Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, of the day of each week that we read back some messages from the mail bag. Rob do you want to kick us off today with this message about your Monster Fact episode on the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Oh yeah, yeah. This one comes to us from Daniel. Daniel rides High. This is Daniel. I've spoken to you before about burning mountains in your Underground Fire episode. I loved your look at the Killer Rabbit of Carbana. You said something about some herbivores eating meat in some rare instances. When I was young, we had pet rabbits in a large enclosure along with some parrots that lived in the upper part, sort of a mix between an aviary and a hunch. One morning I found that one of the parrots had died during the night and fallen on the floor. The rabbits were eating it. I thought it was really weird at the time, but I've since seen other herbivores sometimes do the same. Anyway, thank you for your show. As a radio presenter and producer here in Australia, I know how much work it is. Cheers Daniel. Well, first of all, thanks Daniel. But second of all, I am a little suspicious of this story because of the Monty python dead parrot connection. That's too much of a coincidence to be real. I don't know. I mean, that's the thing. The more you look at reality, you more you realize that that Monty python is not that far removed from reality. But the point is it's good eating what we we We appreciate the story here, Daniel. Yeah, this is this is the topic of us that we've discussed in other episodes of the show before, not just in this one Monster Fact episode. Cases where animals that are you generally might might not think about eating meat, will in some cases if if conditions are right, we'll definitely chat out on some meat. Yeah. I think a lot of animals that are considered her befores might be better thought of as animals that are not specialized at, not biologically specialized at eating meat. But a lot of them can eat meat and do sometimes. Um. One of the times I remember this coming up was in our episode about the Minotaur where we discussed meat eating cows were like cows, they would eat chickens and and other things. Yeah, yeah, and yeah that the mythological examples are pretty rich there too, uh Man eating horses and Greek tradition, and there's a lot of great stuff out there. Oh yeah, I think Heracles had around some of those up right. Alright. We got a bunch of messages in response to our series Unwhistling. I'm gonna do this first one from Kenna, who says, Hi, Robert and Joe, I recently listened to your Whistling four parter and have a new appreciation for some of the context behind a show. I recently watched a Chinese drama called The un Tamed or chin Ching Ling. In it, the main character, a necromancer named way Wu Shan uses whistling or his flute to call up various ghosts, fierce corpses, or other spirits of Chinese fantasy. Other characters use what appear to be more mainstream abilities for shan cha show, but the fact that you mentioned whistling is a Taoist practice made some of the cultural background click into place for me. Secondly, you asked for personal experience with whistling, and my family is in the habit of using quote, the pony whistle, a truly piercing sound that I can only transcribe as I do. How am I supposed to read this? Okay, it's like fwu eu EO. That reasonably faithful to what I'm looking at here? I guess though, Okay, I mean, is it's supposed to be actually whistled? Right? If? If it is supposed to be whistled, Okay, I'm just gonna skip to the next cent. It's I've never met someone else who has a family whistle, but I'm sure we can't be the only ones. Oh, Kenna, you are not. We heard from at least one other person here, so so that's coming up. But Kenn, it goes on. My grandfather, who seems to be the origin of the whistle, could be heard halfway across the county fair or a quarter of a mile away at the nearby creek if he wanted to summon his pack of roving grandchildren. It's also a good method for tracking down parents uh seeking shade in a crowded theme park, or to double check that everyone in your hiking party is nearby. In generations past, this sound was apparently used to call in livestock or my mother's semi feral ponies. Now it's used to summon dogs and children, but only by the older generations of the family. A good number of my cousins never seemed to have learned how to whistle. Keep up the great work, Kenna. Well that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean I never had a family whistle. I don't have a family whistle now, and the family wasn't a whistling family now. I'm not familiar with this Chinese drama that Kenna mentions here, but I pulled it up briefly on IMDb and it looks interesting and I may have to check it out. I'm always looking for a good TV series to view, but it does remind me. After we finished the fourth episode of the whistling series I was watching, watched a couple of things on Hulu, both of which ended up involving whistling. I watched the new Predator movie Prey, which which is a lot of fun and has I don't know if you remember, but there's some whistling at the very end. I don't what I love to pray, I don't recall the whistling, What was it? Unless unless this is a memory that I created, I believe our main character uses a whistle at one point to distract the Predator or uses it as a war cry. Um remember the exact context, but it's late in the film, sort of in the showdown portion. Yeah, okay, Well again, I don't specifically recall that, but it seems like it seems plausible it could have been there. But it's also definitely used on the Another series that's airing on Who's an FX series titled Reservation Dogs, which is a great comedy in traumas. It manages a nice balance of the serious and the and the comedic. But there's some there are some references to uh, inappropriate whistling that might summon spirits, which of course is in line with multiple folk traditions that we've discussed in those episodes. Well that's a great tie. And I haven't seen that show, but but yeah, the New Predator, I can definitely vouch for it. Uh. I never would have expected a deep Predator sequel to not only be great, just like a great action movie like the first one, but to genuinely give me feelings. There's all kinds of like Friendship Feelings, Dog Feelings. It's great. Yeah, I thought they really knocked it out of the park with that one. It's a It's a film that I think I've I've enjoyed all the Predator movies that I've seen. I have not seen the second a VP movie, but I've seen all the rest and uh, and I enjoyed all of them. And so I went into this one expecting, Okay, we're gonna have a Predator movie set in in an historic time period. Okay, I can go go for that. Uh, it might not be good, but at least it will be entertaining. But it it went beyond that. For me. I thought it was just a great film, one of, if not the best Predator movies we've had. Oh, totally. And there's a bear in it. I keep watching movies with bears in them. It should should probably just double down and just seek out bear themed films at this point. What's that mutant bear movie you keep bringing up? Oh? That's uh what prophecy? Yeah, okay, is that like an evil bear created by by unholy science or something? Um? It is it's I think it's an environmental threat movie. I think it's like some sort of a pollution angle. I actually fired it up not too long ago because I was like, yeah, I want to I wanna watch a mutant bear movie with Robert Foxworth in it. Uh, but I don't know. It starts off a little it's it's almost seemed like maybe it was a little too good, a little too serious. And I think it also opens with like multiple dog deaths. I mean I think they're killed by a mutant bear, So like, that's okay. It's if it's not people killing the dogs, if it's like a monster bear killing the dogs, it's all right, what are you asking me? I'm not the boss of people's dog death reactions. I mean, I admit I don't love them, but yeah, I think some of them also died from a great fall. So it's a little mixed exactly what's going on. But I don't know. It was enough to where I was like, I don't know if this is this film is going to be as fun as I thought it was gonna be. Maybe I'll come back and look at this in another time. Okay, Hey, next message about whistling is from David, and this ties into something can ask about here about family whistles. David says, Hey, Robert and Joe, this is Dave. I was listening to your series about whistling, and your discussion of whistling languages reminded me of a girl I dated in high school. Her mother would whistle the name eames of her Rebecca and her sister Emily because the stress pattern on their names was so distinctive. Apparently this started when they were little and their mother couldn't speak because she was fighting throat cancer. She recovered, but the habit stuck. That's wow, that's amazing, um. Dave goes on, when you were discussing the advantages of tonal languages for whistling, this twenty five year old memory suddenly came to me. I could see how an initial quirk like this could lead to a full fledged language. Anyway, I've been enjoying the show for years. Keep up the good work, Dave. Al Right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Jason. Jason writes in and says, in my state and most states in India, bus conductors used whistles to signal to the driver to stop or move the bus. A single whistle means stop, and a double whistle means to move simple yet makes it easy for the conductor to communicate with the driver even in a heavy, we crowded, noisy bus. Maybe this is in use in other countries as well. Continue the great work. Oh yeah, that's the cutting through the mixed property of whistling that we talked about. Okay, next message. We got a response to Weird House Cinema that has some really excellent monster science uh going on. So this is from Eric, subject line Plan nine Solar night Bomb. You remember in Plan nine from outer space. One of the reasons that the Aliens think that we're so stupid, stupid stupid Earth minds is that we're about to create this horrible weapon called the Solar night Bomb, and it's just going to ruin everything. Uh. And then of course the main human hero is like, Yeah, I think we should make this bomb that will destroy the universe. It would make us stronger as a nation. So onto Eric's message. Greetings gentlemen. I loved the episode of Weird House Cinema. I watched this film several years ago, but I pretty much couldn't pay attention, so I only have some vague impressions of Bella Legosy wandering around and cheap graveyard and flying saucer sets. You asked a question about the quote physics unquote of the solar night bomb, specifically what the effective range would be, because remember there's the scene where the alien is saying, oh, yeah, so the bomb will travel along the rays of sunlight and it will explode every particle of sunlight and everything that the sunlight touches. And then we're like, well, I mean, you know, rays of photons just sort of like go on forever. So that would destroy an awful lot. But so, yeah, how would that work? Eric says, it really depends on the mechanism of the bomb. My first question is what kind of particle is exploding? The script I found was a bit vague. First Arrow says that quote the rays of sunlight are minute particles, and later he says, quote a ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms. The sun emits a few different kinds of particles. There are photons of a ray age of spectra from radio to gamma. There's the solar wind, which consists of electrons, protons, alpha particles, which are ionized helium nuclei, and trace numbers of other ionized atomic nuclei and there are also huge numbers of neutrinos. If the solar night bomb causes photons to explode, what exactly is the product of the explosion. Photons are essentially the fundamental form of energy, so there is no way to convert them into more energy. Pretty much all forms of explosions give off light to some degree or other, and nuclear and thermonuclear explosions give off mostly light, typically gamma radiation. Neutrinos would not make sense even though they're extremely non interactive. Nature means that there are literally trillions of them passing through your body every second. They are so ridiculously tiny that even if you converted all of the ones passing through your body in a second, it would only generate about nineteen nano jewels of energy. If you took all of the neutrinos that passed through the whole planet and converted them into energy, you would get about five hundred kilo jewels, which is about enough to power a couple of incandescent light bulbs for an hour. It makes more sense if the bomb causes the particles of the solar wind to explode. Perhaps it's some form of matter to energy conversion that causes all free electrons and or ionized particles in a particular area to convert partially or completely into energy gamma radiation. The Sun gives off about one point five million metric tons of solar wind per second, which is equivalent to about one hundred and thirty five million extra jewels of energy or about thirty million giga tons of TNT. That assumes that the solar night bomb is exploding a sphere around the Sun of approximately one light second in radius. It might be a smaller radius. I can't speculate on what the effect of such an explosion would do, but even a much smaller radius would be at least a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the world's nuclear arsenal. So I'm thinking earth roasting lee powerful. I think you were speculating that perhaps the weapon quote charges solar photons to explode on contact somehow, Assuming the energy is coming from something other than the photons, such as the atom or particle it hits, this would be a pretty powerful weapon. The Sun gives off roughly ten to the forty four photons per second, even if you assume that those photons only hit and detonate hydrogen atoms. That's still about a hundred quadrillion exa jules or thirty quadrillion gigatons. It would annihilate the Solar system, cook most of our section of the galaxy, and probably cause cancer to any hypothetical aliens as far away as the Magellanic clouds. It would be way worse than the supernova. The effects would extend out too much of the observable universe, basically anywhere that light from the Sun can reach before it crosses the cosmic event horizon, the point at which distant objects become unobservable because they are traveling away too fast. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about when I was saying there would be some objects that, because of the expansion rate of the universe, are now sort of out of reach of the solar night bomb. But Eric goes on, although at anything more than a few hundred thousand light years, the number of charged photon impacts would be so few that it would not be distinguishable from ambient radiation. Sorry for the massive nerd doubt. I hope it's not too tedious. No, Eric, this is great. Um Uh. This was the very first weird house movie that I'd actually seen. But I absolutely love hearing your takes on these wacky and weird films, even when I haven't seen them. All the best to you and keep up the good work. Ps. I also wanted to mention, in reference to the Whistling episodes, the thing brought most to my mind was the kill Bill movies. Whistling has used a few different times either to convey menace or at least tension, which is very distinct from the more traditional understanding of whistling as indicating lightheartedness. Good episodes. Thanks for filling in all the empty nooks and crannies in my brain. Eric, Oh this is great. Yeah, no, no, I love of I love a good uh uh like like you said, a monster science kind of a journey here, And really it shows one of the great things about a film like Plan nine from Outer Space is that it has the audacity to present a concept like this, and and then and then we have to think about it, and we have to think, well, how would that even begin to work? And and there's there's so much room for contemplation, like a a better slash lesser film would have just gone with something a bit more established in trope, you know, like, oh, well, it's just we'll just stop at the at the development of nuclear weapons, or it will be just just in the next logical progression from that instead of this just galaxy destroying technology that surely, um like mid twentie century humanity is just a heartbeat away from attaining I could see so, like Edward must have realized. If the script was just about regular bombs and nuclear weapons, it would not emphasize how stupid, stupid, stupid our Earth minds are to go all the way to the sunlight destroying bomb or else the stupidity of our minds is not fully illustrated. Yeah, alright, This next one comes to us from Daniel. I assume this is a different Daniel, but I don't know for certain. Daniel Wrightson and says Hello, First, I love Weird how Cinema so very very very much, thank you for making my Friday's extra spithy. As I was listening to last Friday's episode, I was suddenly struck by the apparent similarity between the trailer music for Thrilling Bloody Sword and the theme song to the Japanese anime TV show Starblazers Battleship. Yamato is the original Japanese title. I thought that sounds much too similar to be coincidence, And then I heard you mentioning later in the episode that there were other pieces of music in the film that sounded very similar to existing songs, the U S National anthem being the most bizarre one. So I wonder if, in fact, the composer was possibly a fan of the Japanese anime show, which predates the film by several years. Thank you for both giving me and likely basilions of others a fancy treat on Friday, Sincerely, Daniel. Do you look this up? Rob? I? Well, I didn't, um, but I will say a couple of things, and this, first of all, it goes without saying. When you dealing with trailers, it is not uncommon to find the music from other films used in a trailer, like how many? I feel like there were a number of films that came out with the music from Aliens uh in it to promote a film that was not Aliens. You know. Yeah, stuff gets reused all the time. I think the music from what that song from Saw shows up in other trailers? I think, and oh, and what's that song from It's from Requiem for a Dream. They keep putting in other stuff. Yeah, there's some probably some other good examples that I'm just not not thinking of off the top of my head. But but yeah, often I think sometimes the score for a given film isn't ready yet when they're putting together promotional material, or they just really really know a certain song, a certain track, or a certain piece from another music is going to definitely connect with an audience and get there, get their attention so you can drive home that they need to see this film. I just did listen to a couple of seconds of the Starblazers theme, and the melody is striking lee similar, except it has lyrics in the In the Starblazers version, it's like, you know the do do do do do? In this it's saying we're off to outer space in the English version. Now another issue I do want to highlight, and I didn't. I ended up not going into this in the Thrilling, Bloody Sword episode. But I did see some user reviews for another film that had been UH that that that had been apparently scored by the same UH composer, and there was in this individual had said, well this this movie just straight up uses music from John Carpenter's the thing. I tried to verify that. I found a rip of the movie that they were talking about online. I was like, I'm gonna listen to this, see if I can get any notes of the thing. And I didn't. I didn't find it. I didn't have enough time to relate to vote to watching a whole other film just to answer this sort of rabbit hole question. But it does at least raise the possibility of of maybe unlicensed score reuse in some of these films. But I really don't know for certain, So I'd love to hear from anyone out there who has more familiarity with Taiwanese cinema, Hong Kong cinema, etcetera, and and may have thoughts on this. This also brings to mind something I don't think we've talked about this on the show before, but Master the Flying Didotine from nine six is an example of a film that has a great soundtrack, but it's like it's taking music from uh, you know, acts like craft Work and Tangerine Dream, And I am not personally sure if if those are like official uses of those tracks, you know. Yeah, alright, Well, on that note, we're out of time. We have more listener mail to get to, but we're gonna We're gonna set it aside. We'll come back to it next week, but keep the new listener mails coming. If you have thoughts on recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, weird, how cinema, monster, fact artifact, or just responses to other listener mail discussions, then let us know. Obviously we'd love to hear from you. Muster Mail publishes every Monday, so just check us out. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, of the day of each week that we read back some messages from the mail bag. Rob do you want to kick us off today with this message about your Monster Fact episode on the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Oh yeah, yeah. This one comes to us from Daniel. Daniel rides High. This is Daniel. I've spoken to you before about burning mountains in your Underground Fire episode. I loved your look at the Killer Rabbit of Carbana. You said something about some herbivores eating meat in some rare instances. When I was young, we had pet rabbits in a large enclosure along with some parrots that lived in the upper part, sort of a mix between an aviary and a hunch. One morning I found that one of the parrots had died during the night and fallen on the floor. The rabbits were eating it. I thought it was really weird at the time, but I've since seen other herbivores sometimes do the same. Anyway, thank you for your show. As a radio presenter and producer here in Australia, I know how much work it is. Cheers Daniel. Well, first of all, thanks Daniel. But second of all, I am a little suspicious of this story because of the Monty python dead parrot connection. That's too much of a coincidence to be real. I don't know. I mean, that's the thing. The more you look at reality, you more you realize that that Monty python is not that far removed from reality. But the point is it's good eating what we we We appreciate the story here, Daniel. Yeah, this is this is the topic of us that we've discussed in other episodes of the show before, not just in this one Monster Fact episode. Cases where animals that are you generally might might not think about eating meat, will in some cases if if conditions are right, we'll definitely chat out on some meat. Yeah. I think a lot of animals that are considered her befores might be better thought of as animals that are not specialized at, not biologically specialized at eating meat. But a lot of them can eat meat and do sometimes. Um. One of the times I remember this coming up was in our episode about the Minotaur where we discussed meat eating cows were like cows, they would eat chickens and and other things. Yeah, yeah, and yeah that the mythological examples are pretty rich there too, uh Man eating horses and Greek tradition, and there's a lot of great stuff out there. Oh yeah, I think Heracles had around some of those up right. Alright. We got a bunch of messages in response to our series Unwhistling. I'm gonna do this first one from Kenna, who says, Hi, Robert and Joe, I recently listened to your Whistling four parter and have a new appreciation for some of the context behind a show. I recently watched a Chinese drama called The un Tamed or chin Ching Ling. In it, the main character, a necromancer named way Wu Shan uses whistling or his flute to call up various ghosts, fierce corpses, or other spirits of Chinese fantasy. Other characters use what appear to be more mainstream abilities for shan cha show, but the fact that you mentioned whistling is a Taoist practice made some of the cultural background click into place for me. Secondly, you asked for personal experience with whistling, and my family is in the habit of using quote, the pony whistle, a truly piercing sound that I can only transcribe as I do. How am I supposed to read this? Okay, it's like fwu eu EO. That reasonably faithful to what I'm looking at here? I guess though, Okay, I mean, is it's supposed to be actually whistled? Right? If? If it is supposed to be whistled, Okay, I'm just gonna skip to the next cent. It's I've never met someone else who has a family whistle, but I'm sure we can't be the only ones. Oh, Kenna, you are not. We heard from at least one other person here, so so that's coming up. But Kenn, it goes on. My grandfather, who seems to be the origin of the whistle, could be heard halfway across the county fair or a quarter of a mile away at the nearby creek if he wanted to summon his pack of roving grandchildren. It's also a good method for tracking down parents uh seeking shade in a crowded theme park, or to double check that everyone in your hiking party is nearby. In generations past, this sound was apparently used to call in livestock or my mother's semi feral ponies. Now it's used to summon dogs and children, but only by the older generations of the family. A good number of my cousins never seemed to have learned how to whistle. Keep up the great work, Kenna. Well that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean I never had a family whistle. I don't have a family whistle now, and the family wasn't a whistling family now. I'm not familiar with this Chinese drama that Kenna mentions here, but I pulled it up briefly on IMDb and it looks interesting and I may have to check it out. I'm always looking for a good TV series to view, but it does remind me. After we finished the fourth episode of the whistling series I was watching, watched a couple of things on Hulu, both of which ended up involving whistling. I watched the new Predator movie Prey, which which is a lot of fun and has I don't know if you remember, but there's some whistling at the very end. I don't what I love to pray, I don't recall the whistling, What was it? Unless unless this is a memory that I created, I believe our main character uses a whistle at one point to distract the Predator or uses it as a war cry. Um remember the exact context, but it's late in the film, sort of in the showdown portion. Yeah, okay, Well again, I don't specifically recall that, but it seems like it seems plausible it could have been there. But it's also definitely used on the Another series that's airing on Who's an FX series titled Reservation Dogs, which is a great comedy in traumas. It manages a nice balance of the serious and the and the comedic. But there's some there are some references to uh, inappropriate whistling that might summon spirits, which of course is in line with multiple folk traditions that we've discussed in those episodes. Well that's a great tie. And I haven't seen that show, but but yeah, the New Predator, I can definitely vouch for it. Uh. I never would have expected a deep Predator sequel to not only be great, just like a great action movie like the first one, but to genuinely give me feelings. There's all kinds of like Friendship Feelings, Dog Feelings. It's great. Yeah, I thought they really knocked it out of the park with that one. It's a It's a film that I think I've I've enjoyed all the Predator movies that I've seen. I have not seen the second a VP movie, but I've seen all the rest and uh, and I enjoyed all of them. And so I went into this one expecting, Okay, we're gonna have a Predator movie set in in an historic time period. Okay, I can go go for that. Uh, it might not be good, but at least it will be entertaining. But it it went beyond that. For me. I thought it was just a great film, one of, if not the best Predator movies we've had. Oh, totally. And there's a bear in it. I keep watching movies with bears in them. It should should probably just double down and just seek out bear themed films at this point. What's that mutant bear movie you keep bringing up? Oh? That's uh what prophecy? Yeah, okay, is that like an evil bear created by by unholy science or something? Um? It is it's I think it's an environmental threat movie. I think it's like some sort of a pollution angle. I actually fired it up not too long ago because I was like, yeah, I want to I wanna watch a mutant bear movie with Robert Foxworth in it. Uh, but I don't know. It starts off a little it's it's almost seemed like maybe it was a little too good, a little too serious. And I think it also opens with like multiple dog deaths. I mean I think they're killed by a mutant bear, So like, that's okay. It's if it's not people killing the dogs, if it's like a monster bear killing the dogs, it's all right, what are you asking me? I'm not the boss of people's dog death reactions. I mean, I admit I don't love them, but yeah, I think some of them also died from a great fall. So it's a little mixed exactly what's going on. But I don't know. It was enough to where I was like, I don't know if this is this film is going to be as fun as I thought it was gonna be. Maybe I'll come back and look at this in another time. Okay, Hey, next message about whistling is from David, and this ties into something can ask about here about family whistles. David says, Hey, Robert and Joe, this is Dave. I was listening to your series about whistling, and your discussion of whistling languages reminded me of a girl I dated in high school. Her mother would whistle the name eames of her Rebecca and her sister Emily because the stress pattern on their names was so distinctive. Apparently this started when they were little and their mother couldn't speak because she was fighting throat cancer. She recovered, but the habit stuck. That's wow, that's amazing, um. Dave goes on, when you were discussing the advantages of tonal languages for whistling, this twenty five year old memory suddenly came to me. I could see how an initial quirk like this could lead to a full fledged language. Anyway, I've been enjoying the show for years. Keep up the good work, Dave. Al Right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Jason. Jason writes in and says, in my state and most states in India, bus conductors used whistles to signal to the driver to stop or move the bus. A single whistle means stop, and a double whistle means to move simple yet makes it easy for the conductor to communicate with the driver even in a heavy, we crowded, noisy bus. Maybe this is in use in other countries as well. Continue the great work. Oh yeah, that's the cutting through the mixed property of whistling that we talked about. Okay, next message. We got a response to Weird House Cinema that has some really excellent monster science uh going on. So this is from Eric, subject line Plan nine Solar night Bomb. You remember in Plan nine from outer space. One of the reasons that the Aliens think that we're so stupid, stupid stupid Earth minds is that we're about to create this horrible weapon called the Solar night Bomb, and it's just going to ruin everything. Uh. And then of course the main human hero is like, Yeah, I think we should make this bomb that will destroy the universe. It would make us stronger as a nation. So onto Eric's message. Greetings gentlemen. I loved the episode of Weird House Cinema. I watched this film several years ago, but I pretty much couldn't pay attention, so I only have some vague impressions of Bella Legosy wandering around and cheap graveyard and flying saucer sets. You asked a question about the quote physics unquote of the solar night bomb, specifically what the effective range would be, because remember there's the scene where the alien is saying, oh, yeah, so the bomb will travel along the rays of sunlight and it will explode every particle of sunlight and everything that the sunlight touches. And then we're like, well, I mean, you know, rays of photons just sort of like go on forever. So that would destroy an awful lot. But so, yeah, how would that work? Eric says, it really depends on the mechanism of the bomb. My first question is what kind of particle is exploding? The script I found was a bit vague. First Arrow says that quote the rays of sunlight are minute particles, and later he says, quote a ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms. The sun emits a few different kinds of particles. There are photons of a ray age of spectra from radio to gamma. There's the solar wind, which consists of electrons, protons, alpha particles, which are ionized helium nuclei, and trace numbers of other ionized atomic nuclei and there are also huge numbers of neutrinos. If the solar night bomb causes photons to explode, what exactly is the product of the explosion. Photons are essentially the fundamental form of energy, so there is no way to convert them into more energy. Pretty much all forms of explosions give off light to some degree or other, and nuclear and thermonuclear explosions give off mostly light, typically gamma radiation. Neutrinos would not make sense even though they're extremely non interactive. Nature means that there are literally trillions of them passing through your body every second. They are so ridiculously tiny that even if you converted all of the ones passing through your body in a second, it would only generate about nineteen nano jewels of energy. If you took all of the neutrinos that passed through the whole planet and converted them into energy, you would get about five hundred kilo jewels, which is about enough to power a couple of incandescent light bulbs for an hour. It makes more sense if the bomb causes the particles of the solar wind to explode. Perhaps it's some form of matter to energy conversion that causes all free electrons and or ionized particles in a particular area to convert partially or completely into energy gamma radiation. The Sun gives off about one point five million metric tons of solar wind per second, which is equivalent to about one hundred and thirty five million extra jewels of energy or about thirty million giga tons of TNT. That assumes that the solar night bomb is exploding a sphere around the Sun of approximately one light second in radius. It might be a smaller radius. I can't speculate on what the effect of such an explosion would do, but even a much smaller radius would be at least a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the world's nuclear arsenal. So I'm thinking earth roasting lee powerful. I think you were speculating that perhaps the weapon quote charges solar photons to explode on contact somehow, Assuming the energy is coming from something other than the photons, such as the atom or particle it hits, this would be a pretty powerful weapon. The Sun gives off roughly ten to the forty four photons per second, even if you assume that those photons only hit and detonate hydrogen atoms. That's still about a hundred quadrillion exa jules or thirty quadrillion gigatons. It would annihilate the Solar system, cook most of our section of the galaxy, and probably cause cancer to any hypothetical aliens as far away as the Magellanic clouds. It would be way worse than the supernova. The effects would extend out too much of the observable universe, basically anywhere that light from the Sun can reach before it crosses the cosmic event horizon, the point at which distant objects become unobservable because they are traveling away too fast. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about when I was saying there would be some objects that, because of the expansion rate of the universe, are now sort of out of reach of the solar night bomb. But Eric goes on, although at anything more than a few hundred thousand light years, the number of charged photon impacts would be so few that it would not be distinguishable from ambient radiation. Sorry for the massive nerd doubt. I hope it's not too tedious. No, Eric, this is great. Um Uh. This was the very first weird house movie that I'd actually seen. But I absolutely love hearing your takes on these wacky and weird films, even when I haven't seen them. All the best to you and keep up the good work. Ps. I also wanted to mention, in reference to the Whistling episodes, the thing brought most to my mind was the kill Bill movies. Whistling has used a few different times either to convey menace or at least tension, which is very distinct from the more traditional understanding of whistling as indicating lightheartedness. Good episodes. Thanks for filling in all the empty nooks and crannies in my brain. Eric, Oh this is great. Yeah, no, no, I love of I love a good uh uh like like you said, a monster science kind of a journey here, And really it shows one of the great things about a film like Plan nine from Outer Space is that it has the audacity to present a concept like this, and and then and then we have to think about it, and we have to think, well, how would that even begin to work? And and there's there's so much room for contemplation, like a a better slash lesser film would have just gone with something a bit more established in trope, you know, like, oh, well, it's just we'll just stop at the at the development of nuclear weapons, or it will be just just in the next logical progression from that instead of this just galaxy destroying technology that surely, um like mid twentie century humanity is just a heartbeat away from attaining I could see so, like Edward must have realized. If the script was just about regular bombs and nuclear weapons, it would not emphasize how stupid, stupid, stupid our Earth minds are to go all the way to the sunlight destroying bomb or else the stupidity of our minds is not fully illustrated. Yeah, alright, This next one comes to us from Daniel. I assume this is a different Daniel, but I don't know for certain. Daniel Wrightson and says Hello, First, I love Weird how Cinema so very very very much, thank you for making my Friday's extra spithy. As I was listening to last Friday's episode, I was suddenly struck by the apparent similarity between the trailer music for Thrilling Bloody Sword and the theme song to the Japanese anime TV show Starblazers Battleship. Yamato is the original Japanese title. I thought that sounds much too similar to be coincidence, And then I heard you mentioning later in the episode that there were other pieces of music in the film that sounded very similar to existing songs, the U S National anthem being the most bizarre one. So I wonder if, in fact, the composer was possibly a fan of the Japanese anime show, which predates the film by several years. Thank you for both giving me and likely basilions of others a fancy treat on Friday, Sincerely, Daniel. Do you look this up? Rob? I? Well, I didn't, um, but I will say a couple of things, and this, first of all, it goes without saying. When you dealing with trailers, it is not uncommon to find the music from other films used in a trailer, like how many? I feel like there were a number of films that came out with the music from Aliens uh in it to promote a film that was not Aliens. You know. Yeah, stuff gets reused all the time. I think the music from what that song from Saw shows up in other trailers? I think, and oh, and what's that song from It's from Requiem for a Dream. They keep putting in other stuff. Yeah, there's some probably some other good examples that I'm just not not thinking of off the top of my head. But but yeah, often I think sometimes the score for a given film isn't ready yet when they're putting together promotional material, or they just really really know a certain song, a certain track, or a certain piece from another music is going to definitely connect with an audience and get there, get their attention so you can drive home that they need to see this film. I just did listen to a couple of seconds of the Starblazers theme, and the melody is striking lee similar, except it has lyrics in the In the Starblazers version, it's like, you know the do do do do do? In this it's saying we're off to outer space in the English version. Now another issue I do want to highlight, and I didn't. I ended up not going into this in the Thrilling, Bloody Sword episode. But I did see some user reviews for another film that had been UH that that that had been apparently scored by the same UH composer, and there was in this individual had said, well this this movie just straight up uses music from John Carpenter's the thing. I tried to verify that. I found a rip of the movie that they were talking about online. I was like, I'm gonna listen to this, see if I can get any notes of the thing. And I didn't. I didn't find it. I didn't have enough time to relate to vote to watching a whole other film just to answer this sort of rabbit hole question. But it does at least raise the possibility of of maybe unlicensed score reuse in some of these films. But I really don't know for certain, So I'd love to hear from anyone out there who has more familiarity with Taiwanese cinema, Hong Kong cinema, etcetera, and and may have thoughts on this. This also brings to mind something I don't think we've talked about this on the show before, but Master the Flying Didotine from nine six is an example of a film that has a great soundtrack, but it's like it's taking music from uh, you know, acts like craft Work and Tangerine Dream, And I am not personally sure if if those are like official uses of those tracks, you know. Yeah, alright, Well, on that note, we're out of time. We have more listener mail to get to, but we're gonna We're gonna set it aside. We'll come back to it next week, but keep the new listener mails coming. If you have thoughts on recent episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, weird, how cinema, monster, fact artifact, or just responses to other listener mail discussions, then let us know. Obviously we'd love to hear from you. Muster Mail publishes every Monday, so just check us out. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.