Script
Australia, 1799. White people, as they so often do, discover something that has existed for tens of thousands of years and been known of and tended to by the natives to the point that it’s been common place for as long as the natives can remember. The white people are astounded by their brilliance and bravery, celebrate their great fortune – a blessing from god – and waste no time in changing its name and pushing it to the brink of extinction before “saving” it – which they pat themselves on the back heartily for – and making it a totem of their own culture, erasing its considerable history.
In this particular case, the white person is Captain Hueling Q. Winbiggler and the thing is a strange Australian creature with a bill, thick fur, a large flat tail, and webbed feat, known to the aboriginals as mallangong or tambreet or dulaiwarrung, depending on which aboriginal you ask.
Captain Winbiggler was exploring the Northern coast of Australia, then known to Europeans as New Holland, at the behest of King George III. He hoped to find gold and magical fountains and spices and people to sell spices to. People were crazy for spices back then.
Instead he found the platypus.
Winbiggler, like some of our best middle aged actors, was a renowned prankster. Six months earlier he had reported back home that he’d discovered a race of gigantic, hairy, pig people. All of Britain was abuzz with the report, but when Dr. Rundell Framebridge, a timid, proper intellectual and Winbiggler’s point man in the motherland, received the supposed proof of this discovery, it was just a crude drawing of his mother.
So Dr. Framebridge was understandably skeptical upon hearing of a creature that was a cross between a duck and a beaver. It sounded like it could very well be another joke about his Mom.
It wasn’t, though the creature he found before him still seemed like a hoax. It had, as Winbiggler had described, fur, webbed feet, and a beaver-esque tail. Framebridge assumed that this was just some clever taxidermy – not uncommon at the time. Monkey tops sewn to fish tails were a popular variation, passed off as mermaids, a far cry from the disturbingly sexualized mer-people of today.
He cut into it’s fur to find the stitching. There was none. This bizarre creature was real. What in God’s name had god been thinking when he created this horrid beast? He opened its mouth to inspect the teeth. He didn’t find teeth – adult platypuses don’t have any – but he did find a graphic rendering of the woman that had birthed him being double teamed by rhinoceros scribbled on some paper.
Captain Winbiggler had struck again.
The platypus got it’s name from the Greek words “platus” which, loosely translated to English, means “freaky-deaky” and “pous”, meaning beaver. As with most things, its existence was fairly inconsequential to Europeans, but folks were eager to wear and consume its parts. The pelt – which looks and feels like a beaver’s but smells of pineapple and your first significant girlfriend’s morning breath – became a popular source for stoles and, because of its water repellant properties, swim wear across Europe in the years following the discovery. The bill was either ground down and used to produce healthifying tinctures and the first known fake dog shit – the kind used to pull hilarious pranks, much to Captain Winbiggler’s delight – or strung from a chain and worn around the neck, where it could hold a beverage or perfumes, anything really, or be brought up to the face to be worn over the nose and mouth to scare children and ward off disease. Their flesh was never widely eaten as it tastes like bologna, which most people had not yet become glutenous enough to deem edible. (Editor’s note: It also had yet to be invented.)
As the human population of Australia grew, the platypus population dwindled and the cost of their parts increased. But by 1815 the craze had died down considerably due to the explosive popularity amongst the very rich of clothes made from human hair, typically harvested from orphans.
And so the platypus population made a comeback, and the animals lived peacefully, as they do today, in the parts of Australia left undisturbed by man as well as the countries zoos and the homes of various eccentrics and hipster scofflaws.
In 1898 it was confirmed that the platypus laid eggs – no one had even thought to find out if they did before then, why would they? – and, upon the discovery and removal of those eggs, that the male platypus is equipped with a poisonous claw on its rear right foot that can kill an animal the size of a dog, cause an adult human severe pain for months, and probably kind of sting a blue whale, though this has never been attempted, as far as I know.
In 1901, when Australia declared independence, the platypus was named the countries official animal after defeating a kangaroo and a wallaby in a fight to the death.
In 1905 the worlds largest platypus was erected in Shelley, Idaho, for some reason. It was carried away by a tornado in 1942, killing 34 people at a Woolworths two towns over when it dropped. The headline the next day read, “Platypus Plummets, People Perish.”
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, a gentleman named Manvil Werts became know as The Platypus Man, and was a popular attraction in the Shamblin Family Traveling Freak Show, which made it’s way all over the United States. Werts stood only four feet tall, was covered in hair from head to toe, and had a massive nose. He really did look like a platypus, with the exception of the tale, which had to be pinned on for the show, but still managed to marry a quite classically beautiful woman of average height and fathered 16 children, none of which looked like a platypus. One did look like a potato, though, and went on to have his own successful career as a freak, as well as inspiring the popular Mr. Potato Head toy.
An infamous 1982 episode of Mork and Mindy featured the arrival of Mork’s beloved childhood pet, Zoldar, a 6 foot long talking platypus, who arrived from Ork in, you guessed it, an egg. The animal is sent to Earth by Orson, a disembodied voice and Mork’s manager or something – to remind Mork of his roots and prevent him from becoming too human. Zoldar, terrified by his new surroundings, runs roughshod over Boulder, reducing the city to ashes, all the while screaming, “I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t ask for this!” The episode ends with the beast dead by Mork’s own hand – he hacks and hacks and hacks at it with a shard of its own egg, weeping madly while Mindy, her blood rich with the platypuses poison, lies near death only feet away. The episode never aired and Mork and Mindy would be cancelled within the year.
In 1994, a homeless woman named Bilomina Shivers gained national attention in the United States when a keen eyed movie critic noticed her and her pet platypus, Gordy Shivers, in the background of several notable films shot over the previous decade. Look closely at the scene early in The Neverending Story, when Bastion is running from bullies to seek shelter in a book store. As he turns a corner, you’ll get a brief glimpse of Bilomina staring straight into the camera, holding Gordy’s leash. She similarly appears in Purple Rain, Sixteen Candles, Fletch, Re-Animator, Brazil, Blue Velvet, Howard the Duck, Flight of the Navigator, La Bamba, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gorillas In the Mist, Do the Right Thing, Tremors, and Aladdin, just to name a few. The directors of the various films have denied casting her and were unaware that she appeared in their movies at all. Asked how she had found herself in so many films, she replied, simply, “I goes where I goes and Gordy comes with me.”
In the years since then, the platypus has laid pretty low. Scientists have discovered a few new, barely believable facts – it stores fat in its tail so it can go long stretches of time without eating and its bill is covered in tiny electroreceptors that it uses to sense prey and predators when it is underwater, for instance. It’s been the subject of a ludicrous number of children’s songs, and the title of an equally ludicrous number of instrumental jazz, house, and speed metal songs. But, despite its extraordinary features, the platypus is a humble creature, really, solitary and stoic, intending no harm to anyone and usually able to avoid inflicting it.
We could all stand to take a lesson or two from this magnificent, ludicrous beast.