Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: A Podcast on Zoot Suits? Yes

Episode Date: February 15, 2020

Few riots can be attributed to passing fashions, but zoot suits are top among them. After originating among the Harlem Renaissance crowd, the zoot suit came to symbolize political defiance. Find out why it's still illegal to wear a zoot suit in L.A. in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, your old pal. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our episode on zoot suits. It is a fascinating, overlooked piece of history about how clothes can mean so much more

than just what's keeping the elements off of you or keeping your modesty intact. Plus, listen up for a surprise appearance by Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is quite surprising. Enjoy. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chucker's Bryant. And since two of us are sitting together again, and it's not lunchtime. It's not leg wrestling time. It's true. This means it's a step you should know.

Yeah, what's up, dude? How are you, Josh? I'm good. We just got something in today that I want to give a shout out of thanks for. Oh, yeah? To our friend, Martin Van Nostrand. Did that come in today?

Today? OK. He kept emailing us, pestering me, like, it hasn't not come yet. Like, I'm the postmaster general or something like that. Right. But anyway, he sent us each a t-shirt. And the new CD of his band, The Bangalores, in vitro meat

is the name of the album. And it's pretty awesome. I haven't listened to it yet. I just got it. Can't wait. He sent us some songs off of it already. Oh, some previous cuts. Yeah.

He was the first person to record a stuff you should know song, like, in 2008. You remember? Well, yeah. And I think he has a Toxoplasmosis song on the new one, right? He does. Yeah, we've inspired a lot.

I think he released a whole album of stuff you should know songs. Really? Yeah, and like, quick little punk songs too, like, a minute and a half, so there's like, 50 of them. Yeah. But anyway, thanks a lot to Van Nostrand. We won't say his real name, but we know it.

We do, finally. We didn't for a long time. But anyway, if you feel like checking that out, it's The Bangalores, like, the city in India, and the album is in vitro meat. And we'll probably get in trouble for endorsing this. Probably so. So Chuck, you want to get to it?

Yes. Have you ever heard of some dumb laws? Yeah, man. There are some dumb laws in this great land of ours. For example, if I may, I've prepared a short list. Awesome. In Alabama, bare wrestling matches are prohibited. It's illegal to sell peanuts in Lee County

after sundown on Wednesday. That would be Lee County, Alabama. Did he give a reason for that one? No, there are some. This is from, I think, dumblaws.com. And they have just international laws, state laws, local laws. And then under some of them, they

have full text of the law or why this law exists. Gotcha. It's a pretty comprehensive site. In Hawaii, coins are not allowed to be placed in one's ears or for spending only. All residents may be fined as a result of not owning a boat. You're going to Hawaii tomorrow, right? Or the next couple of days.

I dare you to put a coin in your ear and walk around eating out of a can of spam. I don't own a boat. I don't own a boat. Chumps. Back in our fair state of Georgia, it's illegal to use profanity in front of a dead body, which lies in a funeral home or in a coroner's office.

That's respectful. That's a good law. OK. In Acworth, which is close to Kennesaw, where I grew up, where you had to own a gun. I didn't know this. In Acworth, all citizens must own a rake. Really?

Yeah. Not a blower. A rake. I think a blower. That's kind of like asking a lot of some of the lower income classes. In Athens, on Mondays, it's illegal for one to whistle very loudly after 11 PM.

What? But on Mondays. OK. And then California, of course, is going to have some zany laws. They have tons and tons of wacky dumb laws. Animals are banned from mating publicly within 1,500 feet of a tavern school or place of worship. I agree.

Women may not drive in a house coat. I agree with that, too. In Fresno, getting drunk on a playground is against the law. That is sound. I don't agree with that one. It's sensible. And then in Los Angeles, it's illegal to wear a zoot suit. Yeah.

Still? Still. Wow. So I bring that up. And I knew Chuck would like that last one, because I'm sure there's stories behind almost all of those zany laws, or at least there's some reasoning. People don't just make up crazy laws, like bear wrestlers.

I'm sure it got out of hand once. And now they're just like, that's it. It's illegal. So Chuck and I actually know the reason why zoot suits are illegal in Los Angeles County, California. And we're going to tell you about it today. It's pretty neat. This little article started off as a bit of a lark.

I don't know. But we thought zoot suits. Those are interesting and cool, but it's more than a suit as it turns out. It really is. It was, at least. You should probably mention, what is a zoot suit, Chuck? I think everybody's seen them before.

Yeah, back in the 1930s, they were very much in fashion, especially in Latino communities, in African-American communities. Coast to coast, though, seems like. Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Cab Calloway, Big Band Leaders, the jazz scene in New York, all very much associated with zoot suits. Tom Kat from Tom and Jerry, who was going after a girl

and she said he was a square and was corny. And he goes out and gets him a zoot suit and becomes a cool cat. A cool cat? Yeah. So you'll know a zoot suit. They were originally made of wool and then later rayon. But you'll know it because they're very distinct.

They have very broad, padded shoulders, very long-waisted coats. The suit pants were worn really, really high, like up over the belly. And were very tight at the top, then ballooned out like MC Hammer style. And then tapered back down again at the ankle. Or were pegged.

Oh, of course. That's how you achieve that look. And the jackets exaggerated contours and colors. A lot of times they would wear the big pocket watch chain that went down to their knee and the hat with the feather. And it was just like pointed shoes. So if it sounds a lot like pimp's, 70s pimp's wear to you. Not too far off, I guess.

I think you could make an argument that it was a predecessor of that. And in fact, you mentioned Malcolm X favorite zoot suits. I didn't realize this today, but in researching zoot suits, Malcolm X used to be called Detroit Red, who was in fact a pimp. Yeah. And he apparently got his education in Harlem

and became Malcolm X. Did you not see the movie? No, I haven't. It was good. From what I remember from the awesome Spike Lee movie was that he was into the zoot scene earlier. And then once he became Malcolm X and not, what was his original name, Shabazz?

Yes, I believe so. Malcolm Shabazz. So once he became Malcolm X and got serious about the civil rights, he ditched the zoot suit and stuff and was a little more traditionally garbed. Right. Another way, so the zoot suit, you just nailed it on the head. You said the zoot suit scene.

It was very much part of the scene, part of the Harlem Renaissance. It was part of the Pacho scene out in Los Angeles, which we'll talk about. Pacho? Pacho. Pachuko? Pachuko.

I like slang on top of slang, so I call it Pacho. Exactly. So it was kind of the uniform of the certain kind of scene, apparently the upscale black nightclubs of Harlem. Like if you saw an African-American man walking around wearing a zoot suit, you're like, that guy is a high roller, and he knows how to get into the good clubs. I thought you were going to bust out some Cab Callaway slang.

Well, you mentioned Cab Callaway, it was one of the people who love zoot suits. And he wrote a dictionary of slang. A jive. A jive slang, thank you. I could not be square if I tried. And one of the words that he put down was zoot, which he says means exaggerated.

It turns out that there's a whole lot of mystery surrounding the origins of zoot suit. But if I may, in Cab Callaway's jive slang, describe what a zoot suit looks like. You did a great job in normal square corny terms. But if you want to talk like a hip cat from the jive jump zoot suit era, you would describe it as a killer-diller coat with a drape shape, real pleats,

and shoulders padded like a lunatic cell. Well, it's interesting that he said drape because originally they were known as drape suits and even advertised as extreme, quote, extreme drapes in newspapers. Pretty cool. So zoot suits hanging out there. It's kind of weird.

Ralph Ellison wrote about it in Invisible Man, his novel. The narrator encounters three young and extravagantly dressed blacks in their zoot suits. And he says that they were the stewards of something uncomfortable. So he's saying it's almost like it's the same as if you saw a bunch of rave kids wearing like the stupid pants.

Yes, in the 90s or whatever, or hip hop kids today. It was the same thing, except this was much more upscale than that. But it was basically like the baggy pants today that people have trouble walking in, but they're still got to have that look, because that's what the cool kids do. Exactly.

So this was, you could argue, the original American version of counter culture dress. Right, agreed. And it grew out of Harlem and was later adopted by Mexican-Americans or Latino-Americans in Los Angeles. Yeah, what's this one bit that it could have originated in Gainesville, Georgia?

How about that? So yeah, there's a lot of, there's some origin stories, right? And yeah, and they're none of them are the same, right? And they're all very different. No, but I do like that one you're talking about from Gainesville. What is it? Yeah, a man, a bus driver, I'm sorry, a bus worker named

Clyde Duncan from New York, came back to New York with one and said he bought it in Gainesville, Georgia. And allegedly, he had been inspired by Gone with the Wind and wanted to look like Rhett Butler. And so got a tailor in Gainesville to make him this thing. I'd like to go with that story. Well, the New York Times put that story forth, and they said it basically unequivocally in 1943.

And that was the story for many, many years until historians actually started to put real effort and thought into the Zoot suits. And they found that it's possibly true, but most likely, it came out of either guys like Cab Calloway wearing them, or guys like Cab Calloway copying people in the jazz scene. And then it basically going forth like that. S-Y-Y-N-Y-S-K-S-K.

K-B-K-K. You should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, The 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive

back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh God.

Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Ultimately, it seems that it did come out of this era,

whether it was, uh, this Clyde Duncan fella, Right. who had the idea originally or whatever, you can basically say the Harlem Renaissance suits came out of that. Gotcha. And you know, I knew that. I did not know of its association within the Latino and largely Mexican community. No, but that's where like really started to,

it switched when it hit the Latino American community. Before it was just like, I'm wealthy, I can get into good clubs. I'm part of this club scene in Harlem. Um, when it hit Los Angeles and was taken up by the Pachos. Pachucos. Right, um, Square, uh, it changed, it transformed, it turned into something political and became ultimately a sign of defiance. Yeah, in World War II, you know, everyone knows that there was,

there was rationing going on, everything from food to metals and, ultimately wool and cloth. So, wearing a Zoot suit, which required an abundance of cloth was deemed not patriotic. Right. Because you're basically flaunting, hey, I don't care about the war effort. I'm going to wear my Zoot suit. That's more important to me. Right, exactly.

So, um, in, in the 40s, the war production board basically said, we need to cut back all fabric use in the States by 26% and help you. Here is the new American suit. It's streamlined, it uses less fabric. As long as you're making stuff according to these, um, these sketches, you're patriotic, you're American, you're within the law. Right? Uncle Sam, why don't you wear tight clothes?

Pretty much. And if you think about it, if you look at the suits, uh, in the 50s and 60s, and, uh, after the 40s, um, the, the American, the classic American suit is narrow. Yeah. It's narrow cut, the cuffs are high. Skinny ties. Yeah. Um, so I wonder if that came out of that.

I'm sure it did. I bet it did. But you can take what they were saying a different way and that Uncle Sam's telling you to dress like this and everybody dressed like that. Yeah. So, Zoot suits immediately became, um, a, a symbol of defiance. Anybody who wore them was saying, you know, up yours, Uncle Sam. Uh, and it was ultimately illegal to manufacture or advertise as Zoot suit or

anything that fell outside of those American suits. So incredibly bootleg and underground tailors grew up to make and sell Zoot suits. That's true. Yeah. And at the same time, uh, especially in Los Angeles, it had an association with, uh, gang activity, criminal activity and thuggery, largely because of, uh, newspapers that would call them, you know, Zoot suitors committing crimes. They would, you know, label people in its particular clothing as being criminals,

essentially. Yeah. Well, racism is definitely nothing new in this country. And it was, um, hot and heavy in the, uh, late 30s, early 40s in Los Angeles among, um, it was mainly targeted, I think, toward Latino Americans, but it's not like African Americans didn't get the brunt of it as well. Sure. But basically it was white people in California were like, Hey, there's a lot of you these days.

So you're making us a little nervous and, um, you wearing the Zoot suit is easy to target. It just so happened that the group that they were targeting, uh, was actually kind of homogenous. People who wore Zoot suits kind of, uh, wore them in defiance, but also identified themselves with them, right? The Pachos. Yeah. It was a statement of independence, uh, not necessarily thumbing your nose at the United States, but just, Hey, I'm independent.

I'm Latino. I'm living in Los Angeles. It's 1940s and this is our look. So the Pachos, the Pachucos, the Pachucos, the Pachos. I'm seeing Pachos right here. Octavio Paz said Pachos, Pachos. Yeah. Okay. Um, so the Pachos were, they weren't an import from Mexico.

They were a real American hybrid. They were second generation, um, Latino American kids who ironically because of the war effort were latchkey kids. Their parents were off working the night shift for war production and they were basically left to them, their own devices. They called themselves 24 hour orphans, the first latchkey kids. And, um, they were also arguably the first rebels and out of their emergence in America, um, came the whole concept of juvenile delinquency.

Yeah. I love that one quote from Octavio Paz. Can I read that? Yeah. He said the zootsuit was a symbol of love and joy or horror and loathing, an embodiment of liberty, of disorder, of the forbidden. So it was this single fashion item was, uh, at the same time, asserting your independence and individuality as well as what white folks saw as thumb in their nose at the white man,

basically. Yeah. Um, and I guess that's exactly what they were doing because as you said, like they weren't necessarily wearing the zootsuit as a statement. They weren't anti-war protesters. Right. But it was more like, you know what? I'm sick of you racist white people and I'm, I'm not going to hide my identity.

I'm not going to try to blend in. Right. I'm not going to go back to my traditional roots from Mexico because I wasn't born here, but I'm not going to, you know, join the service and, and wear an American suit. Like, like, so this is, this was the compromise. And it ticked white people off like crazy, especially in Los Angeles. Yeah. Well, at the time in Southern California, there was an enormous presence of, um,

servicemen who were waiting to ship out to the Pacific theater from California. Yeah. And they were, you know, rubbing elbows with these guys that a lot of people thought were gang members and zootsuiters and they rubbed elbows, not in a very good way either, uh, which, you know, ultimately led to the zootsuit riots, but there were some pretty striking events that led up to that 1943 summer. So one of the things you said you mentioned was that the, they were getting negative press, right?

So people in zootsuits were associated with things like, um, uh, let me see, quote, um, the record already reveals killing, stabbings, and cases of innocent women having been molested by zootsuit gangsters. That's from the Los Angeles Examiner. And, uh, the article was titled, police must clean up LA hoodlumism, which is not a word. Hoodlumism. Right. But so, so there's this joint effort of, um, just general racism among whites in the,

in the general public, um, and servicemen waiting to be deployed specifically and the Los Angeles media kind of fanning the flames. That's right. And then the sleepy lagoon murder happened. The sleepy lagoon case, sleepy lagoon. Josh was a reservoir, uh, by the LA river. And it's not there anymore. Isn't that fascinating?

Not there at all. It's like a plastics plant there now. There's no reservoir. Uh, yeah. So don't go looking for it. Even though they said it's, uh, roughly it was at 5,500 sloths and boulevard in Maywood. I know where that is actually. I think it's on the way to the airport.

Uh, so the sleepy lagoon case, um, at the time Mexican-Americans were denied access to public pools and swimming holes and stuff like that. So they used sleepy lagoon as a big hangout where they would go and listen to music and swim and have a good time. Um, in August 2, 1942, uh, the body of Jose Diaz was found at this reservoir. And what I gather, there was a big party, like a big house party where a fight broke out and one guy ended up getting killed. And as a result, they rounded up, uh, three to 400 Mexican-American youths had a corrupt

trial where they basically denied the many civil rights, cooked up evidence, had no evidence, had no physical evidence, had no, uh, witnesses, nothing of the sort. And they basically pinned that murder on 12 guys. Is that right? Nine kids, but they rounded up 300. Yeah. But they railroaded nine with no evidence that the guy had even been murdered. And eventually the sleepy lagoon, uh, defense committee and the U.S.

District Court of Appeals overturned that as a miscarriage of justice. Right. But the damage was already done. Yeah. And his killer incidentally was never found. They never singled anyone out, which is sad. That's kind of lost a lot of times, I think. But at the same time, you can't just cook up a case against dudes that were there and say that

they did it. Exactly. So, um, the, the press attention that the sleepy lagoon case received just fan the flames further and further. And then, uh, in June, no, May of 1943, that's when things really started to take a turn for the worse. That's right. I guess about a dozen servicemen, I think Navy boys, were, um, down in, uh, East LA.

Yeah. And, uh, a few of them approached some girls, one of them kept walking. And the one that kept walking passed a group of pouches who were wearing suitsuits. The chukas. And when, uh, when he passed, um, one of them apparently raised his hand in what the guy took as a threatening manner. So the servicemen grabbed his arm and right after that everything went black because somebody knocked him over the back of his head with something and he fell and broke his jaw in

two places. Okay. The other guy see this. The other guy see it, but before they even react, the, the pouches jump them and these 11 other servicemen fight their way out and fight their way over to where the guy is laying, the guy who's knocked out with the broken jaw and get him out of there. So this is not, this is not Bodewell for, um, Mexican-American white relations in Los Angeles in 1943, a few days after that, like revenge is on the mind of everybody after news of

this gets out. Yeah, big time, especially in the military community. And, uh, basically sort of the same thing happened. Main Street, East LA on June 3rd, uh, 11 sailors got off a bus and there were words with, uh, a gang of young Mexicans. And when I say gang, I should say group. And we shouldn't say necessarily Mexicans. The, the likelihood was that they were Mexicans in the 40s,

but they're, they were Latino-Americans. Okay. Uh, I tried to get to the whole bottom of the word Chicano as well. I know, um, Hispanic is from Ronald Reagan. Is it? And it's basically, it insinuates that everybody from Central or Latin America or South America comes from Hispaniola. Well, and what I found from Chicano was that it was a, a derogatory term early on, very negative,

but it meant specifically Mexican-American. And then later, I believe they, some, some of them chose to embrace that word as a point of pride. Yeah. Or the 60s. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know where it stands today.

So let's just leave that one alone. I'm just not going to say it. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So, they ran into this group of young Latinos dressed in zoot suits, gotten an argument. The sailors, of course, claimed that they were jumped, although it's unclear exactly how it started. And the LAPD responded, and with a group of off-duty officers and on-duty officers calling themselves the Vengeant Squad, and they basically took it upon themselves to clean up the streets of East LA. To the cops.

Rough house style. The cops, including off-duty cops, took on the name the Vengeant Squad, and went down to the Latin American quarters, Latino American quarters, and just started beating people up. Yeah, and this really, really set off what would be known as the zoot suit riots. The next day on June 4th, about 200 U.S. Navy servicemen jumped in a bunch of taxis, went to East LA. And a caravan.

Yeah, and a caravan, like a mob, essentially. And started beating up Mexican kids, 12 and 13-year-old boys, clubbing them, stripping them of their clothes, burning their clothes. Those were, that was the first group they encountered. And a bunch of adults tried to intervene. They got clubbed, too. Then after that, it wasn't just people wearing zoot suits. It was any Latino American that they saw.

Yeah. They stormed movie theaters. They stormed bars. They stormed, like, any... Yeah, they pulled them off the street cars. Yeah, and black guys got caught up in it, too. Yeah, spread over to Watts. There was an African-American guy on the street car, and I think it wasn't Watts,

who was pulled off and beaten to a pulp by servicemen, just because he happened to be sitting there and was black. It was literally a riot, and it was perpetrated by white servicemen. For several days, it was known as a zoot suit riot. Cops were there, but they had orders to not arrest any of the servicemen. Right. So they were kind of given carte blanche for a few days. So for a few days, finally, the Los Angeles City Council comes to it,

senses and bans the presence of any servicemen in that area of Los Angeles, and issues in ordinance, whereby zoot suits are prohibited. And in the end, 150 people were injured in the riots. Police arrested more than 500 Latinos on charges ranging from rioting to vagrancy. And I don't know if any servicemen were arrested. I think a bagel number of servicemen is probably a good guess. I couldn't find any. It's not to say it didn't happen, but my feeling is it was probably zero.

You know, the local press got ahold of this and called it a, quote, cleansing effect and said it was a pretty great thing going on in the city, when in fact, it was one of the darkest, some of the darkest days of Los Angeles and their history. Pretty sad. It is. It's a pretty sad and strange story. Yeah. Do you, I mean, is there anything else to this?

Um, no, I don't, the aftermath is... Oh, I tell you, one interesting thing from the article was that years later, young Russian Soviet teenagers would wear zutsuits as an act of defiance. Against communism. Against communism. Yeah. So this article of clothing, this fashion statement was a lot more than that. It's pretty interesting.

Yeah. And this is one of those weird moments in history where it's not just like, did you know the zutsuit caused this riot? And then you find out that it didn't really. Right. This genuinely started it. Yeah. This was part of, this made these, the pouchos easily identified targets.

The whole reason they were wearing it was out of defiance and it just irked the establishment. Like the zutsuit caused these riots. It's crazy. It is crazy. And it had another lasting legacy, if I may. Sure. It, juvenile delinquency, the whole concept of that coming out of this area and this era, I believe gave rise to the, like a slew of great movies, Rubble Without a Cause.

Sure. The Wild Ones. Oh yeah. And, if I may, I was a teenage werewolf starring Michael Landon, who was a character saddled with a terrible affliction of throwing milk. So there's this little clip I would like to say. Okay. I've put you out of fight three times myself in the last month.

You're just lucky they weren't any formal complaints. The time before this and the supermarket. It was the checker's mistake. Yeah, but you didn't even give him a chance to rectify it. Boom, you throw a carton of milk right at him. It contained bovine growth hormone and he turned into a giant cow. So that was the Mystery Science Theater 3000 take of Michael Landon. Of course.

And his milk throwing problem. Awesome. Which probably wouldn't have existed had zutsuits not come about. I'd never heard of that movie. I was a teenage werewolf. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if they picked him because of his huge mound of hair.

Maybe. Because he did look kind of werewolf-y right out of the gate. He's close. Yeah. Even without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys discussing it, I guess. It's just fun to watch. It is. It's kind of a cool movie.

Yeah. Look for our podcast on the Stonewall Riots. We're going to cover that soon too. That's another overlooked blight of American history. Yes. We like to point these out. If you want to learn more about all the stuff we talked about, like Cab Calloway's Jive Dictionary, you should search for that on your favorite search engine.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. You could also search for Zutsuits Smithsonian. That'll bring up a pretty cool article from I think like 1984. It's pretty comprehensive. And then of course, the article on our own beloved site is excellent as well. You can type in Zutsuits Z-O-O-T space S-U-I-T-S. If you haven't known what we've been talking about this entire time.

You want to type that into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, friends, neighbors, it is time for Listener Mail. You know some of that Jive, Cab Calloway Jazz Jive is still like a few of those words I recognize is still being used. It's kind of cool. Oh yeah, he established a lot of them. Like I'm not nearly cool enough to speak like this on a regular basis, but that's all I want in life really.

Like Corny came came from this era. Really? Groovy. Groovy. Okay. I say groovy a lot. Mood juice for milk. Never heard that.

You've not heard that? No. There's Buddy G as a guy. Like thanks Buddy G. I've heard that. But it's G-H-E-E. Oh, okay. Crumb crushers for Keith.

Nice. Freebie, no charge. Really? Grottis, free. That came from there. Give me some skin, shake hands. It all came out of this era. Pretty cool.

And we would not have one of the better parts of the movie airplane if Cab Callaway and his cronies hadn't come up with this. And I wish I had one cell of my body that was as cool as Cab Callaway was. He was a cool dude. You know, Minnie the Moocher like has a lot of drug references in it. Oh really? Yeah, Smokey is cokey. He liked cocaine and they talk about kicking the gong around,

which apparently is smoking opium. And Minnie actually in the extended version is taken to an asylum where she dies. And that's why the song ends with poor men, poor men, poor men. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this polygraph inside scoop. Oh yeah. It's a pretty good one.

Did anybody ever offer you a polygraph test? No. Okay. That's all right though. Just listening to the podcast. Oh, he said dear Josh, Chuck and Gary. I just listened to your podcast on polygraphs. Thought my personal experience might add a little to the discussion.

I was asked at one point in my life to submit to polygraph exams as a witness and a crime. I was interviewed by two different polygraphers at different times. One piece of equipment I did not hear you describe was a pad that you sit on, which registered whether or not you fidgeted during questions. No, I'm glad you said fidgeted. Instead of what? Okay.

This may not be standard though because only the first examiner used one. I was not given a pretest like you described in either case. However, they did tell me all six of the questions in advance and which is sort of like a pretest, I guess. Yeah. He just didn't have to answer them. And the polygrapher asked him to make sure he understood all of the six questions. The first was something like, are there lights on in the room?

And in both cases, there were questions like, are you worried? I will ask a question we did not go over. Then I got different versions of the same question. For example, did you see a man in a blue jacket or was a man wearing a blue jacket at the scene? After the questions were done, I got a break from the machine. Then I got all the questions again in a different order followed by another break and then another round of the same questions. Asking each question in a different way multiple times was apparently to reduce

the possibility of reporting a false reading. But I did notice a couple of hinky things, guys. For example, the first examiner had me close my eyes so that the readings would be guaranteed to be in response to his questions. The second guy did not ask me to do so. And when I asked him if I should, he said it didn't matter. Pretty interesting. You also mentioned techniques for fooling a polygraph.

According to a sign in the waiting room, these techniques can actually cause false positives more than false negatives, though it's probably a biased source. Although- Signs usually, yeah. Yeah. Also, they ask you to keep your feet flat on the ground through the test so the tack trick wouldn't be possible. And that is from Matthew and Matthew says, I, by the way, am one of the few listeners who would be thrilled

if you included tribal drums in the background of your episodes. Oh yeah, with you reading Listener Mail throughout the whole time. Yeah. All those combined with the track of us just doing our thing, right? So is that why we're hearing this right now? Weird. I hadn't noticed it. Interesting.

When did that start? I don't know. Weird. There it is. Well, okay. Well, thank you, Matthew. Also, we want to thank our house band of tribal drummers. And we want to thank our producer Jerry for bending to our every whim.

At a moment's notice. Yeah. If you have any info about a cool little piece of history that may be overlooked, we want to hear about it. And we may even podcast about it. And we may even be courteous enough to give you credit for bringing it up. Yeah. You can tweet it to us, although it would have to be pretty short as far as history goes.

But if you want to, it's SYSK Podcast. Or on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. We also have a couple of spoken word albums up on iTunes. Under Stuff You Should Know Super Stuff Guide. They'll cost you, but they're worth it. And you can reach us by email, Chuck. That's right. At stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.