Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Gargoyles

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writer/podcaster Conor Lastowka (Rifftrax, '372 Pages We'll Never Get Back' podcast) and historian/podcaster Patrick Wyman ('Tides Of History' podcast, new book 'The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World') for a look at why gargoyles are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Gargoyles. Known for being spooky. Famous for being stony. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why gargoyles are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. My guests today are wonderful. I'm joined by two guests, Connor LaStoca and Patrick Wyman. Connor is a comedy writer, novelist, and podcaster. He's a senior writer-producer for Riff Tracks, which I hope you know for amazing movie-based comedy. He also co-hosts a podcast called 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back about

particularly excruciating books to read. And Connor writes better novels. His newest novel is entitled The Pole Vault Championship of the Entire Universe. You may remember Connor from the episode of this show about butter. Also very excited to have a new guest, Patrick Wyman, who you may know from podcasting. He has amazing shows like Tides of History and The Fall of Rome. Just wonderful, wonderful history podcasting. And Patrick's a writer and historian as well, and I highly recommend his new book. It is entitled The Verge, Reformation, Renaissance, and 40 Years That Shook the World. Those 40 years in the title of The Verge are 1490 to 1530.

And if you only know Columbus happened then, you have a lot to find out about. And it's really astounding to know how much that time period really flipped all of world history all at once. And then Patrick does so much more. He writes wonderful articles for places like The Atlantic and Defector.com. And then he's an extra special guest because he and I played Jeopardy together. We were contestants at the same time. I was on Jeopardy in 2018. He was on it with me. people ask me a lot of things about being on Jeopardy, and one of them is like, were the other contestants nice, or was anybody weird? And short answer, everybody was nice. But also, I really hit it off with Patrick Wyman. We like hung out after and got to know each other and have stayed in touch. Anyway, Patrick's awesome, and Connor is too. I'm so glad both of them could be here to join me for this particularly fun episode. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples.

Acknowledge Connor recorded this on the traditional land of the Manahoke people. Acknowledge Patrick recorded this on the traditional land of the Hohokam and Akemel O'odham peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about gargoyles. Gargoyles are a patron-chosen topic. Many thanks to Brett Murphy for a really, really fun suggestion there, and it really took off in the poll, too. Thank you to Thomas C. and to Catherine Weidman and to other patrons for cheerleading it and making it happen. This show has more modern stuff than you might expect, and more colonial imperial stuff than you might expect,

because it's such a medieval topic, the gargoyle. Also, incredibly fun episode. We had so much fun together, you will hear the format of the podcast break a little bit, and really excited for you to hear it. Please sit back, or sit in a weird crouch with your wings folded behind you. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Connor Listoka and Patrick Wyman. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Patrick, Connor, thank you so much for being here. This is so exciting. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start, but how do you feel about gargoyles?

So I did my PhD in medieval history. And so I spent a lot of time... So no connection. Yeah, cool. No, no connection at all. But ironically, I did my very best to avoid going near anything that was related to the topics of gargoyles. So instead of it, I did not spend very much time on cathedrals. I spent a lot of time on peasants and countryside. I spent like people who literally never got to see a cathedral or a gargoyle in their lives. And and at the very opposite end, chronologically of the Middle Ages. So I have some vague memories of reading articles about gargoyles and articles about Gothic cathedrals and the purposes they served.

But it was a long way from my specialty. Same time period, same mindsets, but very, very different places. Yeah, and just in case people are fans of Patrick's writing and history podcast, I just super want to have you on the show. I did not book you as a gargoyle expert. They're more of like an art architecture thing anyway. I was always a fan, I would say. I'm a fan of gargoyles.

And it stems from probably like a decent amount of trips that were probably within ages like 9 to 16 that I took where like somehow visiting cathedrals was like a major part of the trip. And so, you know, as a, as a jaded, you know, teenage boy, the gargoyles were like the one cool thing that would separate those cathedrals from all the other places. So that was always like, it was, it was equivalent of going to, you know, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and being like, and now here's the armor room, like that type of thing. So I was like, well, this is, this is the sort of thing I can appreciate when you're just trying to explain to me like why this, you know, architectural marvel is, you know, more important than the other three you've seen on this trip type of thing. Okay. I have one quick question. Since you mentioned the, uh, the arms and armor room at

the Met, um, you know, that suit of armor, if you've been there recently, the suit of armor that belongs to Henry the eighth, that is just enormous. You think about how fat he must have been at that point in his life. Like it is a miracle he managed to cram himself into that thing. Like that we're looking, we're looking at like a 48 or a 50 inch waist. Like he was like 60 years old, just, just real gross. Oh man, I need to go back and check it out. Put Otis, the fat bear in the suit of armor. Some real synergy. Yeah, you could really, like Henry VIII would have fit right in at Katmai this time of year. Folks, we'll link about Fat Bear Week if you're not aware of it.

It's wonderful. Best thing. I love it. But Gargoyles also have a tremendous underrated video game presence, too, in the Gargoyles Quest and Ghosts and Goblins series. So if I can campaign for right now to put Firebranded Smash, that would be my—I'd put that request out there. Are those games related to the TV show that I discovered in the process of researching this and had never seen? Or is that a separate thing? that I discovered in the process of researching this and had never seen?

Or is that a separate thing? I don't think so. But that was like a later edition of the Disney Afternoon from when I would have been watching it, I think. Yeah. You know, that was post like the one with Baloo, tailspin post, you know, post the ducktail stuff. So I won't pretend like I have any relationship to that TV show. I've heard it's very good, though.

Yeah, I'm I'm now two episodes in and it's like really advanced. All the episodes are one continuous story and they put it on TV in the 90s when you can't just sit and watch all of it in a row. I'm astounded. So like the two serialized actual serialized storytelling TV shows in the 90s were Gargoyles and Babylon 5. Like that's the that's I mean, that looking back at things, that's that is not how I figured we would end up in the golden age of TV. Like that's a that's a strange origin story. Right. It's a weird butterfly effect. Yeah, just there was some there were like a couple of really advanced teens where that was all they watched. I think they were like, someday the world will catch up.

They'll know really advanced or just they had the only only parents with working knowledge of how to program a VCR back in those days. That was a real rare skill set in the 90s. that was a real rare skill set in the nineties. There was, there was weird VCR plus codes in the, in the Washington post TV guide that were like a six digit thing. You would press in that were, that was the situation. That was a solution they came up with as opposed to like trying to figure out what you were doing, man. It's, I feel like we've veered into the realm of eighties standup.

Yeah. Speaking of the middle ages, am I right? Boy, this is some history. I have more or less no relationship to gargoyles. I didn't see cathedrals in Europe until like my early 20s, and I think I was mostly, like they're so far up there, you know, like I don't think I've ever seen one up close except in pictures. They're just all the way at the top of the building. That's something something I do remember from my brief my brief exposure to gargoyles is that that was always the question that like scholars debate about them because there's there's some thought that they're supposed to be like a teaching tool. Right. That you're like you're teaching the illiterate masses about their religion through, through a visual medium.

But like with a lot of the stuff that's there in the cathedrals or big monasteries, even some churches, like it's a long way up. Like, how are you going to use that as a teaching tool? Like if it's dark inside, like, yeah, you're going to like, how are you going to show this to them? Like what, what meaning could, could a, somebody who has terrible eyesight, uh, and is 60 feet away going to get from this, from this image? Like that's, that's a question scholars always ask. I mean, when you analyze these things as a, as an academic and you're looking at these up-close pictures and you're really trying hard to like get at the hidden meaning of it. And like, maybe they just thought it looked cool. Like that's, that's always a possibility. And where were they lacking for

for visual depictions of stories of religion in those days i mean that's that was that 99 percent of paintings at that point in time either just enormous it was but but there's like one of the things about religion in the middle ages is that like there's a real question as to how christian the populace actually was like a lot of people like so depending on where you are like 90% of the populace lives out in the countryside someplace right and you've got maybe you've got a little parish church in the village maybe you go there once a month for mass maybe you go there like oh there's a wandering preacher coming through and there's going to be a real good party you can can get real drunk. Um, you're going to have a great time

at the party, but like how much actual religious instruction is happening there. Um, I mean, like I'm kind of, I'm, I'm kind of joking about it, but it's also like a lot of people, their exposure to, to what we think of as religion would have been fairly limited. And oh yeah, like your village priest is probably, it may be illiterate um he may be a drunk he may have he may have a secret wife and like six children hanging out running around the running around your parish church like most people are not getting like a strong background in religious instruction you know like that's much more a product of of the early modern period than it is the middle ages oh wow is that and does that fit in with the thing i think

i've heard where in the reformation they started to put the the religious texts in people's actual languages in europe instead of latin and so so then especially you're sitting in a pew and just someone is speaking a language you don't understand and you're like i don't know i guess i'll look at the art all right yeah cool cool as hell yeah yeah're having it. We're having a great time here. Like, and you got to think like, again, a lot of them would just would not have gone that often. They go, you go at Christmas, you go at Easter. Maybe you roll in a little bit at a couple other times.

And when you read medieval, like pastoral care texts, they are constantly exhorting the clergy to like, get out there and do their job, which is supposed to be like looking after the souls of their, the souls of their flocks. And that's why you end up with the mendicant orders that like the, the Franciscan friars, Dominicans, like these wandering preachers is because the thought was that the regular clergy were not doing their actual job. Like they were not actually doing, going out there and talking to people and like caring for their souls in the way they were not actually going out there and talking to people and like caring for their souls in the way they were supposed to. So when we're thinking about gargoyles and cathedrals and what have you, like this always has to be the background. It's like

they were really concerned. They really wanted people to like save their souls. Like that was a genuine concern. But there's also like how much logistically can we actually do about this? I like the idea of there being a, you know, a series of presentations like on Mad Men where they were like, all right, how are we going to save people's souls? And one guy comes in and he's like, we should translate the Bible into the languages they actually speak. And the guy who was going next was going to present, build some gargoyles. He was like, I left something in my wagon. I'm going to go and like revamp my entire presentation but for 300 but for like 300 years they would have been like okay we're going gargoyles we're

going gargoyles like let's leave we're not doing vernacular we're not doing that like do you do you really want them all knowing what's actually in the book probably not like that's the gargoyles are ways it's gonna be another three crusades before they figure out a better way to teach people the gargoyles. I swear to God. Put all your money into that. Plus, the gargoyles deal with water runoff. They serve an architectural purpose. What else are you going to do with a vernacular Bible?

You use it for kindling? That does sound like that salesman grasping at straws. Yep, yep. It's a gutter, too. we get straws. Yep, yep, it's a gutter too. That, you know, this is exciting. I'm going to break the format of the show a little bit. Normally we start with like a quick set of stats and numbers. We'll get to that later. But since you guys mentioned it, I think we can get into takeaway number one. Takeaway number one, technically a gargoyle has to be a water drain i did not know that at all until researching it and like the dictionary definition technical architectural definition

of a gargoyle is that it is part of the water drainage system of a building it can't just be a statue of a funky thing because if it's if it's not serving as a drain, it's just it's it's like a grotesque, right? It's like it's it's a separate thing. Yeah, it's called a grotesque or possibly a chimera. Those are the like other names for it. So there's like a lot of that stuff I found. It was like, can you believe there's a Darth Vader gargoyle at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.? And there is a Darth Vader head on the building, but it doesn't drain any water. And so other people are like,

actually, it's a grotesque. Get out of here. Oh, man. This is a great opportunity for pedantry into correcting people about gargoyles. I really want to see the Wikipedia editors debate about this. I just want to dive in there and see go back look at the back and forth see what see what people have to say it'll be uh five

times longer the talk page for that would be five times longer than you know the page for martin luther or something it's like like the bodybuilding.com forum where they were arguing about how many days are in a week that's what what the... Is Wario a libertarian of our time? Why do they have to introduce that distinction? The descriptive distinction is mostly just people wanting to be specific about words. But it turns out the architectural function is incredibly crucial. One source here is a book called How to Read a Church by lecturer and writer Richard Taylor. And he says that the medieval churches that first had gargoyles, they built projecting water spouts into their roof systems in order to throw rainwater

completely clear of the sides of the building. And some architects proceeded to make them like fun faces and bodies and other things, and then you get gargoyles. But it turns out that was incredibly crucial because otherwise, especially over centuries, if you want this cathedral to last forever, the rainwater will erode the stone, it can get into cracks and then freeze and make the cracks worse. Like gargoyles were an architectural gutter system, basically, to preserve these buildings for, you know, theoretically all of time. I'm glad that's always been a concern of, you know, speaking of guys, medieval types of guys, Patrick,

because we moved into our first home that we own in February. And the idea of the gutters and then leaking into the foundation has become like my pressing concern whenever it rains. So you can imagine the, the medieval guy who just like, you know, every time it rained starts looking at it as gutters to see how far it's actually getting from his house. Yeah, that's, that, that would have been a, that would have been a constant concern, especially because most people are living in homes that are built of some combination of stone, mud, uh, and, uh, and, and like often reeds.

So when we're talking about these houses, there's going to be a fair bit of continuous rebuilding. And when you excavate, I'm thinking more like Iron Age houses, but it would have been true in medieval houses too. You can often see the place, the edge around the outside of the building where the water sluiced off the roof like because it happened often enough it leaves

a distinct impression in the soil so yeah they people people weren't dumb they they knew these things and the speaking of types of guy also like medieval cathedral builders that would have been a very distinct type of guy like like i'm gonna do going to do this thing. We're going to build this building. That's going to take several lifetimes to complete. So I will not be involved at, at, I will probably not see this finished and I'm going to spend literally my entire life on this job site. That's a type of guy. That's it's one of the fascinating things about cathedrals to me is that like, is that they took so long to build because you compare them to like a pyramid right so cathedral like gothic cathedrals were the tallest buildings built on the planet after the pyramids so the pyramids reigned supreme for

3 000 years is the tallest buildings on the on earth but like the pyramids were built over the course of a single ruler's reign and sometimes even less time than that. So you could even even the Great Pyramid didn't take longer than like 25 years to build. But a Gothic cathedral could take 150 years to complete it. I mean, they're still working on La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona right now. So this is an incredibly long term process. It speaks to a very different way of understanding time and your place in it, I think. Yeah, literally, it's the literal version of that concept of I'm going to build a foundation for society. Like, no, I'm I these are the stones I brought them in. And on top,

we'll have some funky carvings that keep the walls from eroding. That's the plan. Yeah, well, if you're going to spend all that time building the thing, you're not going to let it get ruined by a little bit of water. Yeah. But it also is cool that they made things that were fun in the same sense that, you know, you buy a you buy a thing that stores your garden hose in it that looks like, you know look like a rock or something that you had that level of that level of whimsy, I guess, going on with these 150 year projects. Yeah, I never thought of them that way. But now I'm thinking of gargoyles as like tap handles at bars, like some bars, it's just a regular handle. But then other ones, it's like,

oh, we got the funky mermaid one from from the San Diego brewery for their beer. And it's like, oh, we got the funky mermaid one from from the San Diego brewery for their beer. And it's like, oh, he's pulling on a fun handle. All right. Yeah, cool. All right. In general, there's a tendency to think of the Middle Ages as being pretty dreary. Medieval people also like they did have senses of humor. There were things that they found amusing.

They thought that they uh, they thought that jokes about, uh, bodily functions were hilarious. Like medieval people were really into, uh, fart jokes and things of that nature. Um, they, it was, they had kind of an earthy sense of humor. They, there were all a lot of other like less savory things that they thought were hilarious also. Like there's a, there's a whole genre of like rape is funny medieval french things and so but like they did have a sense of humor there were things that they thought were funny and they did think that like funny faces were funny like that that amused them you know it's like they it's not like they were just going through life like you know like streaked peasants in a monty python you know like they, like they did enjoy themselves at various points.

Yeah, I love that. And I, I love that gargoyles are like a signal of it. This is not intended as a joke. But one source here is is CBS Sunday Morning interviewed a bunch of experts about them. And Janetta Rebold Benton, who's a professor of art history at Pace University, says just as a definition, quote, a gargoyle officially must spew water or be able to do so, end quote. And the word spew is funny to me. Like that even, it just fits the vibe, I think. It's these hilarious carvings that are a silly version of gutters. Great. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot to be said for building that kind of whimsy into the grandest monuments of your society. Like if a Gothic cathedral is really the pinnacle of kind of medieval Christendom, the fact that it has real funny things to spew water out is like that speaks to the kind of the heart of what the civilization is every bit as much as like the soaring buttresses do. Right. Like that's like that's giving you a direct insight into into the kind of the like the social psychology that underlies it.

Wow. It makes you wonder what are the things they would have done if they had the technology? Because like, you know, putting like a novelty doorbell on the cathedral or something like that, that played like who let the dogs out or something. on the cathedral or something like that that played like who let the dogs out or something they couldn't do that but maybe they would have if they had more things to do than just carve stone that spewed water i mean i'm imagining a i'm imagining a gregorian chant of who let the dogs out just pooms has let the dogs out just some some really haunting plane song covering the Banga Boys. Man, love talking about art. Am I right? Great works of society.

So I'm on record as not enjoying my privileged trips to see gargoyles. I mean, cathedrals as a teenager, but Venga Boys and Baja Men, bring it on. That's what I love to sit around and talk about. Yeah. Well, look, when you can combine the two, isn't that really the best of both worlds? Hey, there we go. Let's get a concept album, boys. That's high and low culture meeting in the middle.

Yeah. The Venga Men. Yeah. Yeah. yeah the vengamen yeah one uh and one last thing with this technical division it turns out there's a fun clue about the purpose of gargoyles in their name and especially if you speak latin or french it's you maybe know this and this richard taylor's book he says that the word gargoyle comes from the latin word gargulio which means throat and that's also a root shared that the word gargoyle comes from the Latin word gargulio, which means throat. And that's also a root shared with the word gargle. And so even the name of them in the language that

it comes from is speaking to this is specifically for water shooting out of it. Like it's not just a cool statue of a winged demon or whatever. But it's such a perfect word for a statue of a winged demon. Like if they were named something else, it just would be so lame. I don't know if they were called, you know, fun boys or something. I'm not sure. Just spitballing here. Just spitballing here. Right.

Or look at the winged demon, Brian. It's like, no, I don't know. It needs to be. Right. Firebrand. It's right there. But you said they were called, Patrick, you said they were called grotesques if they're not spewing water right that's my understanding if it's a purely architectural feature

yeah then yes yeah fancy they both work they both you know they both describe that thing perfectly and i guess they've come to mean that because of that's the word that we know them by but it does seem to fit really well it it seems fairly guaranteed to me that medieval people would have found the spewing water part of it to be hilarious like he's been water out of his mouth that's i mean that would that would seem in in my in my professional opinion as a as a scholar of the middle ages i feel like we can pretty much guarantee that i mean i think it's hilarious too for that matter like look at that guy that guy's been water at us. It's doing up there. It would have been great to be a

medieval comedian when there were like three funny things like farting, spitting water, and you know, uh, the, the, the mayor falling into mud off of his horse or something. You could, you could really just go out there and play the hits for people from town to town. Yeah. That's, that's the shared culture of the middle ages right there like that's that's that's medieval popular culture is just you know laughing laughing at that did you see that jeff fell in the mud again he was clearing out the lord's ditches he was tired and malnourished and he fell down ah we got you yeah art it's the best uh when uh uh sorry i'm catching myself because we we did break the format and now i am switching to a different part of the notes

because oh man i'm sorry on all other episodes this is the best break i love it uh on all our other episodes we start with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics, and we will enjoy it right now. This week, that's in a segment called I'm the one who shares fun stats with you. Deep inside, I hope you like numbers, too. Maybe there'll be charts with greens and blues. Just some visualizations of these stats for you. I don't know. 90s R&B? Here's the thing.

I don't think I did the tune very well. It's a song by a band called Mr. Big that I heard for the first time putting this together. I think the first line or two was off. I'm the on who wants to say it again that that was the tune i'm just gonna i'm just gonna retake it for ryan c thank you ryan c i'm the one who shares fun stats with you deep inside i hope you like numbers too. That's more it, right? Numbers too. Maybe there'll be charts with greens and blues. Greens and blues. Just to visualize these stats for you.

Connor, huge save. Thank you. I was way off. Thank you. Way off the melody. Took a little while to get there, but the, but you, you stirred, you stirred some emotions in me. And again, distasteful of, uh, cathedrals that took three centuries to build the greatest glories to God.

There are, uh, able to place the, the clapping part of Mr. Big from 1994. This is, this is why I, I did not, uh, win on Jeopardy like Alex did. I mean, look, art comes in many forms. We keep coming back to this touchstone. I was also watching Amityville 4, The Evil Escapes, before this started. So it's not like I wasn't writing a future bestseller about medieval times either. Is that for Riff Trax purposes? Am I spoiling the future ones?

Yeah, we're doing a show of that at the end of the month. Perfect. It's about an evil lamp. An evil lamp? That's like almost a gargoyle, right? Like an evil building feature? True, yeah, well, it doesn't spew. It doesn't spew it doesn't yeah here we

go i have a question about the evil lamp uh yeah which is was the lamp born evil was it created evil or did it become so afterward god you know oh man i do not know that they get into here i mean it's the amityville verse okay so I believe whatever demon inherited that house also was then transferred, you know, into the lamp when it, you know, when they sort of vanquished it. I think that's sort of like it clutched onto the lamp. So, but it, but also then it looks evil. You don't look at the lamp and think that is not an evil lamp. It's like, so, you know, that's, I'm curious about this, like whether the demon corrupted the lamp and made it look evil or whether the demon thought, you know what, that lamp looks pretty evil.

It is like, you know, if a demon corrupted a gargoyle, it would be like, that makes sense. It looks evil. So I think it had that going for it. Well, it makes you wonder, what were you thinking putting a lamp like that in your house in the first place? That's a lot of a lot of layers to this a lot of questions here i mean what are you thinking putting up a darth vader grotesque and calling it a gargoyle people make terrible decisions well guys we have a couple of stats and numbers here and then a couple more takeaways but the

first number is 102. Number 102. That's the number of gargoyles built into the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. And they probably didn't call them gargoyles or think of them as gargoyles, but it was an ancient Greek temple that had 102 lion-faced water spouts to drain water off of the building in kind of a similar way to cathedrals. So, you know, it's not the same kind of architecture in general. But if you want to like fudge it, kind of a cargo, kind of fun. Yeah, that's what it is. It's an ancient Greek temple and they don't want the water out of it.

That's their deal. I would just try to think if Zeus had ever appeared as a lion as he tried to, you know, have sex with anything, you know, whether that was like tied into his whole his whole deal i mean yeah look this was immortal the chances of him not having appeared as a lion in an attempt to have sex with something are very low like that's like dude's been around for a long time just based on sheer probability at some point he has tried to perform the act of coitus in lion form. Yeah, like he saw that scene in The Lion King where it's real romantic, and he was like, that'd probably work. Or he saw the scene where the dust spells out sex,

and he was inspired subliminally to go and do it. My kids went through a real big lion king phase uh and they watched they watched the lion king honest to god probably 60 times uh so there's i we've got a lot we've we've got a lot of lion king going on in this household and it gets surprisingly it gets surprisingly sexual in that one little seed like you really can feel uh you you can feel the love it's it's it's uh it's it's incipient i would say and aren't pumbaa and timon watching them the whole time and like lamenting the fact that his yeah yeah there's they're being the bros are being left behind there's a strong voyeuristic aspect to this it's um yeah who do they do they get female

counterparts in the uh in the later editions like the direct-to-video lion kings is there like a female poomba because that seems like that's sort of disney law right you have to you know pair off and you have to have that i would like to if that doesn't exist well i mean it exists somewhere on the internet but i would like to see the official version of that if it does what is the is there a wiki for the Lion King expanded universe? When next number here, next number here is the 600s AD. And the 600s AD is the century when, according to French legend, a saint created the first gargoyle. This is one legendary origin story for them. And it's coming from a great New Yorker piece by Casey Sepp. In the 600s AD, there was supposedly a dragon that spewed water instead of fire. And it was running around France, flooding farms and attacking villages and eating virgins specifically.

a local French priest named Romanus fights and kills the dragon. Then he tries to dispose of the dragon's body by burning it. But the head part won't burn away. It's made of too hard of a material. And then after a while, he ends up putting it on top of his church. And like the skull head, basically water flows through it in a drainage kind of way. And then we get gargoyles, according to the legend's metal that's metal as hell yeah it's pretty good yeah i was i thought it was going to sound lame as hell because a saint creating the first gargoyle

is you know a lot of other miracles are like did this like made you know water into wine type of thing whereas a gargoyle anyone you know a guy can do that. Like guys do do that, but that's much cooler in that, uh, in that sense that he, they had to slay it and then transform its head into the thing. Like lots of, lots of medieval saints stories are like that. And my favorite thing was when they would go back and decide which saints were real and which ones weren't, which ones were, they just were, where they just like made up a saint to go along with a cool story. Because if you wanted to tell a cool story, there had to be a saint involved. So like periodically they would go through and be like, no, this local saint that you

guys really like, the one who killed the dragon and put its head on the church to be the gargoyle, that guy wasn't real. We're not going to worship him anymore. No more, no more cult of St. Romanus and his dragon head. We're not doing that one. There were, there were medieval saints cults for all sorts of things. There was one for a very loyal dog, a saint dog. And there were all sorts of ones where it's like this local guy that everybody really

liked. Well, he must have been a saint. OK, we're going to get a little local pilgrimage going. We've got his relics over there. Actually, those are dog bones. There was a lot of that in the Middle Ages. Oh, and people used to like, they would fake relics. So there was a booming trade in relics. They would fake relics to sell them. Like, yeah, that was all part of like the weirdness of the Middle Ages. That's so this did. I don't know if either of you grew up Catholic, but I did. And we would get little calendars of all the saints.

And I love the idea that those all passed an audit at some point. They did. They've passed several audits. Yeah. Yeah. Man, imagine thinking you've got a saint's finger and it turns out to be like a dog's foot or something. That happened all the time. All the time all the time and like you're telling me

that i built a gold reliquary for a goat for for a piece of goat skull that we built we can't tell anybody like looks human to me or you turn it on its head and be like well we worship the goat now like the goat uh he he killed the dragon he was he was an amazing goat yeah jeff jeff the goat now like the goat uh he he killed the dragon he was he was an amazing goat yeah jeff jeff the goat he really got out there he really got after thank you jeff for protecting our community i'm also i'm imagining this conversation happening in front of like sad tourists who came all this way like the station wagons outside they're modern for some reason but like as a station wagon and and, mom, two kids like what you're telling me, you're telling me we walked all the way through the Pyrenees to see a goat skull. That's that we did this whole pilgrimage.

That's what are we getting for a souvenir? OK, so here's here's a fun medieval souvenir fact for you, because they did make souven um to go to go along with these pilgrimages gutenberg the inventor of the printing press his first large-scale uh project like where he borrowed money and was trying to set up like an industrial process to mass produce a thing was to make mirrors for um uh uh like a pilgrimage and the idea was that if you took the mirror in to look at the relics and you caught the reflection of the relic, then you would get some of its kind of holy power to take away with you. Except Gutenberg got the date of the,

got the date wrong. So they made all of these mirrors like a year too early and they had nobody to sell them to. Oh man. It was like an error card. Tough break for Gutenberg wait so you had to look at them in the mirror because you it would be you would be like indiana jones if you looked at them full on you could look at them full on that was fine but if you wanted to take it with you

away you held up the mirror to the relic and you when it caught the reflection of the relic then it would carry that away so you took the mirror away and you had a little bit of the holiness of the relic. No one's ever going to devise a better system for capturing visual representations of things you saw on vacation. You sit down to your family and make them look at it when you get back, like a slideshow. All I see is myself. You're telling me the relic is in here i will believe you but uh what does this date say is that a year no never mind slideshow's over man gutenberg what a clown yeah also went bankrupt printing books uh did a lot of bankruptcy that guy

practically everybody who tried uh printing books early on went bankrupt and went out of business. Like it took it took like a half a century or more to find a viable business model for for printing. Well, you were asking people to probably spend their their year's earnings on, you know, the latest Tom Clancy book or whatever. And then they're like, I forgot I couldn't even read. Oh, like people because they had no idea what people actually wanted to read they had no idea where the people lived who would buy the books uh so you could end up with like 500 copies that took you a year to make of a book that nobody was gonna read and oh yeah like all the books fell into the river as we were as uh because the bridge because the

bridge collapsed that's a thing that happened um so like yeah uh gutenberg i think the reason why gutenberg went bankrupt it's not entirely clear but he probably cheated his business partner uh like he was supposed to pay him back for the initial loans that it had taken to um to like cut the type and and set up the press and yeah he cheated the guy uh kept the money, and then the guy sued him. Gutenberg lost all of the Gutenberg lost all of the stuff. And the got the the investor then hired somebody else to work for him who was much more successful than Gutenberg using Gutenberg's type and everything. I mean, in in Gutenberg's defense, he lacked any access to, you know, some kind of text with morals in it and stories about how to be a good person.

So he had no ability to be guided. How could he have known? You're talking about the art of the deal, right? How to win friends and influence people. How to win friends and influence people. Well, next, there's just a couple more numbers here, and they're very modern. The next one is 1991. It's the year 1991.

And that is... Mr. Big. I think that's close, actually, yeah. 1991 is the year when renovators added a xenomorph gargoyle to a Scottish abbey and I sent you guys a picture of it this is like the alien type from the alien franchise that started in

1979 the alien movie but it's at an abbey from the 1100s in Scotland and renovators needed to replace 12 of the 13 gargoyles at the Abbey. And they, they had fun with it. They made one of them just shaped like a chestburster. That's amazing. Yeah. It's so cool. It rules. Yeah. It's really good. Yeah. You compare that to the, to the woman who redid the, uh, uh, the painting of in,

in Italy, was that where it was, where she tried to retouch it? I was, I was, I think it was in Spain. Yeah. These guys did a better job of updating this cathedral's look, I'd say. Well, it's extremely on brand. That's exactly what a gargoyle is supposed to be. It's supposed to be something cool. Yeah, and kind of funny and imaginative.

Yeah, it fits. Was it a controversy at all when they did this or was it just uh you know have at it guys antlers obscure is my source here and they do not describe any controversy coming of it yeah i think people were either cool about it or or i missed it the other one was vanilla ice and since it was 1991 that was a bit more controversial like yeah they they didn't like that the the that one of the gargoyles played Stop Hammer Time. It's hammer time. Every time water flowed through it.

Wow. And the last number here is the following year, 1992. And 1992, this is technically a grotesque thing, not a gargoyle thing. I just really like it. In 1992, renovators at the Salamanca Cathedral in Spain added a grotesque of an astronaut. They decided, let's just do an astronaut on the side of the building. And Atlas Obscura says an urban legend developed where some local people claimed that the medieval builders of the cathedral predicted the space program.

It was a bunch of Nostradamus-type stuff popped up around it. It's not true. It's just renovators of cathedrals will put in wild art like this. They predicted us faking the moon landing. Stunning. Little stone Kubrick just rolling. I think that was one of the ones I think I saw on the senior, uh, sophomore year

of high school class trip to Spain. I think we went to the Salamanca thing. I think they also have a famous frog on that cathedral. Um, I made me incorrect about that, but I was trying to remember some of the things I had things, scenes carved into that. And I think that was a, a wall that they made us stand in front of and look at for a long time. I do not remember the astronaut though. Yeah of all of these are easter eggs like it's so easy to

like i've probably been to a cathedral that had like spongebob on top or something and i just didn't notice you know like like i'm sure this is happening all the time yeah i'm looking it up it does have a frog but it's also like it's very that would be very tiny if you were down there because it's an it's a massive wall so massive wall. So telling a high school student that there is an astronaut up there, you're going to have to take my word for it, is not the fascinating experience you might have if you had a set of opera glasses or something. Yeah. I mean, I feel like trying to get a 16-year-old to do anything is an extremely difficult task. Like trying to get them to focus on an image on a wall, like, Rex. I'm too horny.

I can't do it, is like every boy at that age. Come on. That's, I mean, I wasn't going to say it, but yeah, that's essentially it. I've multiple times done a performance of a show where I have a poem that me and two other guys wrote to the other girls on that trip that we like slipped under their door one time. That is like exactly what you did then. It's like witnessed all these wonders, cathedrals, like sites we'll never see again in our lifetimes. But it's like, yeah, we're just kind of horny.

So we're going to make Austin Powers jokes and slip them under the girls into the girls room at night. That's that's being 16 put austin powers on the salamanca wall you cowards he's he's paid his dues uh yeah that uh well a fembot would be a great gargoyle do i drain your water baby yeah is the writing beneath it, obviously. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec.

I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie,

Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory the jv club with janet varney is available every thursday on maximum fun or wherever you get your podcasts thank you and remember no running in the halls well uh there's another big takeaway for the main episode. And look, it's going to be a tonal shift, but it's about more modern gargoyles. It takes us into takeaway number two. Australia's main war memorial features racist gargoyles of First Nations people with one modern modification.

And I know that was a long one, so one more time. Australia's main war memorial features racist gargoyles of First Nations people with one modern modification. Patrick, I'm sure you have a guess about what this might be on this delicate topic of, I'll make a funny thing after you've explored this. I have no idea. I got nothing. I got nothing here. This is a story. The main sources are the conversation.com, which is a heavily researched Australian site, and then also the Canberra Times and then the website for this thing. It's called the Australian War Memorial,

and it's the main war memorial for the country of Australia. It's in a suburb of Canberra, the capital. There's also there's a wrinkle with it where they planned it as a World War I memorial, but they didn't really get construction going until the 1930s. And then they realized there were going to be more wars. And so they changed it to be for all the wars, which maybe has happened other places with other memorials. That's interesting to me in general. I remember an Encyclopedia Brown story where the Bugs Meaty was confirmed not to have a sword

from the first Battle of Bull Run because it had the first Battle of Bull Run inscribed onto it. And so Encyclopedia Brown did some quick thinking and realized they would not have had that imprinted on it if they had known there was going to be a second one. Right. The irony of the war to end all wars being the lesser of the two great conflicts of the 20th century is not lost on anyone. All right. So we've gotten around the war memorial part. How does it get racist?

What happened is this war memorial has things that are actually technically gargoyles. There are 26 stone carvings of faces that are drainage systems. Like the mouth is a water spout. And it's not shaped like a cathedral, but they're in the walls and they're for drainage of water in the building. And they were made by William Leslie Bowles. He was a white Australian sculptor born in 1885. And his idea for this was, I'm going to make each gargoyle a different part of Australian nature. And so he proceeded to do, there are 26 gargoyles on it. He did 24 different animals, like there's an emu and

a kookaburra and a kangaroo and stuff. And then the other two are a male native person's face and a female native person's face. And they're caricature-y and they're not great. That's what you think. Yeah. I'm looking at them and yeah, that's real racist. Leaving aside the context in which they appear, which is also racist, also deeply, deeply and inherently racist. The images themselves also super racist. Not great. It's not a great look. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's treating native people of Australia as animals and dehumanizing

them. And so it's pretty cut and dried. It's not a good thing at all. And this memorial opened in 1941. Among other things, the writer Lisa Barrett-Iles, writing for The Conversation, she points out that the memorial opened in 1941, and Australia did not give voting rights or citizenship to Indigenous Australians until 1967. Also, there were active military operations against Australia's Indigenous people by their government after World War I. It's very sad. It's an entire history of Native people being exploited and killed and put through horrible things. So are they still up there?

Yeah. And so then the carvings are still there. And this goes back to that definitional thing of a gargoyle has to be for drainage. Yeah. Otherwise, Paul Hogan will say that's not a gargoyle has to be for drainage yeah otherwise paul hogan will say that's not a gargoyle oh sorry if no if he would pop in and bring some joy that would be something that'd be great no but so unfortunately this war memorial didn't really look into changing these until 2014 and because they needed to just do like renovation of the gargoyles, like there was too much water going through them, and they needed to like redo them. And and then people said, Hey, while you're doing that, change this, this is terrible. Obviously fix this. But then also a debate sprang up around. And it reminds me of a thing at the Natural History Museum in New York where there's a pretty racist statue of Teddy Roosevelt out front where he's being served by a Native American and an African person.

And some people said leave it up to demonstrate the racism of the past, and others said it's just too racist, take it down. But the way this works... These are your standard statue arguments. Yeah, a lot of statue arguments. Yeah, all over the US. We're very familiar with it. But the the way the memorial came down is they said, we're going to leave these up, but we're going to make the the two native person face gargoyles not part of the drainage system anymore and in that way we distinguish them as different from these animals and it's no longer so much of the bad thing was their decision with problem solved yeah that's and connor connor was like brushing his hands

off he was not clapping it should be clear for the audio that that strikes me as a very australian solution to that specific issue like yeah uh based on based on what i know of australian politics that seems very of a of a piece yeah yeah it's like i i find it inadequate but it's it's what they've decided to do and uh and there is that of like, we leave this here so we don't hide our crimes from the future. Like, there's a lot of ways to look at it. But according to the website, quote, they were not fitted with drainage points and are therefore no longer referred to as gargoyles, but are referred to as architectural bosses, end quote. So apparently they're not even grotesques they're this cool term i've never heard of before architectural boss that is a cool very

cool name yeah i mean i was gonna say everything about that seemed like a very half half-assed way to go about it but they they did attempt to stick the landing with architectural bosses yeah yeah because if you go like going from a gargoyle to a grotesque, I'm not sure that's an improvement on the race, on the racism. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this term existed before, but they made a point of it on their website and their stuff. Yeah. And the last takeaway of the show is much more lighthearted.

So let's get into it. Takeaway number three. Allegedly, Disney considered turning the Gargoyles TV show into a massive global entertainment franchise. I like that. That's something you can consider. Yeah. This is like, it's a 1990s animated show about gargoyles that go on adventures and come to life at night. And it was almost like a Marvel Cinematic Universe level project for Disney. But just the idea that they can flip a switch and then make that happen is a very daunting thing for for what art means these days. these days i mean it's it's pretty and in that sense it's pretty meta right because it's it would be commercialized art about whimsical art on cathedrals like there's a lot a lot going on there oh yeah yeah wow it's it's it's gargoyles all the way down great yeah they decided not to

do it because that one guy who made the presentation about gargoyles, they would have had to pay his great, great, great grandchildren. The, uh, that's, I mean, if,

if we're looking at Disney's reasoning for something, I think that may have been a deciding factor. It turns out they're not in the public domain. The idea of gargoyles, Frank gargoyle of, uh, Antwerp or something owns the, uh, owns the rights. The gargoyle of uh antwerp or something owns the uh owns the rights the gargoyle uh the gargoyle lineage is owned by a uh fail son with a ponytail or something like that who just jets around

man i feel like there's a great uh limited knowledge of this Gargoyles cartoon bias. I'm sorry that I couldn't bring anything to the table for it. No, I had heard of it. I think I heard of it for the first time when this past year I started watching Avatar the Last Airbender. And it came up on lists of other very advanced cartoons for teenagers and children. Where there's a continuous story and dark themes and stuff. Because I had not seen it but i think uh people who saw it it was on tv from 1994 to 1997 also split between the disney channel and abc and apparently some difficulties with time slots and things but this was like a a very ambitious cartoon show about uh gargoyles from a castle in scotland who get transplanted to the top of a

skyscraper in New York City. And then they have to have adventures and like figure out the city in the modern day. So they're sort of like the flying gremlin in Gremlins 2 who ends up like, you know, on the cathedral. I'm talking about he gets cement poured on him and that's how he ends up there. Oh, I haven't seen Gremlins 2, but that's amazing. Great. I love it. It was just a very big commitment to gargoyles-based entertainment for kids. Because I think they feel the way we talked about with us visiting churches.

Like, I'm a kid and I'm hungry. Or I'm a teenager and I'm distracted by the other gender that I care about. You know? Yeah. or I'm a teenager and I'm distracted by the other gender that I care about. How relatable are gargoyles if you're looking to make a mass media franchise? Is that really going to be your entry point to this whole thing? Right, right, yeah. The near miss here, and this is coming, and take this with a grain of salt because it's coming from Greg Weissman, who was a co-creator of the show. So he might be overstating how likely this was to dominating the globe in terms of the next big IP. Yeah, yeah. But it is like, I can see how the near miss works and the timeline adds up.

So the show starts out as a pretty big ratings hit for what it is and also sells a bunch of action figures. And then according to Greg Weissman, interview with Polygon.com, he was in a meeting at Disney in the mid-90s where the executives, the agenda for the meeting was, should we buy Marvel comics? Should we, Disney, in the mid-90s do this? And of course, they will do that in our time now. But it was like, should we buy this kind of struggling, failing comic book brand that is out there? And according to Weissman, Disney chairman Michael Eisner was talked out of it in the meeting, which is still wildly ironic to me. Warner Brothers has DC Comics.

We need to have an action universe like DC or Marvel. And he turned to me and said, could we use gargoyles as the launching pad for a Disney action universe? And I said, yes, end quote. So there was a meeting where they literally they said, our Marvel Cinematic Universe could be gargoyles. Let's just blow it out. Let's do it wow what an incredible alternate universe that is ah and just imagine the other low tier

children's entertainment from that like michael eisner like you know solemnly turning to the creator of street sharks and saying that you know right there were so many kind of random cartoons during the day in the 90s like any any of them could have been the the creator in the room any of them yeah right he's the gargoyles guy and it's probably just by by sheer obviously there's some level of quality going into it but like it's probably just by sheer marketing that you make something into what it's going to be you know ninja turtles type of thing like that was just that was by force of will um that it became as big as it did yeah wow like like you're an alien you've come to earth would you predict that gargoyles or teenage mutant ninja turtles is

going to be the bigger deal right i don't know exactly maybe gargoyles in that situation but like gargoyles it doesn't seem like it even lives on as like you know i'm trying to think you know you've there's all a couple of memes from like the x-men animated series like wolverine looking at that picture i don't really feel like the gargoyles penetrates my radar the way that some other shows i've never seen do you know like spongebob is everywhere i know things about that even though i've never watched a frame of it but gargoyles maybe just people don't have fondness for it or maybe it's a weirder corner of the internet but i feel like i hear more about shows like doug than i do about gargoyles you know they're probably of similar quality and and and popularity yeah i think

you're right and it seems like that and difficult chance are the two big reasons it didn't like take off and organically do this. Because also I so I started watching it. And it turns out, like I was reading the interview with this creator, and they asked him, what's the best episode of the show? And he was like, well, definitely the five part pilot. That's the best one. And this show, it's a show that was on TV where you had to watch it when it aired. And the pilot is spread across five episodes. Wow. And it's for kids. It's all very ambitious to me. I don't know if it could have worked. Man. Weissman brings up a couple reasons that seem real. One of them is that there was a key Disney executive championing it named Frank Wells. And later that year in 1994, he dies in a helicopter

crash. So that like removes a supporter of the show, sadly. And then Michael Eisner ends up in a famous fight with Jeffrey Katzenberg at the executive level of Disney. And so he's distracted from this. And then the other issue is the cartoon airs during the day. And the following year, 1995, it starts getting preempted by local news coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial. And this is a show where you have to see every episode to know what's going on. And so a lot of weeks or days, they just broke in with like a murder trial instead. And so that was difficult too. This sounds like something that a guy would tell you at an airport bar when his flight was delayed,

that his saga of almost inventing the Marvel Cinematic Universe of gargoyles, but it was foiled by a helicopter crash and that damn OJ Simpson trial. Other than that, I'd be buying this whole bar and drink, man. Instead, they've got, you know, cats in America with a shield. That's not cool. Kids with gargoyles are cool.

That's stunning. Yeah. Yeah. So a whole for many, many, many reasons, they're not the dominant pop culture franchise in the world. But you can go see it on Disney Plus if you want to right now. It's pretty good. It's cool. Yeah. And there's always a chance they bring it back, you know, if they own that IP, if they want to decide that's the next wing of Disney World.

Let's get that Gargoyles reboot. Oh, and yeah, no joke, there's also a rumor that Jordan Peele thought about rebooting it. So that could have also kicked it off, but it hasn't happened. He's busy with everything else. Keep our eyes out for that one. He's a prominent Gremlins 2 fan, as I recall. Patrick, did you work around saying keep our eyes peeled for that? Is that going on?

God. Yeah, I was trying not to do that. That was, I don't know if I could have lived with myself. It was very deft. I loved it. Yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Connor Lestoka and Patrick Wyman for gathering on the rooftop of this topic with me.

Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, because patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is two amazing stories of gargoyle self-portraits. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than five dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring gargoyles with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, technically a gargoyle has to be a water drain. Takeaway number two, Australia's main war memorial features racist gargoyles of First Nations people with one modern modification. And takeaway number three, allegedly Disney considered turning gargoyles into a massive global entertainment franchise. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great.

Connor Listoka is a senior writer and producer for Riff Tracks. He and his pal Michael J. Nelson co-host a very funny podcast called 372 Pages I'll Never Get Back, and his newest comic novel is called The Pole Vault Championship of the Entire Universe. Links to all of that and more are, of course, in the episode links. And speaking of stuff I'm linking, Patrick Wyman has an amazing new book. It's called The Verge, Reformation, Renaissance, and 40 Years That Shook the World. If you like history, you're going to love this book. Also, I hope you already know Patrick's voice from his podcast Tides of History, or from his past podcast The Fall of Rome, and we'll link a bunch of his excellent online writing

as well. Just really glad to have him on the show. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article in The New Yorker called The Endurance of Notre Dame. That's by writer Casey Sepp. Also a great book titled How to Read a Church. That's by lecturer and writer Richard Taylor. Also a lot of amazing stuff from PBS about how gargoyles drain water away from church walls and spout it away. And then tons of pictures, especially from Atlas Obscura, of astounding-looking gargoyles that you'll like to see. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun.

And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show about the self-portrait gargoyles hidden in the world. And thank you to all our listeners.

I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.