are themselves sometimes depicted as relatively human, other times oversized, elongated, and truly monstrous. Her biography makes things even more complicated, however. Born Yuriko Oyama, Lady Deathstrike's father is said to have originated the adamantium-skeletal bonding process that so famously enhanced Wolverine. Deathstrike, however, obtained her own adamantium claws and bones after her father's death in the Mojoverse. This is where the character's spiral not only gave her the full adamantium treatment, but also transformed her into a full-blown cyborg. As such, depictions of Lady Deathstrike often include circuit-like glyphs on her skin and other cybernetic flourishes. So coming back to her monstrous hands, part of this is the fact that she can extend her forearms via her cybernetic enhancements, but we also might conjecture that additional musculature in the hands and forearms is simply necessary to house the additional retractable adamantic talons and, perhaps more to the point, the muscles or some sort of cybernetic mechanisms to retract and deploy them. Now, perhaps unwittingly, her monstrous hands make Lady Deathstrike comparable to various traditions in folklore and legend in which a demon takes on the form of a beautiful woman but is betrayed by monstrous hands or feet. This clues in central characters or heroes to the demonic nature of the individual. More directly, however, she certainly fits the femme fatale profile. And there are aspects of her appearance in history that would almost allow her to take her place alongside certain feminine yokai and yuri in Japanese tradition. So various ghosts and vengeful ghosts that sometimes have a combination of the monstrous and the feminine. However, it is unavoidable that while Asian comic book artists and writers have subsequently depicted and developed the character, Lady Deathstrike originates as a Western take on the Asian femme fatale trope. Connections have been drawn between her signature nails and decorative Chinese nail guards worn during the Ming Dynasty. Also, I was reminded of Lady Deathstrike during a recent viewing of the 1983 Hong Kong horror film The Boxer's Omen, which features a resurrected sorceress who wears decorative nail covers and also appears with elongated forearms that turn out to be animate skeleton hands. Her profile in one scene in particular feels very Lady Deathstrike, though the Marvel character of Yuriko Oyama introduced the same year wouldn't take on the full mantle of Lady Deathstrike and the various characteristics that we associate with her until 1986 in Uncanny X-Men number 205. Might her creators have found some level of influence in the boxer's omen or merely in related imagery and ideas? I've found nothing concrete on this matter, so maybe I'm drawing a connection here where there isn't one. Lady Deathstrike continues to slice up the pages of Marvel Comics as both villain and anti-hero. And she recently showed back up in 2024 Deadpool and Wolverine as a minor almost Easter egg character but it was still fun to see Once more she was not fully cyborg but she certainly embodied some of the features that have made her such a popular character over the years Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite, on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow TimboSliceLife12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions, to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. and Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecky. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, it's time to discuss, I think, one of the more whimsical superheroes in the Marvel Universe. Let's talk about Squirrel Girl. Long-time listeners to Stuffed Above Your Mind know that we have an enduring fascination with squirrels, particularly the Eastern Grey Squirrel, because these are the creatures I observe every day, and I constantly find myself either just taking them for granted or just suddenly recognizing how weird and fierce they are. They're such survivors. And the same could be said for Marvel's Squirrel Girl. At first glance, you might think this particular superhero is just here for a cute pose and a few laughs. And yeah, she's totally down for all of that. But since her creation in the early 90s by Will Murray and Steve Ditko, Squirrel Girl has scored victories against such iconic villains as Ultron, Galactus, Doctor Doom and Thanos. OK, so what are her powers? You might be wondering if you're not familiar with the character already. Well, first of all, it's important to note that Squirrel Girl is not technically a mutant, but rather a typical Canadian girl who just gradually began to exhibit an amazing ability to communicate with squirrels and developed various squirrel-like physical abilities. As pointed out by Mark Sumarek and Daniel Wallace in the excellent book Marvel Anatomy, she boasts large incisors and rugged climbing claws, both attributes of the real-world furry grappling hooks that we call squirrels. She also boasts a full, fluffy squirrel tail, which I assume offers a number of benefits enjoyed by her namesake. Balance, shade, communication, and locomotion assistance while leaping, falling, landing, or swimming. Sumerick and Wallace put her vertical jumping ability at 30 feet, or more than 9 meters, which feels like a decent scaling up of squirrel leaping ability. How high could we leap if we had the leaping ability of a squirrel? I think that's about accurate. The one head scratcher, however, is that Squirrel Girl also boasts extendable bone knuckle spikes. They extend Wolverine style through the back of her palms, jutting out just above her knuckles, enabling her to punch and carve through wood as well as through Ultron drones. Obviously, rule of cool applies here, and the bone knuckle spikes are indeed cool, no doubt about it, but they do seem kind of unnecessary if we're comparing her to squirrels. actual squirrels don't have them because they can handle all their woodworking and robot thrashing with teeth and claws alone. For natural world analogs to Squirrel Girl's knuckle spikes, or Wolverine's famous claws for that matter, we have to leave the mammal world behind and head into the amphibian world. First, we can look to the hairy frog, or Trichobatracus robustus, which can break its own toe bones and extend them through the flesh as makeshift defensive claws, which may later retract, allowing the flesh to heal back over again. Male Ottenfrogs, or Babina subaspera, also boast a different form of retractable spike that extends from under the thumb. Both of these species are commonly compared to the fictional wolverine, though his namesake animal also makes do with just teeth and finger claws alone, no extendable or retractable claws required. Now, I know there are frog-based superheroes and supervillains in the Marvel world, but do any of them have extendable horror claws? I don't think that they do, at least not yet. So I do put the question out there for any of you comic book fans, and especially any of you hardcore Marvel geeks, if you have an answer to this question, write in. I would love to hear from you. all right let's go ahead and end this episode out with the most recent marvel monster fact entry that i did this is also one of the weirder ones it is the quasi destruct organism or Quasimodo Let dive right in Today, I want to cover one of the weirder Marvel Comics characters to jump out of the pages of the official handbook of the Marvel Universe Master Edition. I have a used copy of this book from the 1990s, and it contains all of your more popular X-Men and Avengers, along with some real weirdos, like today's selection, the quasi-motivational destruct organism, also known as Quasimodo. Yes, this supervillain, who first appeared in the pages of the Fantastic Four back in 1966, is essentially a super-science take on Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame from the 1831 Victor Hugo novel. Though the character's appearance seems mostly based, to my eye, on the version played by Charles Lawton in the 1930s film adaptation. In Hugo's tale, Quasimodo is a cathedral bell ringer suffering from severe kyphosis and excessive convex curvature of the spine. The quasi-motivational destruct organism's nature, however, is a bit more convoluted. As Marvel.com tells it, he was originally a sentient computer developed by the supervillain, the Mad Thinker. This sentient computer desired a human form, but its creator cruelly refused it. Eventually, the Silver Surfer steps in, takes pity on the suffering computer, and uses his power cosmic to grant the computer's wishes. However, the quasi-motivational destruct organism would prove the twisted Vulcan to the Silver Surfer's physical perfection. He looks like a stereotypical hunchback of Notre Dame, but with a metallic skin or a metal suit, you know, sort of the Silver Surfer body, except it is the hunchback of Notre Dame's body. We're told he is a pseudo-organic android possessed of immense physical smashing power. But due to his computer origin, his brain is also able to process information and make calculations with vastly improved speed and accuracy. Yet, despite this, he's not your standard super strong, super smart, demigod cosmic bad guy. We get a lot of those in comic book stories from this era. No, we're told his actual intelligence is more that of a baseline human intelligence and that his biggest weakness is his lack of creativity. Now, I don't think Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were necessarily trying to be all that prophetic with this particular supervillain. What you see is kind of what you get with the quasi-motivational destruct organism. Yet at the same time, beyond the space Quasimodo gimmick, there is a reasonable amount of Miltonian depth here to the plight between the created and the creator. And then there's this interesting detail about computer enhancement. His calculations are lightning fast, but his intelligence is actually more, again, human baseline, and there is something lacking in his ability to think with true creativity. It's interesting to ponder this given our current state of AI and computer enhancement. We can observe the computer form we're building around ourselves Thinking for us, writing for us, expressing ourselves and representing our souls to each other Through the artifice of large language models and so forth Silver-fleshed on the outside, but perhaps somewhat compressed on the inside Bent under the weight of the machine and undergoing atrophication And what's more, there's this fear that I've seen expressed that our actual ability to express ourselves, and indeed our actual self, isn't good enough without the trappings of the machine. A kind of self-fulfilling prophecy as the interface between human and AI has largely fallen short of the creative partnership we were promised. Way to go, Mad Thinkers. All right, there you have it. Now I'm going to have to move on to some all new Marvel creatures, Marvel characters, and so forth to discuss here on The Monster Fact. Again, if you have recommendations to write in. Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Posway for producing The Monster Fact, as well as The Artifact and Animalia Stupendium. You can find these episodes generally every Wednesday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. and wherever you get that feed, be it audio or if you get it in video form, just make sure that you throw some stars, some thumbs up our way, subscribe or whatever the case may be. All of that engagement helps the show out and helps ensure that we get to keep pumping this content out to you. And if you would like to email us with recommendations for the future, you can reach out to us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy. Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headlines. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow Timbo Slice Life 12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring woman in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what y'all say. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor IV. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
