Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Episode 581 - Bat Man (Patreon)

Published:
2022-01-27 16:21:52
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Join us as we nuzzle up to a pulp masterpiece - the ORIGINAL Bat Man by Lew Merrill!

Music from this episode available NOW for bonus subscribers, who can also expect a visit from Manimal on Monday.

Coming in February: WEREWOLVES OF WEIRD TALES and a video AMA Feb 5th!

Comments

Thylacine

This is the greatest story you all have ever covered.

Daniel Granér

The return of Dean! Love it! Great that you guys brought up Roger Dean of Yes and Asia fame. I thought about that also.

Pagurus

Usually I think I know where Chad is quoting directly from the actual story and where he just ad-libs making fun of the the narration - this time I wasn't so sure more than half of the time.

Jennifer DeFord

I don't know what I expected out of this episode, but it wasn't a touching love story between bats.

Jennifer DeFord

Oh, and on the topic of bats and hair: I usually see it dismissed as an urban legend, but my mother swore that a bat got tangled in her own mother's hair. Grandma passed away in the '70s and was your stereotypical tiny old lady with hair pinned up in a bun, so it seems at least plausible that something could get trapped in the hairdo.

Carter Stepper

Well, sounds like a terrible story but this episode was hilarious. Thanks for an enjoyable analysis of a crappy story gents 😂

The Loungeraptor

The real story here is how the bats of the quarry accepted him, over time, as one of their own, teaching him their ways, much like Boba Fett and the Tuskins, or Tom Cruise and those Samurai, this is Dances with Bats.

Robert Curtin

I LOVE DEAN!!! So wonderful to witness his return to the show.

Jason Thompson

This was indeed like a M. Night Shyalaman story, specifically “The Village”, in which the explanation for what is happening is stupider than any explanation the reader could have come up with

Rob Gillie

I dunno, guys. Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein and Candide were all pretty good books, but I never realized until now that they would've truly been great books if they'd only had a guy who thought he was a bat in them. Poor Emily! Poor Mary! Poor Francois-Marie! If only they'd known. Seriously, though -- this story was terrible, terrible in an epic way, but I really appreciate your enthusiasm and I really enjoy knowing that people used to make a living writing spicy stuff like this. Two more things: (1) Chad should read more often, and (2) who knew Chris was so jaded?

Forrest Rush

Holy spicy batwings Batman! It doesn‘t really add anything to this story, but I pictured him hanging upside-down in the cave covered by bats with some feeding him bugs, keeping him warm a la Michelle Pfeiffer’s transformation into Catwoman. I also thought that maybe Dr Dean was trying to explain this nonsense with the notion of the lizard brain taking over after the more evolved mammalian brain was damaged. But that now pretty much disproven notion wasn’t put out until the 60’s, so I guess the writer was just using the left brain-right brain hypothesis. At least he didn’t start going on about only using 10%.

Forrest Rush

Oh regarding the bats in the hair, I’m pretty sure it was a thing discussed or claimed urban myth style from the 19th century up to the 1950’s and had to do with how women’s hairstyles became more elaborate as products developed for maintaining beehives and whatnot. I seem to recall reading something about this on the interwebs or hearing it discussed on a history podcast, but I can’t locate it. Regardless, whatever the source was I remember it saying that it wasn’t really a common occurrence, but the myth of it led to warnings in the states that women should avoid too much hairspray in maintaining their hairstyles ‘cause it would attract the critters. Maybe it was a story started by some forward-thinking environmentalist trying to save the ozone layer.

Steve

I did an A Level in Philosophy some years ago. We covered Thomas Nagel's 1974 paper What is it like to be a Bat? Nagel argues for the impossibility for objective experiences. Besides the dubious conclusion, it wasn't nearly as entertaining as Merrill. Also Nagel is wrong about echolocation, people can do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=2IKT2akh0Ng.

Ben A

And here I thought that the brain swap in the Monster of Lake LaMetrie was one of the strangest and outlandish tales you guys have covered. But both that tale and Bat Man show how entertainingly ridiculous these types of stories are. It would be fun to look for more and do a "brain swap" month on the podcast.

Andrew Brown

The story of a man believing he was a bat is as almost as outlandish as story of a pretty boy vampire who falls in love with a mortal girl

Peter Larsen

I mean, "Strange Studies of Strange Stories" is really living up to its ethos for this episode. It's.. an.. amusing? idea, but none of the actual execution makes a lick of sense. Still better than Manimal, though.

Jason Thompson

Until the big reveal, this story is oddly similar to James Herbert’s novel “Fluke,” in which a guy is reincarnated as a dog and goes back and forth between “gotta chase sticks” and “gotta find my human wife and plant a big sloppy dog kiss on her”

Peter Larsen

There was an article I read years ago where a journalist (Tim Cahill, maybe?) was going into a cave with a group of experts, and he made some crack about bats and hair, since there were a lot of bats flying in and out, and the expert stood up and said "look, bats have really good navigation because of the sonar, so they don't just fly into people..." At that moment, a bat slammed right into his head, and the bat and expert both screamed. The journalist checked in with a bat expert after and was told that, since the bat's navigation interferes with each other a bit, they don't use it on "home ground" and navigate by memory. So, the one time a bat might get stuck in your hair would be during a home visit. This is why bats have the reputation of being terrible hosts.

Peter Larsen

Also, one year, on the morning of November 1st, I stepped out of my apartment and looked down and saw what looked like a toy mouse for a cat tucked into the door frame. I almost picked it up, then reconsidered, and poked it with a broom. It unfurled and hissed at me, being a Little Brown Bat in hiding. I went back inside, called my friend the bat rehabilitator, and said "what do I do?" She said to pick it up on a dustpan or something and transfer it to a tree, if possible. If not, she would call around and try and find a local rehab person for me. I got on the heavy leather gloves, chivvied the bat onto a dustpan, and carried it out of the building past a neighbor who was pretty much perpetually stoned, warning him with "bat coming through!" The bat hissed at me and him with a pretty adorable little face, like a wolf abut 2" long. Anyway, once the dustpan hit the tree, the bat scurried up the bark, and we went our separate ways. At no time did the bat complain about Dr Dean or anyone else.

Peter Larsen

astly, bats have to drop to take flight, so our "hero's" description of what he was doing makes no sense... oh, jeeze, that was not the breaking point of my suspension of disbelief. Nor was the fact that only vampire bats are any good at walking (you can see videos of them running on treadmills on youtube; they are pretty speedy and interesting to watch). To the surprise on no one, this story may have no true bat facts, making it worse at bat information that the huge number of stories that have no bats in them at all. So, a literary triumph!

Peter Larsen

Would it have been better if he though he was a baseball bat? Discuss.

Andrew Brown

In a bad Italian accent, repeat after me: “Dat’s a spicee bat story”

Zane Graves

It's definitely ...a story But certainly no Nashville Hot Chicken.

Karlandos

What an insane story. That said it always amuses me when topics such as sexuality and the act thereof is brought up in stories and media from the period especially because of how taboo and scandalous it is and how it is treated. Also, Chris kudos for the pondering meme plug as it happens to be one of my favorite memes to make the rounds of the internet

Jim Cannon

This is NOT at all what I was expecting. I was expecting some groovy Kirk Langstrom monster action, not this absolute ridiculous sadness. As utterly bizarre as the premise is, the reveal of what is actually happening is just awful. The magical healing moment in the last few lines aside, included to provide an implausible happy ending, that is some bleak bizzareness. Failed suicide thinks he's a bat, lives in a cave for three weeks eating bugs and creeping on ladies? That's messed up in a way that Deep Ones and Dutch rats can't approach. And being the lazy guy who didn't click with Aikman, I did appreciate Chad chiming in about how if this was a well written story, you guys would be digging on the weirdness and not baffled by it. Feeling just a trifle vindicated. Glad you guys are still dedicated March to Draculas, after spending January on them. Vampenary? Blooduary? I'm no good at this stuff.

Mooncubus

Man I was having a pretty bad morning. Then I heard Chad's awesome performance as Batman and my dad was instantly better. Good luck topping that Robert Pattinson! I gotta say I was really loving this ridiculously batty tale until the ending. I saw it coming but I much prefer the idea that he was a little bat the whole time. In regards to if this has any bearing on DC's Batman, the only thing I can think of is that he has the Batcave, just minus the computers and stuff.

Ben Gilbert

For similar and superior pulpy thrills you should read A. Merritt's short novel "Burn Witch Burn". Or better yet watch the movie version "Devil Doll" with Lionel Barrymore. (The movie titled "Burn Witch Burn" is based on Fritz Leiber's "Conjure Wife.")

UltharMeow

I’m just picturing this little fruit bat shaking it’s tiny fist and squeaking out “Curse you, Roger Dean!!” Except it’s all in ultrasound so only other bats can hear him.

Stacy Schumacher

In a previous job, I used to take the public on guided bat walks, with the little hand held detectors that would play their echolocation sounds back at a frequency we can hear. I would always have someone bring up the 'bats in hair' myth. If a bat can catch a tiny midge or mosquito in midair, why in the world would anyone think they are clumsy enough to fly into hair or have any desire to do so? It's probably because bats swoop around and people have bad spatial awareness so think the bat is closer than it is. My favorite information to share with them was given to me by a different staff person, and I wish I could find the source material online, but alas, I cannot. Nevertheless, here goes: Apparently the Victorians, with their scientific curiosity, set out to find which color of women's hair was most likely to attract bats. They put four women, each with a different hair color (blonde, brunette, black, and red) into four rooms, with the windows covered up and no source of light. Then they put a bat into each of the rooms and timed how long it took for the bat to fly into the woman's hair. And of course, the bats, not being idiots, didn't fly into anyone's hair and just hung out in the corner until the 'experiment' was done.

Shana Carter

I wasn't too fussed about how the mind of John Charters wound up in a bat, because (1) our narrator said things like "I could have sworn I was a man" often enough that I guessed the twist, and (2) there's a lot of sci-fi/horror in which consciousness seems to exist or operate independently of the brain. The most famous example is THE FLY, where the scientist can still think and write after his human head has been swapped with that of an insect. Before that, there was HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, where Boris Karloff's mad scientist tells an enemy that he's going to put the Wolf Man's brain into his skull, "so that all your waking hours will be spent in untold agony awaiting the full of the moon... which will change you into a werewolf." More seriously, I wonder if Merrill was familiar with the case of Phineas Gage, a man who had a metal rod blown clear through his skull. He survived, but the near total destruction of his brain's left frontal lobe caused profound changes in his personality and behavior.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Not my sort of spicy, but there sure does appear to be plenty of stuff here for the fine cucks, furries, voyeurs, and blood play enthusiasts. Which, I suppose, pays the bills..?