Moana Fossilized Giants and Polynesian Cosmology Explained

➡ In this podcast episode, the hosts discuss the Disney movie Moana, comparing it to Frozen in terms of box office success and cultural impact. They also talk about their personal preferences for reptiles as pets, and share some anecdotes about encounters with snakes. The hosts also discuss the music in Moana, with one host not enjoying the songs sung by the main character. They end the discussion with a humorous debate about the differences between Australia and New Zealand.
➡ The text discusses the cultural background and accuracy of the Disney movie, Moana. It highlights the movie’s representation of Polynesian culture and mythology, and the directors’ efforts to make it relatable and accurate. The text also compares Moana’s animation style to other Disney movies, praising its blend of cartoonish and realistic elements. Lastly, it debates whether Moana, the main character, should be considered a Disney princess, a demigod, or a shaman due to her connection with the ocean.
➡ The discussion revolves around the Disney movies Moana, Pocahontas, Hercules, and Snow White, comparing their portrayals of mythology, history, and cosmology. The speakers appreciate Moana for its accurate representation of mythology and its attempt to explain a whole cosmology. They also discuss the visual appeal of the movies and their personal preferences, with a side conversation about tiki culture and Disney theme parks.
➡ The text discusses a Disney movie, possibly Moana, and its connections to Polynesian culture. It also talks about the changes made to the movie in different regions and the directors’ fascination with including demons in their films. The text also mentions the plot of the movie, which revolves around a crisis on an island where food is running out.
➡ The text discusses a movie that mirrors Polynesian history, where sailing stopped for a thousand years due to ocean current changes and then resumed. The movie’s plot revolves around a princess who advocates for sailing beyond the reef, representing a new era. The text also discusses the use of GPS and maps, reminiscing about older methods of navigation. It mentions reading various books and the experience of observing stars in areas with less light pollution.
➡ The text discusses a movie experience, comparing it to personal life events and cultural aspects. It talks about the movie Moana, its songs, and the conflict within the story. The conversation also touches on Japanese culture, sumo wrestling, and the belief in mountains as living entities. The text ends with a mention of the character Maui from the movie.
➡ The text discusses the character Maui from Polynesian culture, who appears in various forms across Hawaiian, Maori, Samoan, and Tahitian cultures. Maui is compared to Western gods like Prometheus and Dionysus due to his similar traits and actions, such as slowing down the sun and attempting to defeat death. The text also mentions Maui’s fish hook, which is a significant symbol in Polynesian culture and is used for navigation. Lastly, the text discusses the concept of ‘tapu’, a system of unwritten laws in Polynesian culture, from which the English word ‘taboo’ originates.
➡ The text discusses the representation of non-western cultures in Disney movies, focusing on Polynesian culture in Moana. It mentions how few Disney movies are based on non-western folklore, with only Aladdin, Mulan, Hercules, and Moana being mentioned. The text also discusses fan theories about Moana, such as her dying in the storm or Maui being a fallen god. Lastly, it talks about the psychology of the characters, particularly their fear of the unknown and the sea.
➡ The text discusses the appreciation for 2D animation in movies, despite the industry’s shift towards 3D. It mentions the effective use of animation in films like Moana and Princess and the Frog, and the memorable villain songs in these movies. The text also talks about the impact of these films on children, with some movies leaving a lasting impression while others are easily forgotten. Lastly, it promotes a website offering mini comics and other items for sale.
➡ This text seems to express a strong, defiant attitude, possibly from a person feeling misunderstood or undervalued. It suggests a desire for peace and rest, a dislike for negativity, and a determination to keep going despite challenges or lack of recognition.

Maui’s just joking about a human sacrifice. Or is he ask about Illuminati sister charting me up Bet is it Disney mind controlled? Is this MK Ultra Deluxe? I go Disney we go from real to real go this day go hear me moving no more real I go this ask her back to the moon. I take a co business teacher home to everybody. A co Disney A wish upon a star. A co business. You know God to transfer. Oh, a co Disney A new grand Pinocchio dinner called Disney. En. Hello. Welcome to the Occult Disney podcast where we go searching for all the secrets found in the sea.

It’s Moana today. This is Matt here. Over there, it’s a paranoid American. How’s your swimming skill? I’m actually a reptilian shape shifter, just like one of the main characters in this movie. Yeah, but some, some reptiles don’t like water, right? I mean, I’m thinking, you know, you got water serpents, sea snakes. I’ve been to Okinawa. You got to be careful. The sea snakes there, they’re super poisonous. They’ll do just fine. Reptiles can handle water just fine. Yeah. What’s kind of creepy, you’re snorkeling or whatever and you’re, you know, you’re probably 10, 20 meters above, but you look, you look down and you can see one of those guys on the ground.

Sometime you’re like, that thing is like venomous as hell. They’re not cute, so a lot of people like to keep them as pets. I. I don’t know. I think I would prefer a snake over a lizard as a pet. Really. Okay, I’m gonna go lizard over snake. But maybe I’ve mentioned the story before where I used to do environmental education in South Carolina. Before that, I was kind of a not. I didn’t love snakes, but snakes didn’t bother me. But working there, I’m taking kids through a forest where I’m always like, having to, you know, I see poisonous snakes in the path.

We found coral snakes behind our living, behind our drawers in the office. Well, I’m not advocating to keep a poisonous snake. That’s not my favorite. I was walking by a tree once and the snake fell out of the tree. That didn’t make me happy. I mean, I guess, but it would be the same for pretty much any reptile, though, if you just. It was a snake. I’ll take the lizard over the snake. Okay. Some hands. I can see what they’re doing. Snakes don’t have any hands. Of course, here we. We get, I guess a reptile with, with Some appendages.

Well, it’s. It’s a God, though, right? Is it a reptile? If it’s a God, doesn’t the God. Yeah, I don’t know. Is the reptile living at the center of the earth a God? Or is it just was. Was Zeus a swan? Or was Zeus, when he wanted to be, he would. Sometimes he is a calf, and then he become amorous with a lady as a calf. Is that how the myths work? I don’t remember. It’s been a while since I hit those. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I feel like once you convert to an animal, you can just do whatever you want.

Yeah. Yeah. I’m an animal. Yeah. Sort of in the Stone Rules. So, Moana, is this your first view of this? I. This is one that did play, actually. I watched it. I realized I have a little USB drive that I haven’t used in years. I was like, oh, that’s what we used to plug in a TV and play Moana on. And alas, it was still there. So I just watched. That’s the first time that I’ve seen it. I. I could understand, though, if this one. In the household of a girl growing up, this might be like a regular rotation one.

Yeah, this actually is probably it. Box office wise, it didn’t really touch Frozen, but cultural imprint wise, it’s a little bit behind Frozen. As I said, I often go by how many of my kids have, like, you know, T shirts, socks, and. And thermoses with Disney characters on it. So Anna and Elsa are on way more. And Moana, but they like the songs. Moana shows up every once in a while on the kids ephemera. Okay, so, okay, two things. First, let’s. Let’s ignore the songs for a second. I feel like Moana is superior to Frozen in almost every single way.

It’s. It is. I agree with you. I’m. I’m talking box office and cultural ump here. As a movie, I prefer Moana easily. Although here’s the difference is that I’m not one that likes the musicals. We’ve been over this a million times. I won’t hammer it all the way in, but I’m not a fan of the musicals. Frozen was way better music wise than this one was to me. And it’s not just. It’s not because I disliked the music in this movie, per se. It’s just because for the 95% of the movie, until I looked it up at the very end, I thought this was being voiced by Mila Kunis.

So every time she went into song. It sounded like Meg Griffin from Family Guy going into song and it just never hit right. It always sounded a little bit like nails on a chalkboard. And then at the very end, I was absolutely shocked to find out it was not my lacunas. They did hire a 14 year old Hawaiian to do the voice, so makes more sense culturally and no, no shade to her. But it did. It was not pleasurable to listen. Whenever it was a song that she was in, I kind of turned the volume down a little bit.

Like it was not a pleasurable experience. Well, the first song was basically Let it go backwards. Right. I mean, her first big song was between her and the rock. The rock’s the other one that you get to hear singing. Yeah, we don’t need to hear the rock singing. There was one song that I particularly thought was really good and it was the Crab song. And the Crab song, interestingly, it almost sounded like David Bowie a little bit. And I had to do a little bit of research and apparently the singer did say that he was channeling David Bowie in that song.

So I don’t know. Okay. That was the one that did go. I did go looking for that because I was like. There were like five different people and I was like, oh, oh, fly the Concords. Let’s fly the Concords guy. Yeah. If you ever saw that show, which. If you didn’t, you don’t. I have Australian comedy show New Zealand. Yeah. Or news, whatever. There’s the same place. I don’t care if they’ve got like, you know, antagonistic histories or whatever. I was just reading a map book which was talking about how a lot of maps tend to leave New Zealand off accidentally.

Like there’s an Ikea, you know, wall map a few years ago where there’s a controversy because they had left New Zealand off. When you start looking, there’s lots of other flaws. Like even Scandinavia is like shaped completely wrong and Norway no longer has fjords. So know. I mean, it’s. They did take a. You know, it wasn’t supposed to be accurate, but New Zealand was completely gone. So when I was in, I don’t know, 9th or 10th grade, but I actually got in trouble for bullying and it’s. But I wasn’t bullying anyone. But there was this kid in our class that was from New Zealand and I like m.

Everyone always mistakenly said that he was from Australia because he had the accent. And you just heard the accent and you were like, oh, that’s an Australian accent. And at a certain point it became kind of funny, because he got really upset whenever you said he was Australian instead of being from New Zealand. And it just seemed like such a trivial difference. Like, whatever we’re talking. Like, it’s like, I’m not Floridian. I’m from, you know, like, south. Like, you know, South Georgia. I’m not from North Florida. I’m from South Georgia. Just like, okay, whatever. But, like, we got to the point where nobody acknowledged that he was from New Zealand and always said he was from Australia.

And I got in trouble for, like, leading a little, like, ring of people to just deny this. This person’s New Zealand genealogy. Well, you. You and Ikea, then. The other fun thing is the. The month that. The same month that controversy happened, they were, like, opening their first store in New Zealand or something. So you have to fill me in. What controversy? Ikea, New Zealand. Leaving New Zealand off the. Off the map. I mean, this is a very small controversy, you know, like an incendiary one or anything. Yeah, I guess. I guess they just like to puff their chest up whenever they have a reason to, like, hey, we here, too? Well, the thing is, I think the New Zealanders in general, it was like.

I think they’re just. They think it’s funny at least if they’re living in New Zealand. Not your class, so. And for the record, I’ve got way more readers in Australia. I think it goes us, and then Australia is, like, number two. So if it ever comes down to it, I’m Team Australia, baby. Like, no shade on New Zealanders. But I’ve got too many fans and readers in Australia. Like, I’m. I’m fighting for the Australians on this one. My daughter did a home stay in Australia last year, and then they came to visit us in summer. And, yeah, the guys, like, we’re Australian.

And then his. His wife was Filipina from the Philippines, and he was like, oh, I’m actually from New Zealand. So we. We didn’t know what nationality they were. So. Okay. So, okay, speaking of nationalities and stuff, this. This one. It is important maybe to do a little bit of housekeeping, I guess, before we get deep into the. The movie background and all the different occult readings and stuff. And that’s the Polynesian people. Because this movie is essentially about Polynesian culture, Polynesian mythology in general. And Polynesian just means many islands, right? Multiple islands. It’s all Polynesia means.

And historically, when they named these different groups of islands, there was, like, Polynesia, then there was Micronesia, which were, like, all of the tiny islands. And then there was Melanesia, which were the black islands, which were just because there was black people that lived on the islands. So out of those three that were like, historically European references to these groups of islands, and in typical European fashion, they would just group things that weren’t really related to each other. So just because you’re in Micronesia doesn’t mean that you share culture with everyone else. And just like you’re in Melanesia doesn’t mean you share culture.

When it came to Polynesia, just by dumb luck, they. They, like, happened to actually group this. These different peoples together that did share a very unified and cohesive culture. And it’s not because they knew what they were doing when they called it Polynesia. It just kind of happy accident worked out that way. Like, they just happened to be right to group all of Polynesia. So when we’re talking about New Zealand and Hawaii, because the main character’s name is Maui, which is actually a God, which is just the name of someone who I. The reason why. And they never mention any actual islands.

They never mention nationality or countries in this whole movie. So it’s kind of up to you to figure out what they’re talking about. And it’s like, they talking about Hawaii. Are they talking about a New Zealand? Right now they’re talking about all of Polynesia. And it all kind of works. I. I actually read a book about Polynesian history or a year ago, and so I’m coming off a little vague on it, but it was talking about how the people, you know, not with the European sort of border classifications, but were basically like, they. They would divide everything into two islands, you know, the atolls, the flat islands, and then the.

The mountain people, you know, because they have mountains on their islands, like Tahiti or something. Right. But even if they were, they were separating themselves as peoples, they shared a common culture between the two of them, so they had a consistent frame of reference. Yeah, I was also looking at the map book. I was talking about where it had the. The New Zealand thing. It also was talking about Marshall island, like, stick charts. Have you ever seen these Marshall island stick charts? It’s not just, of course, Marshall islands is the U.S. designation for this place or European designation for this place.

But yeah, it’s like a flat piece of paper and it’s got sticks on it. So nobody in particular knows how to read them anymore. That’s what the CFAR is. Would use. So there’s only like one or two people left, but it can actually read these things. But, you know, by training you would, like, lie in the outrigger or whatever with your eyes closed, and by feeling the waves, you could kind of tell what direction you needed to go in to get to the next island. So, I mean, it doesn’t make any sense because nobody has the skill anymore, especially now that everyone’s got their sat nav, gps, whatever you want to call it.

I. I think I would still trust the sat nav over some. Oh, of course you would. But if. If you lived in a pretty digital electricity and someone had that skill, it’s pretty impressive, you know, but, yeah, they have these charts. I think they’re still sold as like, you know, like, like Taurus stuff or whatever, but it’s not like, it’s not a practical thing. So, I mean, even by the early 20th century, it’s. You’ve got a compass now, so that’s a lot easier probably than learning these arcane skills to be able to just feel waves and know how it works.

So. And also, I just want to preface everything else we’re about to say that I do think that this is one of the Disney’s most accurate non Western mythology movies ever. Like, they actually seem to go into just enough detail to. To be concise and leave things just enough vague to be relatable to all the different concepts they bring up. But this, this one is kind of on the nose, on the money. You can find all of the different events and the claims and the names backed up by, you know, centuries worth of research. Yeah, this is kind of an interesting place in the Disney lineage.

This is not a movie that got bopped about. This is kind of like their mainline Disney renaissance guys for going in for one last hurrah to date. I don’t know. I guess there’s 72 now, Musker. They’re both. Muster and Clements are both 72. Of course, these. These are the guys that directed Great Mouse Detective, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet, Princess and the Frog, and Now, Now Moana. So this is kind of like the A tier or traditionally a tier directors on this one. You know, I’d call this a tier. I don’t. I actually need to, like, sit down with you at one point.

And we should just rank all the movies that we’ve seen just so we can actually see what the top 10 or top 20 are. For sure. This is top 20. I. I don’t know if it’s in top 10, but there’s a good chance that it could be. This is actually like one of the better Disney movies. There’s so many reasons for me to not like it. There was so much going against it. Not even before we bring up my lacunas singing the soundtrack again. I realize it’s not her, but I’m gonna say it is. But even with that ignored, there was so much going against this movie, but it still ended up being incredibly entertaining.

The animation, the artwork was really good, including. We just saw the good dinosaur, right? And the good dinosaur had this crazy, over the top, photorealistic rendering of Yosemite and Jackson Hole. In this one, it’s more cartoonish, but in such a good way. Right. Like, the actual landscape and the foliage and all the organic stuff was rendered in a way that made me feel like I was watching an animation and not some weird, creepy, you know, sort of like Fever Dream here. It all blends together, right? The backgrounds and the characters match. The problem with a good dinosaur is you had cartoony characters, photorealistic background, and it.

It was, like, kind of jarring to look at, you know? Yeah, yeah, that one. Bottom, maybe like, bottom tier. This one’s definitely top tier. Yeah. Yeah. Is Moana considered a. A Disney princess? Yes, she’s a princess because her father’s a chief. I guess you’re. If your daughter achieved, you’re kind of a princess, right? Well, but she’s more of a. I would say she’s more of a demigod than a princess. Like, she’s kind of like. Like, Maui is a. Is a true demigod, right? Oh, because she’s got powers, Right? I guess that’s ocean. That mean that seems.

Or is it. Is it. The ocean follows her around, not that she controls it. I feel like the ocean is just interested in her. Like, the water spirit has a certain interest in her because she doesn’t do, like, Storm from the X Men. And, you know, just her eyes go white, and then a gale comes through, you know? Wasn’t that pot? That’s Ponyo, isn’t it? Oh, Ponyo is definitely of the sea, though, right? That. That’s kind of our. You know, was. She was supposed to be kind of a Little Mermaid analogy or whatever. Right? But, like, the sea would, like, follow her around.

Right? But Ponyo definitely had more, like, powers. I mean, she took different. She turned herself into a girl. Right? So I guess I could. I could see Moana going that angle. But. But Moana is sort of. If nothing else, she’s magical. She’s probably a shaman. I think shaman might be the closest version where she can commune with gods. I would say she could be a princess. Shaman, though. I mean, we are following up, you know, Frozen, where Elsa has straight up powers. Right? Of course. She’s a queen, not a princess. That’s Anna, I guess. I don’t know who.

Are there any other Disney princesses? Elsa’s more of a mutant, right? She’s got the power. She’s got mutant powers. Moana is more of a shaman who. She’s communing with nature and. And nature works with her, you know, Don Juan style or something. Would Pocahontas be a shaman? Or is that racist to imply. Well, she paints with all the colors of the wind, but I don’t think she makes anything particularly trippy happen. If I remember. Okay, she’s a. Maybe we’ll put her down as a solid maybe for sure. Also, you were saying, like, this one at least seems to get the mythology kind of right, whereas Pocahontas got the history so massively wrong.

Right. So because they couldn’t get it right, in that case, they couldn’t make the movie if they actually stuck the facts. Yeah, well, if they stuck to, like, an actual historical Polynesian royalty, I’m sure that would become problematic at some point. Oh, that’s why. Specify Moana. The mythology part, which seems to kind of island society, might be a little more raw in the real place. I don’t know. So I think the. The only one that comes as close as this one to the way that they just, like, broadly attempt to explain, like, a whole cosmology and not.

Not like a modern version of cosmology, but like a. Like a classic version in which you’re trying to explain the entire universe and humans role in that universe and life and death. And why, like, that kind of a big cosmology. The closest one would have been. Was it Hercules? Was that the one that was like, ancient Greece? Yeah, but that one certainly sanded down the edges. Right. Again, wasn’t banging everything that moved in that. In that version. But I. But I can’t think of a lot of other Disney movies in which they were saying, like, here’s a movie to encapsulate an entire belief system.

Like, it’s Moana and it’s Hercules, and I can’t really think of a lot of others. I honestly want to go og. I think you could kind of slot Snow White in there. I mean, that’s like European myth stuff. So it’s a little. It doesn’t feel quite as, you know. Well, so is Hercules, but kind of sorta. But Snow White’s kind of a nature shaman, right? She, like, I mean, I could give you that. Although it’s. It’s not comprehensive enough. If anything, it would be like a Rosicrucian version, but it’s just. It’s not enough of that. Wherein Moana.

I feel like we get a much bigger dose of it. Like, you get. You almost walk away with the movie understanding a tiny little bit of that cosmology. Whereas in Snow White, if you don’t know what Rosicrucianism is beforehand, you might not pick up on it. I. I think Jesus been, what, three years? Crazy. But I think when we did Snow White originally, we. We sort of acknowledged that people in the 30s actually knew a whole lot more of, like, occultism and stuff, so they didn’t need to be told any of that. Yeah, I’m convinced of that at this point.

It. It’s. It’s funny because 2026, right. People be like, oh, man, we’re. We’re digging into the craze. Like, look at the date when that book was published. It’s like, 1919. That means, like, your great great grandpa probably heard someone talking about it in public, and they didn’t have a phone to distract them. So everyone on the bus was probably talking about Malik and Satan and Lucifer and all these, like, weird occult rituals. They were probably talking about this way more often than you think. Yeah. Just like, how 20 years ago, the Secret was the big. The big book.

Right. Which, I mean, that gets to. I mean, that’s like, the dumbest version. I guess you can. Yeah. You’re gonna trigger me bringing up the Secret. I. I can’t. I’m just saying that that was kind of like a more more modern flush of that, and it showed up in a bunch of movies. And if you watched a movie around 2010, and even if you didn’t read it, you heard about the Book or whatever, so you didn’t need to be told. Right. It was kind of baked in. Yeah. Even now, if you, a kid, a zoomer watching that movie might get a little thrown off.

What the hell is this? I hope. No, if. If we ever go back to burning books, the Secret’s gonna be one on the top of my list. Okay. Haven’t read it. Can’t. Can’t judge it. I. I get. Maybe I can. Okay. Oh, I mean, I’ll burn all the DVDs, too. Whatever. I don’t care. So this movie started out too, and as always, now I can’t help this for the rest of my life. My eyeball is gonna immediately go to the runtime and I looked at this one and I’m like, all right, this one’s way closer to two hours than it is to an hour and a half.

Disney’s been treating us pretty nice on the run times lately, but I’ll give this one a shot. And after that, I don’t think I looked at the. The time until it almost felt like, oh, this is starting to wrap up. And then I realized it was almost over. But I didn’t. I wasn’t watching the clock on this one, which is usually a great sign. I did. But again, I was starting the movie at 11pm so that’s. How many times have you seen this total? I. I’m gonna guess this was times six or seven. Probably about half a dozen.

Okay. Not like I actually asked my daughter last night. It’s like, which do you like better, Frozen or Moana? She was like, I like Moana better. And. Oh, and then I compared it with Zootopia. She said she didn’t remember Zootopia. I know we watched that one about six times too, but. Yeah, so Moana stuck in her head. Zootopia did not. I mean, she knows who the characters are. This new movie’s real big, right? But she doesn’t really remember watching the first one of those. She remembers watching this one. Zootopia I like so much, but it’s for so many adult reasons.

And I don’t think as a. Like a kid. I don’t know if Zootopia would have any of the same impression. Like, it wouldn’t be as impressive and it wouldn’t make the same impact. This one is clearly has some pretty awesome visuals. Like seeing Maui actually flying through the air and then transform into dude and like, slice through the air with his little magical hook and then turns into a shark and then turns into a. Like a. Like a lizard. Just like seeing all of that happening is such a crazy visual. Like there’s. There’s nothing to compare to it between those two movies.

No, I mean, I was pretty much in from the start because, you know, I like a good tiki bar. You know, I want a zombie. Four kinds of rum, you know, knock you off your butt. It’s always been a point of pride for me that Atlanta has one of the few remaining Trader Vics. I think Tokyo has one too. I should go sometime. But, yeah, I love Trader Vic. Especially when they. They got the band playing, you know, like Martin Denny sort of music, that sort of thing. I dig that you were a tiki guy. I’m not a tiki guy, but I I have a close artist friend that specializes in making custom tiki bars for people all over the world.

So I’ve gotten. I’ve gotten privy to all sorts of crazy tiki culture, and I. That these guys spent a lot of money on tiki stuff. And you know what? It probably was going to the Magic Kingdom when I was four years old. And, you know, being at the age where you actually like the Tiki Room, you know, the Tiki. Tiki. Tiki. Tiki. That’s right. Huh? That’ll never get out of anybody’s head you see here at one time, and you’ll never forget it. It’s worse of an earworm than It’s a Small World. I’ll take that under consideration.

It’s a Small World is more prolific, so you hear it more often, and people bring it up more often. But if you were to actually sit down and go on the It’s a Small World ride and then go to the Tiki Room, I feel that the Tiki Room really drives it in way more. And you’re kind of, like, locked into this, like, little area where they keep seeing it over and over again. Oh, yeah, they’re right. They’re right in your face there. That’s the difference. Yeah. Because I’m like, you know, at this point in my life, I certainly prefer the Country Bears, but they don’t really have an earworm like that, do they? They change.

It doesn’t quite count. Yeah. If you go and look at the history of all the songs that the Country Bears have gone through, they’ve. They have to keep kind of updating it because they. They’re always saying something that be slowly becomes offensive over, like, five or six years. And they have to update it again. Not in Tokyo. Okay. Another reason that I need to go to. We still have. And they still change it. They do the Christmas one, they do the regular one, they do the summertime one. And the summertime one is where a bear hooks up with an octopus.

So, of course, Japan, it’s great. The Florida one, I believe, is now they’re just. They redid all the animatronics, so they move real nice now. But now they just do country fried Disney songs. So they’ll do one of these Moana songs, you know? Yeah. So that’s kind of a bummer. Do the country version of under the Sea, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it’s nice they did. It’s nice they didn’t take it out because they could have easily done that as well. So I guess that’s probably gonna happen on a long enough timeline. I think the.

The original cool part about Country Bears, though, it was like the one janky part of Disney for a while, but it was. It was acceptably janky because it’s the freaking Country Bears. Like, you expect it to be a little janky, so it felt like it was part of instruments. I would call the Tiki Room jankier, though. But there’s this smaller thing, so I guess, you know, there’s a lot more clicking in the Tiki Room. Yeah, A little. A little more dated feeling. Yeah. But anyway, there. I wonder if. I don’t think they specifically were like, we got a bunch of kids into this vibe with a tiki room, so let’s make Moana.

But, hey, maybe they did. I don’t know. No, I think that legitimately, Polynesian culture is absolutely fascinating for so many different reasons. So Tiki Room can exist completely independent of Moana, and they both have, like, a very similar allure to them. I do have to put out, though, what I like, and I. I’ve read Polynesian history books. I think that’s interesting. You’re correct. Polynesian culture is very deep and interesting and cool. But the thing that got me is the dumb fake version from the 50s and 60s. Right. Like the Tiki Room. Like Martin Denny and Les Baxter’s music.

You know, like the zombie rum drink. That. That’s American culture, you know? Yeah, fair enough. I mean, so. And also, I don’t know if you know this, There was a movie from the 1920s called Moana, or almost. It was trying to be a documentary, and it was made by. I’m flaking on the guy’s name, but he made Nanook, which was the first commercially successful motion picture ever in history. I believe in some of that, but I didn’t watch all of it because I got bored. Yeah, well, yeah, it was great for. I’ve watched all three hours of Intolerance.

You know, I watched Metropolis multiple times. Dr. Caligari, I’m not. I’m not slamming silent movies here. I’m saying the Nook of the north was particularly boring. So. So Nanook of the north, he went to follow that up and he tried to make a movie called Moana. And Moana was basically about a Polynesian girl that was of the sea. It wasn’t necessary. I don’t think Disney took that plot line and was like, let’s turn that into a movie. I don’t think that’s what happened. But it’s just interesting because it’s very coincidental, at least the. The beginning of the story.

Although the interesting part is that the director ends up drinking some water while they were in Polynesia from, like, a cave system. But the cave system had, like, silver oxide. I’m just. I’m making up some of this because I can’t remember the exact chemical. But he ends up, like, poisoning himself. So it became, like, one of his last movies. Or at least it wasn’t a very great movie for him or anyone else. And it didn’t necessarily finish it. Oops. By the way, I just want to mention a few name changes of this movie. In Europe, it was changed to the name Viana because of trademark.

But the fun one is, and I’m reading here in Italy, the film was released with the title Oceania. Media outlets speculated that the name change was to avoid confusion with Italian pornographic actress Moana Posi, which. That sounds pretty entertaining. Yeah. So if you go on IMDb and you search Moana, you’ll see a couple pretty racy covers that show up right next to this Disney one. Hey, as a teacher, you know when you’re doing a Google search or something, like a kid wants to see a cartoon character, you’re always like, don’t scroll down. Yeah, leave it at the top of the page.

Please rule through. Whatever rule it is will kick in if you scroll down, especially if it’s an anime character. So Elsa gate again, Right? We never talked about Elsa Gay on this podcast. That would be interesting. That’s kind of old news now, right? That was like 10 years. It is. I think we didn’t talk about when we did Frozen. That’s what I find fascinating. Anyway, we don’t need to talk about now. This is one of the first movies in a while that I think Disney explicitly talks about demons, like, by name, demons. Even if you start seeing character again.

Hercules, I think, was one of the other ones directed by Musgrim and Clements. Princess and the Frog, directed by Musker and Clements. Okay. Yeah. So. So maybe that’s the. The Common Survive. I guess they like demons. Yeah. I mean, hey, if that’s their thing, I. I guess I can get that. But it is fascinating that you. We just named the movies that were also directed by them, like in sequence. It was Hercules. Oh, Treasure Planet. No demons there. I don’t recall. And yeah, Princess the Frog in this. And then Little Mermaid. I mean, Ursula is pretty demon like.

Yeah, well, but demon like. But no one actually calls her a demon. We don’t actually come up. Yeah, I think totally different, though. A witch is just someone that. That maybe, like, tries to summon demons, but a demon is like, an entirely different entity. I guess Aladdin suggests Jin. Fair. Yeah, I guess that is a fair point. I’m just. I’m just. I’m just looking through all their movies, and Great Mouse Detective, I don’t believe had any demons in it. No. Okay, so it’s a short list. Even if there is a list, maybe there’s like five to ten total.

Yeah. I just wanted to consider all the films real quick, but. And I, as well. Jin actually is good. Yeah. With A Little Mermaid and Witch is a different thing. And that’s a traditional Disney thing from, you know, all the way back. So I don’t think I can really count the only. The only other explicit ones I’ll give you Jin, but I would think it would be Fantasia, where you get Chernobog. I think that one’s actually. Even though they don’t say demon, because they don’t really say anything in that movie. You can’t make anything look more like a demon than that, right? I guess.

Yeah. That. That’s like the. If you go in the dictionary, that’s the picture next to the word demon, isn’t it? That or like a, you know, little devil or something. So. So the. That’s his name. The whole thing with the ocean following Moana around, is that. Is this the ocean protecting her, or is it her controlling the ocean? Do we even have a consensus on this? What? I was. I. Well, that’s where we were talking about the. Is she super powered and a mutant like Elsa, or is she just a nature shaman? We still have Moana, too, to watch.

Okay, so. Okay, jury. Jury’s still out. The ultimate question, though, is the. Can anyone else on the planet do this, or does the ocean react like this to anyone else? And we do see in this movie that it takes the chicken, and because the chicken almost drowns, and it, like, saves the chicken, it throws it under deck, and it, like, closes the hatch, and it kind of, like, makes sure the hatch is closed. And Moana kind of laughs at this, as if the ocean did that on its own accord and that she didn’t have anything to do with it.

So I get the feeling that the ocean itself is sentient and she’s just there to observe it. But that’s why I brought up the stick charts. I mean, that kind of fits in where you have the, you know, the sailors using the feel of the waves to navigate themselves, and this chart somehow told them how to do that. You Know, I mean, that’s different than, you know, those seas parting and then you get like a psychedelic aquarium because the ocean just decided to do that for you. That. That a very different thing than a stick chart I get, but you draw a little bit of a line there.

So the. The underlying premise of this whole movie, I guess, is that they live on this island and the coconuts are going bad and the fish aren’t there anymore. They’re basically all going to starve any day now because no food’s around that. I mean, that’s the plot driver, the impetus for the movie, which actually is. This is one of those times sometimes even for a movie you love, you hear the original idea and you’re like, that’s stupid. You know, this one was smart. They were just looking into Polynesian history. You know, I mean, you could say that’s another, you know, another culture that Disney can stamp their IP on, I guess, if you want.

Which of course they’re gonna get held. They. They really did it. They went. They puppet. They held a press conference where they were like, oh, it’ll be the first Tahitian language, you know, dubbed film that Disney’s gonna do officially. So they, you know, made a big deal about it, but they were just apparently looking to Polynesian history, where about 2,000 years ago, because of ocean current changes, it’s one of those things nobody knows. Everyone did kind of stop sailing for a while, for about a thousand years, and then started up again. They’re like, why don’t we do our movie where it starts up again? Because that’s kind of interesting.

And it is. That’s why this movie is pretty good. And the premise is that she’s the princess and the king has a pretty big disagreement. She thinks that we should go and search for fish beyond the reef. And he says, no, no one ever goes beyond the reef. And I guess that’s. That’s a description of the old way and the new way that you’re talking about, where the old way was for a thousand years. The currents have changed, so we can’t go out sailing anymore. And she represents this new way, which is that time is over and now we can go out sailing.

In fact, we have to, otherwise we’re going to die if we don’t. I have to say, as being the resident space communist Trekkie guy around here, recent Trek has gotten to a thing where they. They kept doing prequels and they were. They were like, we can’t do this. They sent the ship, like a thousand years in the future. So in the future, they’re in the setting where kind of similar Polynesia, where they’ve been space farring and you know, the Federation, all that sort of stuff. And then some this thing called the burn happens and nobody can travel faster than the speed of light anymore for like whatever period of time.

And that gets fixed. And the newer shows are dealing like the ramifications of the fact that everyone had to isolate themselves for like a hundred years or something. And now they’re, oh, now we can actually explore again. Which is kind of what this movie is doing as well. We only meet Maui. We don’t meet other islands in this one. But I mean, it’s basically a Polynesian or in that case, a Star Trek version of the Dark Ages, right? Where all of a sudden all progress and all your ability to share new information and get new information comes to some sort of a stalemate or a plateau for a while.

And that’s. It’s how we think. It’s how maps work, you know, that’s what. Now I’m curious, how do you use your gps? I’ll often not use a GPS at all. Walking, I might use it. I’ll always go top down. I was reading something like, oh, to save your mental skills, make sure to do top down and not just looking straight. And then it tells you to turn left or right. And I’ve never done that. How do you use a gps? Always top down? Yeah, always top down and north, pointing up. Same here. Okay, so I’m still reading the maps and stuff.

I think my spatial skills are still there. But you go back to the Dark Ages, as you said, and some of those early maps were just like scrolls. They would say, go to this town, go to this town. Look for this landmark. But it had no spatial thing. It was a straight line, it was a scroll. So your, your path might know a lot. You just have to make sure to ask people along the way. You know, when I, when I was driving cross country in like late 90s, early 2000s, going into like a AAA office and sitting down with a.

AAA person with this huge list of like four or five booklets where they would sit down and like draw on a marker, like, okay, then you’re gonna go here and then you’re gonna take this exit. And it was still, it was still top down, but it was top down. But you’d have to like flip through like two or 300 pages. And I think that just that process made it. So I’m always going to be top down. The map book, I Just read, by the way, it’s called a Witch, which way up? Which I guess I. I’m spouting out half the information I read in there.

So that makes it worth reading. It was one of those books where it’s too gimmicky. Like, each chapter has, like, a gimmick or something, you know, writing gimmick. And that got a little bit annoying. But, you know, I guess they all need a little bit. They all need some kind of help, adds a little spice. A few of the gimmicks were better than some of the other gimmicks. Right. A few of them made the book, like, interminable to read for a chapter. And a few of them were quite fun. So, you know, a mixed bag there.

I think the other one I read last week, I wanted year. I think maybe it’s called the Puzzle of Polynesia there. It’s just when I’m spouting out a bunch of facts from a book, I want to at least try and get the title out there, you know? Okay. And all cards on the table. I’ve been reading Frazier’s Golden Bough Unabridged Edition. I’m only. When did you start? I started maybe two months ago. And I’m on, like, book two and a half. No, I’m not off of 12 yet. I have. There are 12, though, right? There are.

There are 12. And then I’ve. I have read the abridged version, but the abridged version is just a single volume. That’s like 700 pages. The unabridged is like 7,000 pages. But if I were to read it, I. Would you start there? You. Well, would you be. I don’t know. I read all of Zachary and Stitching’s books and did not read the consolidated version they made. So I don’t. Yeah, I don’t think you can read the abridged version and think that you’ve got the premise. The abridged version, it’s more. It is definitely a Cliff Notes. The abridged version feels way more like reading a dictionary or an encyclopedia and then miss it.

Like, the encyclopedia doesn’t tell you how all of those things connect to each other, other than like, they’re all animals or that they’re all, you know, like, you know, whatever the. The category is. The. On the unabridged version of Golden Bough actually spells out and makes the connections and lets you know what all these things are. So I did look up some of the Golden Bow, where Frasier talks about Maui by name, which I thought was really interesting. I guess I should do it. I did work my way through the manly P. Hall ones. That was like 10 years ago, so I probably.

Of all ages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did power my way through it, but that was in like 2016. So I, I used to have a yearly New Year’s resolution to read that entire thing. I did it four years in a row and then I did another twice. But I like took two years off read. It took two years off Reddit. I don’t, I don’t have the time or motivation to do it anymore. But yeah, I’ve read the entire Secret Teachings of All ages at least five or six times in its entirety. Plus the reader’s edition along with the Diamond Jubilee edition that was like all printed out and everything.

I would say you could probably read that 10 times over and still be done faster than reading through the Golden Bough. Yeah, that’s why I was asking about your timeline on reading that. It’ll be a while. It’ll take a little while, but it’s, it’s something that I don’t. I could never see myself regretting even. Second, I, I definitely regret some of the time we’ve spent watching some of these movies. I won’t mention any specific strange magic names, but there’s a few of them out there. How about the stars? Of course, they do make a big thing about going by star.

How can you pay attention to the sky at all? In Orlando, you might have too many lights. Yeah, we have way too much light pollution. When I, when I grew up in upstate New York then there was really not that same issue. You could actually look at the stars here. It’s a lot harder to see anything. Okay. Because I got a few walks that I, you know, at night I’m going home from work and especially on Thursday nights where if the sky is clear, I’m definitely like charting where the stars are through, you know, the entire year.

My, my anchor is, you know, Orion, which of course soon is going to go bye bye. And I won’t be able to do it again until late summer. But maybe I’m not disconnected from all that. I miss it because every once in a while I’ll go somewhere on vacation where you don’t have as much light pollution and it’s a reminder of like, oh, wow, this used to be the, the original movie theater. This is where everyone would go and, and talk about what happened last night in their favorite show. Yeah. January 2nd 3rd. We stayed at a bed and breakfast in the mountains and went out night and so it was completely clear, and there was a full moon.

Damn it. I did not want the full moon that night. So. But what’s going to do the. There’s another. The other big conflict on this movie, too, is that Moana wants to go out beyond these waves. Her dad is saying no, but then her grandma is basically telling her, like, don’t listen to your dad, honey. Just do. Like, you have to go and do this thing, even though he’s saying no. So there’s definitely not cohesion within this. This royal family. That kind of happens, though. My wife’s Japanese. We got married in Japan. We went back to the States for a couple years, and we.

Then we’re like, oh, we want to go back to Japan. And it was kind of my aunt that said, do what you need to do to me. You know, in the end, just do what you gotta do. So we. We came back. But, yeah, my aunt kind of gave the. Not that my parents were, like, super against it, but I, you know, felt a little bit bad because I’m an only child. But in the end, yeah, my. The aunt did kind of push me in that direction. Like, grandma, you might have a Disney movie coming out soon.

Then it’s basically your version of Moana. That’s right. I’m gonna sing. Sing whatever the fake Let It Go is. And then there’s also the you’re welcome song by. That was, like, the rock’s main song in this one. Right. So I can look up the titles specifically, if you would lack. Well, he kept. He kept saying, you’re welcome. I’m just assuming that was the name of the song. And I gotta say, I’m not a fan of the song. Not a fan of the Rock singing any songs. But it’s. It. Even. It is still not as bad as Strange Magic.

Like, even the. This might be my least favorite song next to the Mila Kunis songs, but I still would rather listen to those again than anything in Strange Magic. Sorry. It actually took me longer than I thought to find the titles. What is the rock singing? You’re welcome. Yeah, that one where you are, I guess, is the. The big. Or How Far I’ll Go. Excuse me. How Far I’ll Go is the. The best song by far? The one where they’re trying to. The one where they’re trying to win the, you know, Oscar for original song. Sorry.

The best song by far is the Crab song. Shiny, Shiny, Shiny. Yes. That’s. That’s the name of the song. Okay. Randomly. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, the music, I guess Who? It was the guy that did Hamilton. Was it that did the music, I think. Okay, sure. That’s right. I. I’ve never seen Hamilton, actually. But, yeah, it’s that guy. Okay. He did the music for this. I think he does the music for a couple other films. What’s his name? Like Luis Manuel or something? Yeah, sorry, I was just looking at his name, and it’s one of those names that you just can’t quite remember for whatever reason.

Lin Manuel Miranda. Okay, there you go. I was close enough. Yeah. I don’t know why that one just doesn’t stick for whatever. I like it. I mean, out of all the different musicals that we’ve listened to recently, like, I don’t like the music in this one, but I think they did a good job with it, if that makes sense. Like, I don’t have to like it to acknowledge that it wasn’t bad. Like, they’re clearly trying to go full Broadway. Right. Which does not appeal, definitely. Not to you. And not to me either, actually. But, you know, same with.

It’s a valiant effort, and I can. It feels like someone that does appreciate this would like it. And. And this. And that song in particular, the you’re welcome song by the Rock. Even though I didn’t like the song part, the visuals of that one, it had this really cool blend of 2D and 3D, which, like, I guess like a 2 1/2D kind of look. And I just thought that that looks so great. I almost wish the whole movie was kind of like that. Because they. They sort of do it in the credits. They sort of do it in this section, and they kind of do it again at the end where they have this, like, 2D, 3D mix going on.

I can’t confirm this happened, but I. I know Frozen, and it turned me off to Frozen because I think I did say in that episode. My buddy and Irish theater trailer comes on for Frozen before Guardians or something. And it’s just the let it go sequence. And I was like, oh, my God, I’m never gonna see that. You know, it’s the exact wrong marketing to show to me. Don’t show me the Broadway show stopping number. I think Moana did the same thing in Japanese theaters. And the trailer was just the. Her. Her longing song. Right, the longing song or the I am Moana song.

Her. Her song of longing. The. The. What I keep call it facetiously calling the fake Let it go. And I already forgot where you. Excuse me. How far I’ll go see the names here. Okay, I Didn’t like the message. I didn’t like the message of that song. No. The problem. I got the title problem. All of the titles are just so anonymous. Where you are, how far I’ll go. We know the way. You’re welcome. Like, don’t you. Those don’t. There’s nothing there to stick in your brain, you know. Fair enough. And I own Moana is a little bit on the nose.

Yeah, yeah. There is a song that starts off and I guess Tahitian, and then within 10 seconds is not into he should. I thought they should have just done the whole thing into Heat and I didn’t need to understand it, did I? I. I can figure out what’s happening. Yeah, fair point. I don’t think we needed to hear what. I didn’t need to understand it to understand. To understand that they were singing. Whatever. Also, this movie ends with a gaia, like entity that turns into an island. So, like, her body and her head and everything turn into mountains and stuff.

This opened up a whole conspiratorial can of worms. I don’t know how far you’ve been on the recesses of the Internet, but there’s just to reiterate, that’s almost the same design, I think, that we saw in Fantasia 2000. And, like, you know, one of the only good sequences. Yeah, it’s a. It’s a fairly popular motif, but there is an actual group of people that legitimately think certain mountains that look like faces because they are faces, and that there might have been these giants that just became fossilized over time. And that what we see as these big mountain ranges or, like, you know, peaks are actually just the head of a previous Nephilim giant.

Oh, I heard a slightly different weird version of that, where the. The mountains are all melted ancient buildings. Well, it’s. It’s tangential. Right. So the. Yeah. Melted buildings came from a big laser in the sky. And it comes from this global reset premise. It’s. And there’s like a red brick theory where it just melted red bricks. And then you can. It’s a fun rabbit hole to go down. But this one in particular, it goes into the mountains and landscapes are living entities and living creatures. Is there a. I assume there’s like a Japanese analog to that? Hell, yeah.

That’s Shinto. Shinto. Is that like the mountains are gods or creatures? Yes, the mountains are. Do you know what sumo is? Go on. Okay. Sumo is a sumo ring, is basically a shrine. I think I mentioned before that women cannot go in. So the current prime Minister is not welcome inside the sumo room. A guy had a heart attack and they wouldn’t let the lady doctor in. Above it is the actual shrine. If you look up, there’s a big wooden thing. There’s a whole lot of ceremony. And the sumo wrestlers. Let me find a few recent sumo wrestler names because they are even in Japanese, they’re, they’re a little bit weird wrestler names.

Are there any other cool ones, like Ultimate Warrior? No, no, they’re all like Hakuho Taruno, Fuji Chiono. Fuji. You’re hearing Fuji a lot. Sumo wrestlers are supposed to be battling mountains. They’re supposed to represent the gods of the mountains at battle. Okay, so yeah, fits right into Japanese culture. Maybe Old World Tartarians would have more luck with Japanese people where there’s a whole moo idea, the pan idea that, you know, if. If ocean levels were lower at some time or they’re before some kind of catastrophe, you know, there would have been more of a continent out here with.

With Japan and Polynesian islands being like the remaining peaks. So another thing I had, I had to do a little bit of research on this one. So the God’s name is Maui. But Maui in my Rockefeller American trained brain was like, oh, that’s, that’s a. You know, that’s Hawaii, right? Maui. Well, no, Maui appears in Hawaiian culture, in Maori culture and Samoan culture and Tahitian culture, like all of Polynesian culture all kind of shares Maui. So I, I just thought that was important enough to point out. And once I realized that, I kind of came to appreciate Moana a little bit more.

Well, yeah, it’s like Queensland is pretty far away from the queen, you know, Australian province of Queensland, not close to the Queen at all. So place can be named after something somewhere else. And I think it’s. It’s also really interesting because he has so many similar traits as other gods that we’re kind of familiar with. So it. And they kind of. They cover some of the broad strokes on this when they’re describing Maui and what’s happening to him. But he slows down the sun and he steals the fire. This is kind of like Prometheus, right? Like, this is like a Promethean thing.

He also is the one that fishes up the islands and he tries to defeat death, but he fails. And this is kind of like a Dionysian thing where, like, he represents sort of the agricultural aspect on top of that, getting food to your people, getting things to grow. So he kind of represents a whole bunch of different Western gods or at least like the western archetypes all wrapped up into one shape shifting demigod. Yeah, of course, the fish hook is also a big part of that. I mean, I guess that’s one of their constellations. Right. So when we’re looking up and seeing the, the Greek mythology in the sky in one way or another, I mentioned Orion already.

You know, they’re seeing the, the fish up, they’re seeing completely different constellations and Maui is one of the big ones. Oh, I just, I didn’t get that. So the fish hook is like an astrological reference. Yeah, yeah. So you know, obviously when you can see the sky that well and you need to navigate at night sometimes a lot because I’m sure these are more than one day journeys most of the time. Yeah. You have a completely different set of constellations. And now he is in the way that, you know, we have Hercules staring down at us from the sky.

And if you’re especially living in ancient Greece, that’s a big deal now. He’s always looking at you from the sky, you know. Okay, yeah, I appreciate that. Even more, Even more on the cosmology angle and also like this whole system of rules within this cosmology is called tapu. I think I’m pronouncing that right. And again, like no matter where you’re at in Polynesia there’s a version tapu, kapu and taboo. And this is actually where the English word taboo comes from. It comes from this Polynesian concept of like these unwritten laws. Yeah, let’s see. Saying my anchors.

Orion, Maui’s just joking about a human sacrifice. Or is he? That, that was one, you know, that was the trickster God a bit as well. So you, when he does start saying that, you’re like, I don’t know, he might actually mean that. Yeah, he’s got like a little bit of Loki kind of energy to him. Oh, definitely. He’s the, the, you know, Loki sort of guy here. I like that because he, he doesn’t come across as a good guy or a bad guy. He’s kind of both. Like he is a bad guy for sure in some ways.

And he is a good guy in some ways, but it’s like, like a chaotic neutral. Maybe that’s most, I feel like that’s most ancient mythology, like partly around the world. You know, you just mentioned Loki. You know, Odin sometimes does some horrible stuff. Zeus certainly does horrible stuff. And other times anybody’s supposed to be the, you know, main God of the Olympians. Everyone’s kind of up to about Tom Fuller, you know, in the. In ancient mythology. So why not Maui as well? Yeah. And I guess a better way to put it is that, like, he’s not a hero.

Like, Maui’s not necessarily a hero in a traditional Western sense. Well, that’s why you mentioned Prometheus. He stole knowledge. And that can be a heroic act, depending on how you look at it. You know, I mean, I guess you could also say Robin Robert Oppenheimer stole, you know, knowledge and away from nature, and that didn’t work out as well. And speaking. Speaking of Polynesia, that was the Bikini Atoll was. Still got a big hole in there. I looked on Google Maps yesterday, and no one’s living near there. I did find a few buildings like spongebob around there.

Oh, they live under the sea there. Yeah, I found a few buildings. I’m like, those might be from the 50s. I don’t think anyone still lives there. There’s a rabbit hole there too. You look into all of the different military intelligence that was at the atolls. Yeah. You’ll. You’ll find some pretty deep connections. That’s maybe for another episode. Do you spend much time. I do have a weird tendency to go looking at small Polynesian islands on Google Maps a lot. I know I do not. I can’t say that I’ve done that. Okay. I don’t know somehow how my brain’s put together.

I just found the island community a fascinating. Trying to create, like a society that’s functional, but you only have a couple hundred people probably, so. And. And I don’t even want to see the nature part. I’ll go, like, clicking on, like, the restaurants just to see what they’re like, you know, or the stores. What’s it look like in the store there? You know, that’s my weird fascination. And if it’s got a street view, sure, I’ll hit the street view. A lot of times it doesn’t. So. Well, for first big meetup will be the occult Disney in Japan, and then maybe occult Disney in Polynesia.

There we go. Well, I think it kind of came from one. I live in Japan. It’s an island. Right. And we had a company trip to one of these southern Okinawan islands. Actually, I’ve been there three times now. Miyako Jima. Miyako Island. It’s smaller than the main island of Okinawan. I’ve always just found it fascinating because it’s nowhere close to any other land, like at least 50km to another small island, you know, but they see and I think it’s a supermarket. I don’t know. Spending time there, I’ve just found weirdly fascinating. So I also found it weirdly fascinating to look at other tiny islands.

Just be careful, man. Going to the wrong tiny little island, they’re gonna eat you. Well, not on Google Earth. Not yet. Well, yeah, no, not on Google Earth. Yeah. I mean, I’ve had friends at. Oh, Scott, who is here for strange magic. He went to Palau once and this was 15 years ago or something. And at the time, it was really hard to find stick deodorant in Japan. So my omiyage, my souvenir from Palau was a few stick deodorants. I. I don’t. I don’t co. Sign with the deodorant. No, I. I don’t use them now, but 15 years ago I did.

That’s when I went to Palau. So. And both of us were, oh, they’re hard to find. So he’s like, oh, I found a bunch of. Here, here you go. It’s your souvenir from. Might have given me something else too. But I. I do remember, you know, getting souvenirs from Palau that were deodorant. No Antiperspirant or non antiperspirant? I don’t remember. It’s the. The chalkier one, I guess. Well, enjoy your dementia. Yeah, I haven’t. Yeah. Should I admit I did. I did learn you don’t have to use deodorant if you take showers enough. Sacrilege. Sacrilege. I don’t know, because maybe the reason I couldn’t find it here is just because they don’t need it, you know, they didn’t get the marketing.

They had the oily ones. Again, I don’t know which one’s antiperspirant, which one’s not, but the oily ones suck, so hate those. Well, especially if there’s a more cohesive diet, then everyone kind of smells the same anyways. You got too much variety here. I’ve been buying cheap cheesy poofs at the supermarket just in the past week because the calories weren’t high. But I have been noticing I’ve woken up in the morning with, like, horrible breath. So I think I’m gonna have to blame the cheesy poo and start eating. Well, I would have gotten almonds, like maple glazed almonds, but they ran out of them.

That’s why I usually get probably healthier. So one of the other things that we’ve been doing on some of these episodes, 8 the ATU index, the Aaron Thompson Uther index. So this one, I looked up a few different ones. The ones that seem to match the most, there’s ATU 301, which is Hero retrieves magical object. We’ve got that twofold in this one, right. We’ve got retrieving the heart, and we’ve. Then we’ve got retrieving the fish hook, and both are magical objects. So I feel like that’s probably one of the bigger ones. And then there’s also ATU552, which is fire or life stolen by trickster God.

So there we’ve got Maui kind of pegged down specifically. And then there’s even ATU114.8B, which sounds like. Like when you get lost, like a droid from Star Wars. Yeah, this is basically how you take down the Death star. But. But ATU 1148 b is island creation myths. So not only does it match these two bigger ones, but then island creation myths kind of just encapsulates all of the Polynesian culture in general. So if you want to go and find other Polynesian stories, you just look up your handy old 1114 Apu. Well, I guess that’s where the.

The Polynesian mythology is interesting. And Moana doesn’t teach us enough about it. If you want to learn it, you got to go somewhere else, really. But it is weird just how many parallels there are on the other side of the world. You know, food for thought. Of course. You know, Native American myths, of course, they have trickster gods and things as well. Like, there’s a. Not a lot of analogies from, you know, worldw myths and religions. So speaking of worldwide myths and religions and. And Native Americans too, how many non western Disney movies are there when it comes to, like, folklore style? And I.

I can only think of. You’ve got Aladdin, we’ve got Mulan, we got Pocahontas, and we’ve got Hercules, and now we basically have Moana. That’s pretty. Pretty much it. Right? Everything else is Western. Yeah, sorry, but the emperor’s new groove is as Western. That’s what I’ll say. Pocahontas still kind of. I mean, it’s got. I mean, it’s got plenty of western, you know, let’s kick that one out. So technically, Aladdin, Mulan and Hercules and Moana, because in the 40s they were like Sal Los Amigos, the Three Caballeros, when Disney was doing whatever he was doing in South.

South America. Right, but that’s still South America. Yeah, it’s A. So they. There was a bit of a. And in the 40s, I guess that would have seemed like that. But yeah, now it’s just like, whatever. It’s Donald Duck wearing a sombrero. Anything else? A 1940s Moana would have been very problematic. Yeah. Anything else? I’m just actually sitting here scrolling through the whole list and seeing if. If anything, I think you got it on. They got the nail on the head. Hercules and Mulan are back to back releases too. That’s interesting. So they did it twice in a row at that point.

So we’ve got Greek Lilo and Stitch at least did the Hawaii. Hawaii thing. Although it’s still America, right? Yeah, but that. But that just took place in Hawaii. But it wasn’t really about like an actual belief system. Yeah, no. I was sitting here thinking, maybe I’ll find something else. But I think he hit the nail on the head with. With. With what you said. It’s still a short list, which is cr. After like a century worth of movies. We only have four that are based on non western folklore. And even now it’s more like Encanto or Elio, where it’s like.

It’s like, you know, Latin American communities. Western. My book. Right. I know. They’re still not going that far. What is Rhea and the Last Dragon? That. Okay. Ray and the Last Dragon looks like it’s going for something Asian, which we’ll be covering before. Okay. Well, yeah, so far. And then I’m looking in the future now. Yeah, now I’m looking in the future. Sure. Isn’t there a red panda movie? Was that a Disney movie turning red? That’s. That’s in a classroom and stuff, though. It’s a. It’s. Let’s see where it takes place. That’s why I’ve heard. Well, I had some friends tell me it’s good, so I’m looking forward to it.

I think I might have seen that one about like a raccoon or a bear or something. A red panda, right? Yeah, yeah. Toronto. Okay. So no, as far as what we were talking about. And then another thing too. I guess this is more in like Frasier Golden Bow way, but Frazier had an interesting way of drawing analogies to stuff. And one of the analogies that. That really stood out to me was that when he’s talking about Moana looking for this heart of Te Fiti, was that. That is basically the Polynesian equivalent of the Holy Grail, like.

Like actually going and trying to find this thing that represents life force and authority and he represents. He said it represented kind of like the Holy Grail and like a few other objects in history, but I guess that’s the Western version of this. And it was. It was that important to Polynesian culture. I would just think. I do want to take it two steps back to that last conversation. I was the Jungle Book. Did you say Jungle Book when we were listing those? That’s pretty non. I mean, it’s Rudhart Kipling book. So I left it out just because, again, that one’s not really a belief system.

It’s not like it’s not folklore necessarily. Yeah. My other thought was the ones that have done Africa are Tarzan and the Lion King, neither of which have. Tarzan is so wet. You know, Tarzan. No, that’s my point. Tarzan and the Lion King don’t have any Africans in them. It’s animals. The Lion King and Tarzan. Yeah, that’s the joke. Is that, like, they can’t ever make a live action Tarzan because it would be problematic. But. But since we’ve reviewed it and we know about the actual history of Tarzan, the reason they can’t make a live action Tarzan, it’s literally about how in the wrist a British aristocrat is better than anyone else.

Yeah. I guess we got James Bond for that now. Although now James. James Bond’s got to be a tortured soul. Right? So, I mean, I like the Daniel Craig movies, but they’re definitely, you know, before that James Bond’s a superhero. Right, Right. Some fan theories worth mentioning is that Moana died in the storm. So that one’s kind of popular, but it’s not. It doesn’t really hold up. If you try and play across the board, you got to use that one sparingly, don’t you? Like I’m thinking recently, I’m like. When you said it for Po, I’m like, okay, that’s an interesting thought.

That the sea isn’t one that I. But this is a popular one, is that Moana died in the storm. There’s another one that Maui is a fallen God who’s regaining his power. But I guess he kind of. He admits from day one. Yeah, that’s pretty much baked right into the movie, isn’t it? I mean, God, demigod. Does a distinction really matter? In the case of Maui in this movie, he’s got powers. He’s godlike. That’s close enough. The other one is Te Fiti didn’t actually need to be saved and didn’t need the heart or any of that.

She just wanted to be recognized and I guess that’s less of a fan theory and more of how it actually ended because Moana just kind of snuggles with her for a brief moment at the end, and then everything goes back to being cool. And then Te Fiti turns into one of those mountain gods. Yeah. Some of these fan theories just. It’s. Well, it’s like an Evangelion where it’s like, you have to infer some things. These are seem like relatively simple inferences rather than fan theories. Other dies in the storm. That one I just don’t like. Yeah, it’s a.

It’s the Bob Newhart thing, right? It’s. It was a dream the whole time. Or that’s. That’s the laziest version of most of these Disney conspiracy fan theories is like, they were dead the whole time. It was Sixth Sense. Well, Grandma’s kind of the conspiracy theory is in this one, isn’t she? She’s like, I know of the old ships. I’ll show you where the old ships are. You don’t know what was actually going on. And everyone else is just like. Especially dad is just walking. La, la, la, la, la. Well, Grandma for sure was a shaman. Like, no.

No question about it. She was the shaman. Yeah. So she’s. You know, I. And it’s. Well, it’s like, weird, because I get. It’s been a thousand years where these people have not been moving, I guess, historically or something like that. So. Yeah. How long when it is interesting thing, the psychology of when they became completely isolationist. How long did that take? How long was it like, we want to go out, but we just became, we shouldn’t go out? Which is an interesting plot point of this movie because. Yeah, like, the dad represents those people, and then Moana is the new generation that is ready to stop thinking that way.

Like, it’s nice that toddler Moana has her magical moment with the sea, and the sea loves her. But that chief is still correct. You keep your toddlers away from the water, you know, and she almost. She almost drowns a couple times. I don’t think the ocean would let her drown because of how it favors her. But she, like, she kind of gets into a fight. And that’s probably my favorite line in the entire movie was she almost drowns. She washes back up on shore. And then she, like, yells at the ocean and she just goes, fish peeing you.

Well, they do. Oh, one other thing in the animation. I wonder if this. It is because this is like. Like the. At the time, old guard, people making this movie is. We did have those stylized blasts of 2D animation, which I’ll take at this point because we’re so 2D animation starved by now. You know, it’s like, yes, yes, please give me those stories. The whole intro was like traditional 2D animation. I appreciated it. And like I mentioned before, like the rock song that you’re welcome one, that one had like a really interesting blend of the 2D 3D going as well.

Again, which it. More of that in this movie. I didn’t dislike the 3D. I think the 3D looked great, but made me like, reminisce more and miss the 2D animation more than the 3D. Well, I am curious if Musker and Clements came in wanting to make this 2D. And you know, at this point it’s like, sorry, no, yeah, we don’t. We don’t do that anymore. Yeah, I’m looking at development film. They did a lot of traveling to islands, but they were just doing what I wanted to do. Right. But one of the reasons was that the environment, including the ocean, benefited much more from the use of CG as opposed to traditional animation.

Come on. In 2016, no one’s even thinking about that. I’m pretty sure Disney just like, do it. You know, this is. And again, if we just pop on freaking Snow White man, like, Snow White is still holds up as phenomenal animation. But this one does use the tools in a nice artistic way. More so than a lot of the other movies. Because even Pixar, it’s. It sometimes feels a little more utilitarian with even as impressive as the animation is, it’s kind of utilitarian like Toy Story, the original, which doesn’t look good compared to most Pixar films.

But you. The idea is like, let’s frame the shots like it’s a liveaction movie. Because we’ve never done that in animation. Pixar is still kind of doing that where Musker and Clements are like, no, let’s direct this to look good in animation. So it. That’s why this movie, I think, pops so hard. I mean, Princess and the Frog, I barely remember the plot of that movie, but I remember what an awful lot of it looked like, you know, yeah. Princess and the Frog is not top tier. It’s not. But I remember images from that film very easily because these guys can direct really good looking animation.

So. Yeah. And honestly, the song in this movie, Shiny, has a scene where it goes kind of black light neon, that reminded me a lot of the Princess and the Frog. Song, which is my favorite in that movie where it gets black light and neon. So. Well, they. They. Musker and Clements always kind of knock the villain song out of the park, don’t they? They got the Yearning song and which. Which Disney has weaponized and other things like Frozen. And they got the. The villain song, which I don’t feel like we get so many villain songs anymore.

We should get more villain songs. Was the last villain song. Princess and the Frog. Frog, I mean, isn’t shiny. Technically, that crab is kind of a villain. No, I’m saying this is the first one since then because like you said, it plugs in with the Princess and the Frog song pretty well. So, yeah, it PR me to bring up Strange Magic, but Strange Magic did have a villain song. It didn’t have a good villain song. No, I’m scrolling list so much today, but I don’t think we’ve had. Because Frozen did not. Because, yeah, they fake it.

The villain, the eventual villain actually sings the love song with Anna. Right. So there isn’t a villain song so much. I don’t even think he’s the villain. I think the villains are the. The people that raised. Oh, what the hell was the. Tangled. Tangled, okay. Tangled had a major villain song. The Trust Mommy or whatever. Mother Knows Best. Yeah, that had a hardcore villain song. Okay. Yeah, okay, there’s one. And then you could call out the Baxton Song from Winnie the Pooh, but those are the heroes singing about, you know, their paranoia. So that. That doesn’t count.

But Winnie the Tippoo doesn’t have villains. I just wanted to bring up Willie and Pooh in the Backson song. That’s all. You got anything else on Moana? We’ve done at you. We’ve done Frasier, we’ve done the whole cult decode breakdown. We’ve talked about conspiracy theories and Tartarian buildings being melted by space lasers. I think we’re ready to put it a pin in Moana. Okay. Oh, also, when I asked my daughter, she said she liked Moana Butter and Frozen. She forgot Zootopia. She did not remember the music from this movie. I specifically asked, do you remember the songs from Moana? She was like, no.

Yeah. So, yeah, okay. Understandable. It was. It was. Wasn’t even in English. I don’t really remember either. Yeah, I mean, she hasn’t seen any of these. Turk. She might have watched them since. But, you know, the big viewings were 10 years ago, so. So it’s kind of. That’s why I was asking. I was like, oh, what Stuck, you know, from actually showing my daughter these movies as a kid and what didn’t. So Zootopia didn’t stick at all despite being a good movie. But yeah, it’s Chinatown for Kids. So Chinatown for Kids might not be for real little kids.

And also, even if Disney gives you a little bit of acknowledgment culturally, they’re not going to put their entire marketing behind it unless it’s like, I guess Tiki Room is. Is a. A different example. Right? But pretty much all the songs, they turn into earworms and they pump through the parks and they pump into their commercials. Let It Go is probably the one they’ve pumped the hardest out of all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You can’t get away from that song even now, can you? People can’t let that song go, can they? Stop. Yeah, I’ll stop.

Okay. I don’t know. Plug people with the plug. You want to plug? Yeah, I mean, plug. You did. I don’t have to run to the restroom this time, so you can. Well, this one is a. Is an easy one. Go to paranoid american.com. i’ve got a limited edition 2026 sampler kit right there on the front page. It’s got three of the mini comics that we’ve come out with. It’s got a bunch of a few different stickers. It’s got a conspiracy card, trading card, and it has a perpetual occult calendar. It’s like a little day planner that works for any year.

So even if you get it halfway through the year, you can use it for any years that you want. And you can get all of that combined into one little package with free shipping. If you’re in the States, if you’re in Japan, or if you’re in Australia or if you’re in New Zealand, if that even exists, then I can. You can reach out to me and I’ll get you some good shipping on it. But for everyone that stateside is the cheapest that you’re ever going to be able to get all these mini comics and all this stuff together in one bundle.

And I think I’ve got maybe like 40 of them left. So hopefully there’s still a couple left by the time you’re hearing this. All right. I talk about movies and TV shows all day. Well, every morning, most mornings, head to podcastio podcast.org films and filth. Talking about really good movies, really bad movies. Right now we’re talking about all the Fast and Furious movies. Time Enough Podcast does the Twilight Zone. We did the original we’re now talking about the 2019 Twilight Zone and what else there podcast 1999. We are talking about the bizarre 70s planet of the Apes animated series.

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