The Monstrefact Redux: The Flight of Dragons
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This is an iHeart Podcast. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. Our recent Weird House Cinema episode on the 1981 film Dragon Slayer got me thinking once more about dragonflight.

In this film, noted for its superb dragon effects, we get to see Vermithrax pejorative soar terrifyingly across the sky like a fighter jet, as well as swoop down from craggy peaks. But we don't see the creature engage in vertical takeoff. In the special features for the excellent 2023 remastered Blu-ray release, the effects team indicated that they intentionally avoided depicting the dragon taken to flight.

in order to avoid challenges in making the feat seem believable. Because of course dragons, while creatures of fantasy, should feel believable on the screen. And that may often mean choosing what to depict and what to leave to the audience's imagination. But in raising the specter of believable dragonflight, I was reminded of an older episode of Weird House Cinema in which I discussed the 1982 animated film The Flight of Dragons with Seth Nicholas Johnson.

The film, from Rankin and Bass, was based on the 1979 book by Peter Dickinson and illustrated by Wayne Anderson. Part coffee table fantasy art book and part speculative natural history of dragons, the book is an absolute delight. And affordable used copies are still very much in circulation. Dickinson lays out one of the more intriguing models for dragon biology and flight, which I'll briefly summarize here.

For starters, the dragons of Flight of Dragons are, quote, flying bricks. They have thick bodies and short wings, but are very capable of flight. The wings, for starters, are too small to support their weight and are not proper limbs, but rather webbed spines that evolved from their ribs.

The dragons only use these wings for propulsion and maneuvering because their large bodies contain lighter-than-air gas, specifically hydrogen, which the dragon produces via digestion of limestone. The fiery breath, then, is a byproduct of their mode of flight. They must regularly vent hydrogen as a means of lowering their altitude when in flight, or as a matter of course, when not engaged in flight.

Via a structure known as Thor's thimble in the roof of their mouth, the dragons are able to ignite the hydrogen as a great burst of flame. The film does a fine job relating all of this, and the book ruminates on the speculative evolution, life cycle, and biology of fire-breathing dragons, as well as dragon slayers. It's a great deal of fun, but also rather insightful and clever. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the monster sciences.

While we don't have any terrestrial organisms that engage in this mode of flight, science fiction contains numerous other examples of creatures that fly via bladders of lighter-than-atmosphere gas. Artist and author Wayne Barlow, a legend in this field, for example, envisioned the Eosapiens in his 1990 book Expedition. Barlow envisioned them as the most advanced life form on the planet Darwin IV.

floating in the atmosphere via two bladders of methane in the planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart Podcast.