From the World Turtle to the Beast of Busco, join Seth, Heather and Aaron for a deep dive on all things giant turtles. 

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SHOW NOTES:

Monsteropolis - Turtle Town

NEWS - We got a DISTRIBUTOR for Lost Contact lined up. Hey! This means you kids get to see it soon, along with some other stuff (right? Am I remembering this right?) that’s not presently available (is this wrong?). 

(At time of air) - Ape Canyon is screening at the Kiggins Theatre in just a few days! (5/22) 

Heartland, Archives, Decoded, Appalachian, BTT all be going on. Finale for Paranormal Horizons! Head to Youtube. Go there now, you can do that while you listen. Hit that subscribe button. They’ll all call you Subscribe-o

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Monsteropolis: Turtle Town. A sub neighborhood of Monsteropolis, like Ape Street, Octopus Alley and Thunderbird Boulevard. Let’s do these the whole show instead of the show. Bigfoot Borough. Turtle Town is a quaint little (big) neighborhood. And it’s gotta be big, because it’s full of real big turtles. Not Ninja Turtle big, those guys were big but like size of a bus big, eat your house big, ride across the ocean on their backs if you forged an unbreakable bond with them by saving their home land from a dragon big, stuff like that. 

TURTLES are REPTILES. They live in the WATER, but they breathe AIR. They have SHELLS. What a WEIRD ANIMAL. 

If you think about it, turtles are almost like their own cryptid already. Not as weird as the Platypus but still pretty weird. I mean. Shells? Some of them live to be super old too, like 100 years or so. 

Intrinsic weirdness aside, there are a lot of legends and cryptid encounters associated with turtles. 

THE WORLD TURTLE - Present in a lot of mythologies. Basically the idea is that the WHOLE WORLD sits on top of the back of a giant turtle. Turtle world. Turtle Planet. 

The oldest version we know about seems to come from Hindu mythology. The god Vishnu appears in the avatar of a giant turtle named Kurma, which had a mountain on its back. 

It also popped up, seemingly independently in First Nations lore, such as the Iroquois and Lenape, who portray it as a giant sea turtle. 

It’s cool to think of ancient societies observing the world around them and going, “Oh yeah, all this is on a turtle.” If you think about how they would have observed turtles in the wild, you know, algae and stuff growing on their backs, they kind of look like little models of earth. 

Historians and scholars also talk about themes that would likely have been in play, such as longevity and continuation, which were important to some of the First Nations tribes and really have been important to human societies for most of history. People would have noticed that turtles lived a long time and also kind of represent security and strength. That’s cool. 

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/world-turtle-cosmic-discworld

THE BEAST OF BUSCO - A big old turtle legend from Indiana. Local to Churubusco, Whitley County, Indiana, also referred to by the nickname Turtle Town, which I did not know when I tentatively named this episode. According to one online source,

the nickname originally stems from ‘Little Turtle,’ the name of a sagamore (chief) of the Miami tribe, but it’s later become associated with the giant turtle sighting at Fulk Lake.

https://www.iflscience.com/the-beast-of-busco-the-mystery-of-indianas-500-pound-turtle-sightings-75278

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/could-citizens-of-this-indiana-town-have-seen-a-500-pound-turtle-180984659/

The Ogua - Another big old turtle guy but this one has two heads (sometimes)! Two head turtle, Turtle Two Head, Turtle Tim and The Two Headed Ogua, I don’t know, this would make a great kids movie though. A lot of cryptid stories would make good kids’ movies. 

So could any of these guys actually exist? Maybe not the world turtle one unless we’re just gonna decide that that’s real. I like it so I’m good with it. 

SOME POP CULTURE REFERENCES - Plenty of giant turtles in Pop Culture. There’s that Gamera guy, and the smaller Toho kaiju Kameobas from the cult film Yog: Monster from Space (Kameobas also shows up in Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, 2004). There’s the giant turtle from Aladdin and King of Thieves, always liked that guy. The Pokemon Torterra is pretty clearly a take on the World Turtle idea (got trees and mountains on his back and in the Detective Pikachu movie he’s the size of a mountain). There’s this video game called Fortnite you may have heard of. Giant turtle in there as a part of the Oni/Ninja theme they did for season whatever it was - is that guy still around? I haven’t played in awhile. He was cool though you could hide in the trees on his back and find really crappy shotguns and then get killed by a much better player who already figured out that’s a bad strategy. 

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Thanks for listening everybody! Come to the Ape Canyon screening, listen to The Lore You Know, and maybe by the next episode we’ll figure out how to get Aaron out of here. You can (should!) subscribe to Small Town Monsters on Youtube, and if you liked this show, give it a rating or review! If you didn’t like it don’t. Enough people did that already. You’re good.