Oh jeeze, try to follow this stupefying line...
At Free Comic Book Day, I picked up this for nostalgia reasons:
Remember the show? I do. Cass asked me, What's this? And I said, besides a very cool David Mack cover, it looks like a comic based on a television show from the '80s that I remember fondly. I tried describing the show to him: a regular guy is given a super-suit by aliens and has difficulties controlling the powers as he navigates his new responsibilities. A super-hero show a bit ahead of its time.
But, it turns out, William Katt, the actor who played Ralph Hanley (originally Hinkley, but changed after the Reagan shooter, er, de-popularized the name), got involved in the production of this upcoming series. His face is so ably painted by David Mack right there.
I went and looked up some info on Katt, and was reminded about a movie where he played Sean Young's husband, and she was a biologist and explorer on the hunt for a monster in the African hinterlands.
Oh, yeah, I thought when I saw the name on Katt's filmography, I remember that movie. I was very fond of it, and was trying to describe a scene to Cass later: "So, there's an African dude, a local who's all sick, and they ask him what's wrong and he motions to his stomach, and then they ask him what he ate, and in the dirt he sketches it, his food---and it's a brontosaurus!"
Nevermind that Cass was like, "What?" and I remembered that we use terms like sauropod now instead of the recently abandoned 'brontosaurus,' but eventually he got the idea.
Sean Young plays an American researcher in search of mokele-mbembe in the movie titled "Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend." She and Katt end deep in the central African rainforest saving a baby sauropod, while the father is killed by a national military and the mother is caught.
It's silly and mostly forgotten today. But when I was looking up info on the movie, the name mokele-mbembe was hyperlinked to its own background, which was extensive.
Apparently, mokele-mbembe is similar to Bigfoot, the Yeti, or the Loch Ness monster, in that it's a cryptid, that is, a legendary animal that's unverified by current evidence. Instead of a hominid, it was described variously as larger than a hippo but smaller than an elephant, or half-elephant/half-dragon, or four-legged with a very long pointy-thing on it's face. That last one I think was translated by someone else as 'four-legged with a very long neck.'
It turns out that a few very serious expeditions to search for evidence of a living mokele-mbembe have been outfitted in the recent past, all with the thinking that the animal is a sauropod relative. And you may think: Okay...that's kind of...interesting.
But, it needs to be said: These expeditions were outfitted and funded by recent-Earth creationists, an apparently well-heeled group of very religious christians, either incidentally or purposefully ignorant to the realities of geology and deep time, who were trying to prove---by way of finding a living sauropod---that the Earth was only 5 or 6 thousand years old.
They were, um, unsuccessful in their expeditions.
Most historians of linguistics and the area think the legends that form the basis of mokele-mbembe are based on the black rhino, an animal that hasn't lived in the jungle areas where the stories come from since before written history. That at least passes the sniff test: big animal, once did share the space with humans, left before stories were written down so those stories had to pass by word of mouth and oral tradition...those dots are easier to follow.
Anyway, seems like a roundabout way to get to "once again irritated by purposefully ignorant religious people," but here we are. Maybe I'll show the kids the Baby movie, or the Greatest American Hero show, but both of those are only available on streamers like Tubi or Pluto.
So, there's that.
Yeah.
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