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Episode 421 - Leiningen Versus the Ants (Patreon)

Published:
2018-09-29 18:35:07
Edited:
2019-01-04 01:53:11
Imported:
2021-07

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Content

Siegetember comes to a close with Leiningen Versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson!

Special thanks to reader Greig Johnson. Check him out on the YouTubes!

Here's the Nostalgia League article we quoted, as well as that article from Ask an Entomologist!

Next up: Strange Eons by Robert Bloch!

Comments

Richard Horsman

For some reason I pictured Leningen as L. Ron Hubbard the whole time I was reading this, even though he's clearly British. Something about the blustery "men's adventure pulp" tone of the whole thing.

Anonymous

Time to listen! (In the off chance you cover Strange Eons in three weeks, I once more want to push for reading Bloch's "The Terror of Cut-Throat Cove.")

Anonymous

The last two stories were both taught in my 8th grade English class and I’m having major flash backs. Unsure as to weather this is good or bad. Will check back later....

Fred Kiesche

A movie version with Charleton Heston, IIRC. Don't have very good memories of it.

Anonymous

Funny anecdote about Leiningen Versus the Ants... My friend had read it for a class or something and was unable to find it again for a long time. Finally she searched "ants petrol" on Google and the story was the first result. I remember it whenever I successfully use keywords to find something via search engine (which doesn't commonly happen).

Anonymous

I read this in my 9th grade English class and had nightmares for weeks. Just the concept of a carpet of destruction rolling inexorably toward your home -- it's like Nature just up and saying "F you in particular." I've remembered it ever since, and I was delighted to hear you cover it.

Anonymous

I also remember seeing a movie adaptation when I was a kid. It starred Carlton Heston as Leiningen.

Steve

It's kind of lining-en.

Anonymous

Long time listener but first time commenter here. I just couldn't resist commenting on this story because I have some personal experience with these guys. No matter how overblown the ants of Leiningen Versus the Ants are, let me tell you that seeing a swarm of a few hundred thousand ants in person is surreal. They turn the ground into a seething mass and the small arthropods in their path either run or are completely overtaken and devoured. I have been lucky enough to be in the middle of swarms on a few occasions and while I wouldn't necessarily consider the swarms true forces of nature like Brazilian official Leiningen speaks to at the beginning of the story I would definitely not call them mere animals.

Steve

We had a column of ants in our back garden, the first year we spent in France, big black carpenter ants, up to a centimetre long. The line was a couple of meters long and half a meter wide but they were marching towards the house so my dad poured petrol on them and burned them.

Steve

Fortunately they did not strip him, or any of us, down to the bones.

Anonymous

I was waiting the whole episode to post here about the episode of MacGyver... And then you mentioned it, and now I don’t feel special. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ One of the more memorable episodes. I watched it as a kid. He made a welding tool with some metal rods and four quarters.

Anonymous

On the subject of ants and water. I moved from Los Angles, CA to Austin, TX and my boyfriend lives in Houston. Here, we have fire ants, which are basically ground wasps. When it floods here you’ll get bunches that hook their legs together to make a raft for the majority of their colony. Some may die but basically you have floating clumps of very much alive, and very angry, fire ants the size of salad plates. (The clumps are that size that is, not the individual ants.) They will just swarm over anything they come into contact with. Like a bit of flotsam, a swimming animal, or your kayak as you’re just trying to salvage your day by enjoying the whimsy of being able to paddle to the super market. So when the story was like “He made a moat all around his plantation.” I was like, “Oh. Sir. You are going to be unhappy soon.”

Anonymous

Phase IV (1974) is definitely the best movie about an ant siege I know of; it starts as an ant-based disaster/sci fi movie, in which a new breed of ants has evolved, or bootstrapped themselves into, a kind of hivemind sentience, but it ends up as something more like Kubrick's 2001 (the ants even build monoliths). The first act draws on this story as a means of showing how formidable these sentient ants are: a stubborn farmer refuses to evacuate despite the warnings of the scientist protagonists because he believes the same two-moat system will save him. The ants quickly swim across the water in the same way and then just dig under the flaming gasoline; the farmer, his wife, and his horses are all soon bitten to death. This works to show that the protagonists really will need all the tools of modern science if they are going to stand a chance. I think because of this movie, and many other Man's Hubris versus Nature narratives from Moby Dick on, I just assumed that this story would end with Leiningen and all of his men dead and devoured. I guess his men didn't deserve that fate, although blindly trusting a charismatic leader is at minimum not a smart life decision, but I was a little disappointed that Leiningen's picked-clean skeleton washing away in the flood wasn't the closing image.

Anonymous

Lakewood manor. 1977 made for TV movie ABC. Suzanne Somers, need I say more. Jiggle ant tv.

Anonymous

I recall seeing an old Charlton Heston movie based on this story entitled "The Naked Jungle". Army ants overrun a coca plantation in Brazil. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Jungle" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Jungle</a>

Anonymous

Spit based time keeping is such a hipster move

Anonymous

Not sure how well this applies to literature, but for movies nature is one of the few threats that still holds water. Superheroes, martial arts films, shoot-em-ups, and superspies have left movie audiences largely numb to the threat of physical violence. A dozen guys shooting at our hero doesn't get our heat rate up. Caped folk punch each other through buildings and we just go, "Neato!" Boot to the head, boot to the head, boot to the head . . . yawn. But give our heroes a cliff-face to scale and suddenly things get real exciting. A couple of angry guard dogs are far more adrenaline-inducing than their armored, armed, and well-trained masters. So we might have to speed up and bigify the ants a tad. Still. Nature finds a way (to terrify).

Anonymous

You would definitely pronounce the 'g' in 'Leiningen' like you would in 'goat'. Source: I know some people from Austria who are named Leiningen ;)

Anonymous
>>15909745

To be fair, that's because--going back to the episode on Conflict--the concept of a protagonist that's actually vulnerable or in any real danger has all but disappeared. And if your superhero or secret agent is so good that they aren't in any real danger, there's no stakes in any of the action sequences.

Anonymous

Siegetember has been a blast, just great fun.

Anonymous

A search of IMDb shows The Naked Jungle (1954) is Stephenson's one and only movie credit. Besides Heston as Leiningen, it also stars Eleanor Parker as the missus and William Conrad as the commissioner.

Anonymous

When I was in the Navy, I had a tour of duty in the Philippines, where I lived in a house in town and shared rent with a buddy. Once, in the middle of the night, he got up to go to the bathroom, and there was a dead mouse on the hall floor. When he got up in the morning, the mouse was a gleaming-white little skeleton: -- ANTS!

Anonymous

Wow! You released this and then your Comments show before I could spit 3 times!

Anonymous

I was going to complain about how this story compares women to livestock and children, but then I remembered the time when someone accidentally set off the fire alarm at my work, which startled all the women in the office into a stampede. Tragically, 3 co-workers were trampled to death before management was able to turn the herd. One of my earliest memories is of watching some movie or TV version of this story where someone is eaten alive by ants. I'm sure it made no impression on me at all though.

Anonymous

PS - When you guys talked about the various iterations of the ants vs. humans siege-story, you brought back a seemingly repressed memory of an Outer Limits episode entitled "The Zanti Misfits" wherein a group of highly intelligent and technologically innovative aliens make an arrangement with the US government to send their anti-social and criminal outcasts to a secluded Californian desert in exchange for sharing some super sweet alien tech with the US military. There's just one caveat: the Zanti demand complete privacy. If their privacy is breached, then they promise that the earth will face with complete [and unspecified] destruction. Unfortunately the Zanti ship lands just as a young Bruce Dern and his morally ambiguous lady-friend arrive on site to ruin everything. Dern's character sneaks a peek at the Zanti in their ship where it is finally revealed that the Zanti are just squirrel-sized ants with some old, ugly dude's face (and yes... It's just the same ugly, old dude's face for every one of them). Of course Bruce Dern is painfully and brutally killed somehow when a Zanti crawls on him and swivels it's head a bit, and from there the Zanti proceed to lay siege to a military outpost where it turns out their only weakness as a species is guns, fire, and blunt objects. No spoilers of course as to who wins out in the end. But I have to say that the best part of the episode is when a Zanti stalks Bruce Dern's girlfriend who's locked herself in the car (It's really not too far off from a low-budget Cujo knock-off), and the ugly, little lazy-eyed alien receives a dramatic on screen closeup that pretty much captures the spirit of the episode: <a href="https://media.giphy.com/media/gho6daXcHPSEw/giphy.gif" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://media.giphy.com/media/gho6daXcHPSEw/giphy.gif</a>

Anonymous
>>15950792

HA! Allison, I'm so glad you posted this. My office just had a fire drill and we almost lost three team members to the stampede! One woman preemptively evacuated the building to avoid the trampling (which also sounds like a great title for a cheesy B-Horror flick: "The Trampling in 3D -- Run for Your Lives!")

Anonymous
>>15951524

Actually, Chris has already covered The Zanti Misfits in a bonus episide on his other show Rachel Watches Star Trek (<a href="http://rachelwatchesstartrek.com/)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://rachelwatchesstartrek.com/)</a> in which he watches Star Trek OST with his wife Rachel, who is not a fan nor into science fiction in general. I can heartily recommend the show. It is hilarious.

Anonymous

I do know someone who can fight lighting bolts with their fists - Greig Johnson, the amazing Electric Slide!

Anonymous

You know Hank Pym would probably solve this problem in the time it takes you to spit twice. Scott Lang would probably make it much much worse.

Anonymous

“I'm staying. A few ants aren't going to run me off this plantation.” “Damn it, Leiningen! These ants can strip an adult frog to the bone in as little as twelve hours!” “... I'll get my bag.”

Anonymous

My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

Anonymous

There are more horror stories about ants I think. Why do you have Januantuary?

Anonymous

This story really had an anticlimax.

Anonymous
>>16280924

This may have been mentioned, but I remember H.G. Wells' Empire of the Ants being good.

Steve

40:45 in, the BBC has an audio version of this very story.

Anonymous

Since Episode 134 (287 episodes ago), Austria has meant nothing to Chris. Well played. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EagwYm8ZmiI" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EagwYm8ZmiI</a>