In the Clutches of The Cuttlefish - Episode 77

Will Falk’s death come at the hands of the villain known as The Cuttlefish? Do you like cliffhanger serials? Will there be actual tentacles in this episode? Listen to find out!

In the Clutches of The Cuttlefish, episode 77 of This Gun in My Hand, was massaged by Rob Northrup. This episode and all others are available on Youtube with automatically-generated closed captions of dialog. Visit http://ThisGuninMyHand.blogspot.com for credits, show notes, information on how to subscribe, and to buy my books, such as Little Heist in the Big Woods and Other Revisionist Atrocities. What will you feel if you plunge your arm into my aquarium? This Gun in My Hand!

Show Notes:
1. Trail of the Octopus (1919) and The Spider’s Web (1938) are actual movie serials.
2. It’s true that the publishers of The Spider magazine briefly issued a magazine named after his nemesis, The Octopus. In this episode, The Cuttlefish assumes that the magazine went on hiatus, taking a long time to publish its second issue, but a second issue never came. Only one issue was published in 1939 before changing its name to The Scorpion.
3. “The Sinister Ray,” Chapter Five of Shadow of Chinatown (1936) is available on Youtube, along with the rest of the series. 
4. In which episodes did you hear about those animal and insect classifications? Mollusks in episode 76; cephalopods in episode 77; arthropods in episode 74; kinkajous in episode 75; hemiptera and hymenoptera in episode 74.
5. It’s possible that an ad for the real Johnson Smith Company’s mail order catalog appeared in The Octopus magazine. It was really located at 6615 East Jefferson Ave, Detroit 7 Michigan in the 1930s. The idea that they offered a mail order training course on biological taxonomy is fictional.
6. That dissertation and its author are legit, and might have been published on microfilm in 1939. You think I’m playing with you? Not when it comes to microfilm.

Credits:
The opening and middle transitional music clips were from The Sun Sets at Dawn (1950), and the closing music was from Killer Bait (1949), both films in the public domain. The fake commercial music was from the public domain film The Scar (aka Hollow Triumph, 1948). All music used in the episode is modified from the original versions.

The image accompanying this episode is a modified detail of a public domain illustration by Alphonse de Neuville featured in 20000 Lieues Sous les Mers, circa 1871.