Video Oddities #9: Big Foot

VIDEO ODDITIES

by john cribbs

For those just tuning in: what I'm doing in this series is tracking down interesting movies I've never heard of based on the ancient art of the "video box." For younger readers a "video" was an analog system used to record sound and images onto a continuous stream of waves; a format which pre-dated dvd, Blu-Ray and HD streaming. You would take a trip to an establishment called a "video store" to rent these items from an actual person and return home with them - the video, not the person - to enjoy at your leisure (you had to bring 'em back, though.) I'm basing my selection on the outrageous boxes these "videos" came packaged in, the kind that helped us decide whether a movie looked like it was worth our time back in the days before the internet started telling us everything there was to know about every film before they've even been released. Then I'm writing about them - simple as that. With the inevitable extinction of the video store it's become more difficult to hunt down some of these more obscure titles...they're becoming harder to find than Bigfoot.

And the obsolescence is almost complete. All three Blockbusters in my area just went bust. Part of me wants to celebrate the imminent death of the soulless corporation that employed fascist policies as to what titles they stocked, that killed so many great independent video stores, but mostly it just makes me sad. The end of the most powerful rental company on the planet is the Seven Chalices Full of Plagues for the industry; that is, the second to last sign of its demise. The next stage will be the discontinuation of packaged media, followed by the dissolution of video streaming - not in the near future mind you, probably not until they figure out how to channel movies and tv shows directly to the human brain. I guess that'll be fine...but it will be hard to determine whether or not they're any good without a video box.

Video Oddities #9: BIG FOOT

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan

"Maybe they don't exist, but I want them to." - Jane Goodall

I can tell you why Bigfoot is real.

As I was getting started on this article in late March, a video was released by one Thomas Byers, depicting a Bigfoot walking across Golden Valley Church Road in Rutherford County, Tennessee. "As I filmed it crossing the road it turned its head towards me and snarled or growled at me as it ran across the road," Byers said in an excited statement. "It was truly one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen." However the footage came about, it's got the three B's of a classic Bigfoot video: bumpy, blurry and brief. These qualities are what connect this latest clip to the hundreds if not thousands of recorded alleged Bigfoot sightings brought to the public eye since the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, arguably the most iconic American home movie not shot by Abraham Zapruder. To skeptics, the poor quality of the footage is intentional desecration of the image on the part of the cameraman to hide the zipper on the gorilla costume or make the shooting of the film seem more abrupt and unexpected. But I think it's more interesting to look at it through the eyes of a believer. With today's technology, where any boob could CG a Bigfoot or any amateur creature makeup artist could create a mask that looks as good as the one in those commercials, we're still getting grainy footage of a blurry behemoth crossing the road. Why would you try to pass this off when you could easily make a video with a tuxedo-wearing Bigfoot skydiving onto a vespa and driving down a rocky ridge into some rapids to do battle with a school of hungry mutant crocodiles on your computer? Why does the cult of the grainy video persevere?

Before I get to the movie, I want to relate some Bigfoot anecdotes (don't worry, I've never had an encounter of the hairy kind myself - only an Easter Bunny encounter. True story!)

The first original script I ever wrote* back in fourth or fifth grade was one called Bigfoot's Vacation, in which Bigoot - having come out of hiding and subsequently climbed the ladder as one of the world's most renowned paleontologists - travels to Scotland to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. I don't have a copy of it anymore, but I remember the ending: a scuba gear-suited 'Foot discovers the secret lair of Loch Ness, where the Monster admonishes him for having revealed himself to homo sapiens and thus taking some of the mystery out of their lives, at the same time making himself a little less special. This argument convinces Bigfoot not to share his discovery with the science world, and after returning to Northern California he builds a spaceship to journey to other planets where he can possibly start over again with a new alien society as a rarely-glimpsed recluse. (His friend the Yeti would have found him despondent on the latest of several unoccupied planets at the beginning of my intented but never written sequel, The Big Foot Bang Theory.)

Cut to 20 years later. One of my favorite moments from my sister's December 2009 wedding was sitting in the hotel room the night before the ceremony with my 36-week pregnant wife watching a documentary on the search for Bigfoot. It had been a surreal day - after driving six hours down to Virginia, I'd been immediately tasked with making a run with my brother to the airport to pick up some late wedding guests. While waiting for these strangers to pass through the Dulles gates, I heard my brother whisper-shout "Oh shit, Joe Mantegna!" I turned around and, sure enough, there was Fat Tony himself strolling through the terminal. 'Celebrity sightings are like Bigfoot sightings,' I mused while lounging on the hotel room bed taking up space that rightfully should have belonged to my wife. 'The lesser amount of exposure time, the stronger the mysterious aura that remains.'

Anyway, the TV program was kind of amazing. It didn't interview specialists, scientists, researchers - nobody with abbreviated letters following their name. The cast was made up entirely of backwoods yahoos in jean vests and caps with gas station logos. None of them claimed to have actually seen the mythic cryptid, nobody produced a photo or footprint impression to back up the story of an encounter. They all treated the subject like the existence of a 9-foot ape man was a given, that they knew the creature lived among them and were just telling us viewers at home a few things we might not have known about these very real animals. One guy, bald on top with long hair in back and bushy sideburns, related a story of one night where unseen intruders hurled stones at his pickup truck. The idea that these were bored, dipshit high school kids never seemed to cross his mind: it was a family of Bigfeet, warning him in a threatening yet harmless way not to venture too far into the surrounding wilderness.

Check out this report of a classic 1924 sighting:

"Fred Beck claimed that he and four other miners were attacked one night in July 1924, by several 'apemen' throwing rocks at their cabin in an area later called Ape Canyon in Washington. Beck claimed the miners shot and possibly killed at least one of the creatures, precipitating an attack on their cabin, during which the creatures bombarded the cabin with rocks and tried to break in. The incident was widely reported at the time. Beck wrote a book about the event in 1967, in which he argued that the alleged creatures were mystical beings from another dimension, claiming that he had experienced psychic premonitions and visions his entire life of which the apemen were only one component."

I don't read passages like that and think "Oh well it must be true, there were so many witnesses!" Trying to use actual facts and scientific evidence as backup is overrated**; instead, I think "It's so fucking incredible that these guys really believe this story and stuck to it long enough to write books about the incident four decades later." Mystical beings from another dimension! Nude conspiracies! Mothman vs Bigfoot! The lore is endlessly engrossing, and has remained durable and expansive from one generation to the next. Whatever this collective madness that keeps the spirit of Bigfoot alive, it's infectious; people's enthusiasm for the subject rapturous. How are you supposed to ignore a guy at a party who regales the guests with a story of how he barely escaped a sasquatch with his life? On the flip side of the coin, who would want to waste time with the assholes who ruin it for others - what fun is it to disprove Bigfoot sightings? And wouldn't going out of your way to proove the non-existence of Bigfoot make you feel like even more of an idiot than people who fervently believe in him? How is devoting one's life to the search for Bigfoot any different from "theological positivists" who finance excursions to hunt for Noah's Ark? Are those doofuses any more legit than the BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization)? I honestly think it would be awesome to be a BFRO-er; unfortunately, membership is by invitation only - you have to know a member and be invited on expeditions, then recommended for initiation, which I don't really have time for. Instead, I'm just really glad they're out there making Bigfoot exist by chronicling tales of Bigfoot engagements and photos of impossibly large footprints. That kind of dedication is what makes TV programs viewed on the night before your sister's wedding every bit as memorable as the blessed event itself, and why people like my (adult) buddy Scott Runnels have wet dreams about getting it on with a sasqutch (true story!)

I think the "Spanish Fry" episode of Futurama summed it up best:

"In the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest dwells the strange and beautiful creature known as Bigfoot, perhaps. Sadly, logging and human settlement today threaten what might possibly be his habitat. Although if it's not, they don't. Bigfoot populations require vast amounts of land to remain elusive in. They typically dwell just behind rocks but are also sometimes playful, bounding into thick fogs and out-of-focus areas. Remember, it's up to us. Bigfoot is a crucial part of the ecosystem, if he exists. So let's all help keep Bigfoot possibly alive for future generations to enjoy unless he doesn't exist."

It is up to us! "Bigfoot exists in all of us," is the point I'm trying to make here without actually using those specific words, and his legend endures throughout our American culture like Mickey Mantle or the atomic bomb. Why else would he have been immortalized so many times in feature films? Why else would Marvel turn him into a beloved Canadian superhero? In Jackson County, Oregon there is a famous "Bigfoot trap" that's been around for almost forty years. In 1969, Skamania County, Washington passed a law declaring that "any willful, wanton slaying of such creatures shall be deemed a felony" that's still on the books today (although the law was passed on April 1, the country commissioner was quoted as saying "This is not an April Fool's Day joke...there is reason to believe such an animal exists.") It's a dream of mine to one day write the libretto for a musical based on Bigfoot sightings alone, without even going into the alleged history or actual "discovery" of the beast himself. Because that's what really counts, and what makes me want to see a movie where the big guy flips a dude off a motorcycle in front of a half-naked chick tied to a tree in the background as Colonel Sanders and a cop with a machine gun look on in horror...

Ok, now that all that's out of the way, on to the movie...

* My first script was a sequel to Teen Wolf called Teen Wolf Too - yes, the "two" was spelled "too" because it was about a DIFFERENT Teen Wolf. Hollywood ripped that one off.

** Although I will say this: Many people have come forward to claim that they were the man in the suit in Patterson-Gimli film, thus debunking the classic bit of footage. But how about this logic: if there were two men present (Patterson and Gimli), why wouldn't one of them played the "phony" creature? Why would they need a third guy? It just goes to show that for every person who (allegedly) tries to get famous by saying he saw Bigfoot, there are ten who try to get famous by proofing him wrong.

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