In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the Mister Mind, a Venusian supervillain mind-control worm from the pages of DC Comics…
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hi, my name is Robert Lambin. This is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in no mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time. We just came off a five part series on various monsters and mutants from the world of Marvel Comics, so now we're going to dive into the world of d C comics with another five selections to discuss. Most of the ones I'd picked out for this runner fairly well known, but I thought i'd start with a more obscure pick. My thanks to former Stuff to Blow Your Mind co host Christian Seger for bringing this one to my attention. Meet mister Mind, a tiny Venusian worm or caterpillar to be clear. He has legs with enormous power at its disposal. Created in DC comics in the early nineteen forties by Auto Bender and C. C. Beck, Mister Mind stands as one of the primary supervillains of Captain Marvel. Not the Marvel Captain Marvel, but the DC Captain Marvel. Minds you. This is the one that moviegoers may know best as Shazam. Mister Mind also makes a couple of cameo appearances in those films. Now, mister Mind boats incredible psychic powers and a genius level intellect to back those powers up, so he's gotten into all sorts of mischief over the years, including founding the Monster Society of Evil. He also employs at least two key bits of technology, special classes and an audio amplifier to interact with the larger world, because again, despite his powers, he is a tiny worm or caterpillar. But what I want to focus on is his old and frankly odd origin story from the Silver Age of comics, in which he makes the interplanetary void from Venus to Earth in order to meet ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy. This was Slash is a real ventriloquist dummy. Mister Mind, you see, had heard Charlie McCarthy on Earth's radio program Transmissions and apparently mistook fiction for reality. He was, of course disappointed upon learning the truth. It's a common sci fi trope explored on Futurama and elsewhere. Extraterrestrials pick up on transmissions from Earth and either misunderstand the difference between fiction and reality, or simply lack the ability to tell the difference. There are even more sci fi works that explore the larger idea of intercepted Earth transmissions, most notably Carl Sagan's nineteen eighty five novel Contact the Si. In the sci fi here is, of course that for more than one hundred years we've been busting out commercial radio transmissions here on Earth. However, is Robert Matthews points out in a BBC Science Focus article. Most of these signals were absorbed by the atmosphere or drowned out by solar radio transmissions, so our radio leakage as a planet was perhaps minimal. However, Matthews stresses that Cold War military radar transmissions are strong enough to have already broadcast our presence out to anyone listening within sixty light years. There have also been deliberate radio transmissions aimed at communicating our existence, such as the nineteen seventy four Arecibo message sent to Messia thirteen, or at least in the spirit of such communication, but the basic idea of such transmissions either emanating from US or potentially picked up from an extraterrestrial source, has garnered much discussion and debate over the decades, how likely is alien reception or our reception of an alien transmission based on the vast distances involved in limits of possible travel speeds as we know them, How should we approach such long term concerns, and just how careful should we be when it comes to such radio transmissions or even our radio leakage. Because while our most optimistic views of extraterrestrial contact are rosy, indeed some of the more pessimistic models, based in large part on Earth's own history of outside contact, situations in which one culture encounters a technologically superior one are perhaps best avoided. And then there's the mister Mind model, in which we manage to attract a caterpillar supervillain to our planet with our tantalizing nineteen forties radio comedy shows. Thank goodness, we have so many Captain Marvels to deal with that sort of thing. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week, and if you want to check in on the work of Christian Sager, visit Christiansager dot org. That's hr S t I A n SA ger dot org. As always, you can email me at contact at stuffd blow your mind dot com.
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