X-E Cryptozoo: The Giant Squid

Welcome to the X-Entertainment Cryptozoo! Your one stop shop to learn the fabulous trade dealing with animonsters that may exist...or may not! I've been waiting to do this article for awhile, and now that we've entered the spookiest month of the year, (aside from the angel-faced April) I think it's a good time to help you guys get better acquainted with animals that quite possibly only truly exist in the minds of Todd McFarlane and Robert Stack. I'll be doing a series of five Cryptozoology Profiles, right here in the Quickies section. I'd put this in the main article section, but I'm not sure how the public will react to a squid post after that whole Tigers incident last year.

Putting all this into my own words to avoid any confusion with dictionaries smarter than us, cryptozoology is basically the study of animals whose existence is, as of yet, still 'unofficial.' This doesn't mean you can run outside claiming to have seen a red-eyed pig who speaks French and get the beast into cryptozoologist publications worldwide. Usually, there's enough substantial evidence to where it's hard to deny the existence of the creature...but not enough to where we can all make plans to start eating them. It's an amazing little science genre, as it provides us with something tangible - something here - which we haven't truly discovered yet. Outer space and extraterrestrial life is a wonderful thing to want to know everything about, but it's so far away from us. I can't tell you what the pizza's like on Jupiter because I just don't have any way of getting there. My huge catapult broke last week during an unfortunate incident involving my grandmother and three 50-pound boulders. But this cryptozoology stuff...it's here, it's on our world...it's out there to find. You don't have to be an expert in anything to go sit out by Scotland's lakes waiting for a plesiosaur to pop out. Likewise, you don't have to have anything other than a complete lack of common sense to go searching for a yeti in the Himalayas. It's amazing enough to think that our world plays host to these magnificent and often-scary creatures...but the thought that we ourselves might come across one someday? Beautiful. Get me the harp.

The animals and creatures who fall under cryptozoology's jurisdiction range from the slightly abnormal to the positively otherworldly. Certainly, things like giant turtles and king cheetahs exist, but what about something like the Jersey Devil: a hideous creature with a horse's head and bat wings that ran around tormenting people and ripping livestock to shreds. Obviously, some of these creature legends should be taken with a grain of salt. And a jug of sweet Merlot. And cans of tuna. Mmm. Today we're going to examine the first of five of my most favorite entries into the cryptozoo - and all of these examples are ones who a lot of people swear by. They're also some of the strangest, most surrealistic things you could ever imagine walking our planet.

To better tie this in with the site's chosen route, I'm also including pop-culture tie-ins for each entry into the X-Entertainment Cryptozoo...

X-Entertainment Cryptozoo: Case I:
GIANT SQUID
(Special Super Power: Able to play Mortal Kombat against itself)

Okay, first off, make no mistake - there are really big squids in the sea. But we're not talking about 'really big' squids. We're talking about squids big enough to throw our cars through the air at 70 miles per hour. Squids big enough to quench a Brando-sized desire for fried calamari. Squids big enough to take charge and destroy everything in sight - even misbegotten ships who stray a little too close to one of their horned tentacles.

There's nothing all that abnormal about a Giant Squid - they don't grow cyborg machine guns on their arms when they reach a certain length, nor do they gain the ability to explode into poisonous confetti. They're just the same as any deep-sea squid...just a hell of a lot bigger. So why's that so interesting? Well, picture a spider. Scary, but not that scary. Now picture that same spider a hundred times larger. Now picture Delta Burke's face superimposed on each of the spider's eight eyes. Blonde version Delta. Really scary stuff. Hence the magic of the giant squid - making leaps and bounds ahead of us on the food chain simply by growing to enormous sizes. And besides that...what seems like a minor threat on a small squid becomes an absolute terror on an infamous giant one...

Aside from having tentacles that can quite definitely rip you in half, the squid's arms are lined with suction cups that have little 'horns' inside - these horns can pierce pretty much anything the squid gets it's arms around. If you manage to survive that, your end won't be any more pleasant - the squid's mouth is actually a 'beak' - capable of biting through substances like steel if the squid if big and powerful enough. Once thought to be a myth, or the concoction of seafarers in need of attention, scientists found indisputable proof of the giant squid's existence on the very bodies of their main adversary - the sperm whale.



You've gotta imagine that sperm whales were the ass-end of many a joke back during their high school days. The other whales got passable or cool names like 'blue,' 'killer,' and 'basking,' and here comes the poor mammalian sea fish, named after love seeds. Whoa, off-track. Sperm whales feed mainly on squids, which is fine and dandy for them, so long as they remember not to go after the squids who dwarf them. Squids in general are some of the toughest fighters in the sea - they don't give up easy. When you've got that kind of spirit on one of the biggies, the sperm whale might've bit off more than he can chew. Scientists have found several sperm whales with squid 'sucker' scars all over them - and some of these scars are so large in diameter, they could've only belonged to squids of vast size. It's theorized that some giant squids grow longer than 50,' while some scientists claim that they grow up to 70' or more.

Chance of Actual Existence: Giant squids do exist, there's no mystery there. As for the giants who exceed 40 and 50 feet, I'd bet that some of them have been around. In the right environment, there's really nothing to stop a squid from continued growth, so it's really just a matter of a steady food supply and a short predator supply. It's entirely possible that an offshoot breed of really large squids has emerged from the right mating matches, too. In short - I believe we have a 'yes'.

Giant Squid Fun Facts: Can weigh as much as a ton, or even more on weeks when brie's on sale. Scientists have, as of yet, not been able to study a living specimen of the giant squid. It's believed that giant squids live as far as 2,300' underwater. Aside from fish, most giant squids will eat smaller squids, thus proving once and for all what Italians knew for decades - you can't resist good calamari. Their eyes can be as large - or larger - than a volleyball. This is probably why squids don't watch The Jeffersons. Seeing Weezy any larger than I have to would really scare me. She'd be the real sea monster, assuming she could get close enough to the ocean without said ocean gaining sentience and bodily movement just to escape her. Make Mine Marla. Gibbs.

Giant Squid Pop-Culture Ties:

1) Peter Benchley's The Beast Made-For-Television Movie:



Wow, squids who don't only make their way into lakes, but are able to single out small families of which to torment, eat submarines, even occasionally climb up onto land to make sad noises over the death of their young. In other words, you'd have to be a monkey trained to find absurdity hilarious to enjoy this one. It's Benchley, so it's Jaws...only with a squid. I know Jaws wasn't really a literal shark, but this? The flick was panned and banned by almost everyone who saw it, aside from Weezy, who considered it a good excuse to step out for pizza. As a bonus, it costars that girl from the Noxema commercials who married Dylan and died twenty minutes later. Luke Perry is a curse. Avoid at all costs.

2) Weird Beast Wars Action Figure, Claw Jaw:



Transformers: a world where heroic and villainous robots turn into high-tech cars, soaring jets, and...squids. Claw Jaw never made it onto the American cartoon, but nobody was able to pass him up in the toy aisle because he's the first example of a squid who fights for justice. See, Claw Jaw's a Maximal. That makes him a good guy. Or in this case, a good squid. Not that there's such a thing as a bad squid. Unless you're ordering it from a Chinese food place that doubles as a laundromat. Then it's almost assuredly bad squid.

3) Silverhawks Villain MonStar's Stupid Space Ship



Thanks, RICHIE. Yeah, MonStar, that weird red guy from the Silverhawks who'd morph back and forth between equally ugly but altogether different villains for no readily apparent reason other than making his action figure have a special action feature, rode through space riding a giant squid shuttle. If you ever wondered why Silverhawks didn't make it to a third season, I'd say we've got some perfect reasons displayed here.




- Matt