And basically, I think the problem is I had writer’s block and I
started leaning towards content on the internet that I could comment on.
That’s not really what I wanted that show to be because I have
an engineer in Japan, which is commenting on the news in Japan.
And I didn’t want just like a non-version of an engineer in Japan to be C-McB.
C-McB was experimental, it was supposed to be different,
supposed to be fun, supposed to be other stuff.
So, here we are. I’m back. Why? Because someone asked
me a question and I realized that is where I flourish.
Someone asked me, could a zombie have a baby? And that question
settled in my brain and I’ve been ruminating on it for months.
And so, in those months, I came up with a multitude of answers
and I decided to work them all out here with you today.
Now, the first thing is we need to define a zombie, which seems like a really
simple thing to do until you go back through the history of zombies in general.
Because what is a zombie? A zombie is the living dead, the walking dead.
We have a lot of sort of amorphous terms for what a zombie is, but nothing that’s
truly definitive and it’s because people have zombie as a concept, it’s the undead.
So, I decided to go back sort of through the history
and so let’s really clarify what zombies are.
So, the very first zombie type was a hypnotized villager.
Now, this is because the very first version of zombies were
actually village people who had been hypnotized by Dracula.
So, this is where the term undead comes from. These people were not dead, but at the same
time they were living, but at the same time they had no sort of self-will or self-control or
anima or whatever you want to call it, because that
had been taken away by the magical power of Dracula.
So, these people actually had very little to do with dead bodies, which when
you think of zombies, you tend to think of dead bodies rising up from the earth.
This is not the case in the very original way back when zombie. They were called undead because they weren’t
dead, but they weren’t alive and they weren’t alive because they had lost sort of their own free will.
Then we get into sort of the 80s, I would
say, and the 80s became sort of the mystical.
This is when you had the Dungeons and Dragons crisis.
I had a sort of hysteria named to it.
It was like, people were afraid of… It was referred to as the satanic panic.
Satanistic hysteria kind of took over the country.
Dungeons and Dragons became a point of attack.
I actually remember that really well, because this is when I was a kid.
If you watched a zombie movie from the sort of
70s to 80s, you got a sort of mystical version.
So, they would say hell is full or some kind of magic had been done.
So, the magic had been done to raise the dead. So, these were corpses that were somehow reanimated and then
came up out of the ground and usually brains, brains, that’s kind of where we got that sort of stereotype from.
Then we get the third type. The third type is when we get into the 90s.
I would say into the late 90s more than anything else and these are chemicals.
And this is you can see the sort of awareness or cultural commentary
that comes along with zombie movies or horror movies actually shows.
Because you have, the original was just I want villagers to do what
Dracula says and then it’s like going to apply more to our concerns.
It’s going to apply to the hysteria that’s going around Satanism at this time.
And then, now we get into the 90s. What are the biggest, scariest things?
It’s chemical warfare. It’s chemical in the air. It’s chemicals in our food.
So, these chemicals, usually the opening of this movie was the military is transporting a truck and that truck has a crash and then barrel falls down, rolls into the water
or rolls into the ground and then breaks and then the liquid, usually glowing green, seeps into the ground and then the next scene you have zombies coming out of the ground.
That was a very normal start to a zombie movie at this time. Then you get the fourth one, which
is sort of the more modern zombie so this is going to be the odds plus. This is usually a disease.
And you can actually see in a way we’ve come full circle because while
number two and number three are sort of corpses that have been reanimated.
Number one is just a villager that’s lost their will.
The more modern films, it’s usually some kind of flu.
It’s a disease that goes around. It’s incredibly virulent. It took place before COVID. I
mean, this is actually sort of almost prescient in how deadly diseases are going to be.
But it became really forefront because we had the SARS issue.
We had a bunch of diseases go around. The people were freaking out Ebola.
I remember Ebola. There was even an Ebola movie.
It was really cheap, really bad. Do not watch it.
But this means you don’t have corpses being reanimated. You have regular people who
get infected with the disease and they lose their self control. They lose themselves.
They become the living dead. Very much like number one.
So in my view, these have actually all become sort of full circle.
We went from people to corpses in magic to chemicals reanimating
corpses to people who are now being impacted by a disease.
Which is very different from hypnotized, but it is a healthy human body that is then
attacking people because they’ve lost because their brain has been infected by this disease.
So the question then, once we’ve defined which zombie
we’re talking about has to be can they produce offspring?
So I’m going to make a matrix of a healthy male, a healthy female.
There is a zombie male and a zombie female.
And so we can create kind of a matrix of how the different things get together
because we also can a zombie have a baby needs to be defined by the people
involved in trying to create the baby. We would have healthy male
to healthy female. That can produce a baby. Perfect. No problem.
We have a healthy male to a zombie male. You’re missing some of the
requisite parts to produce a baby. I’m just going to go ahead and say no.
You have a healthy female and a zombie female also
missing some of the requisite parts to produce a baby.
So that’s why there’s no lines going down.
A zombie male and a zombie female is a possibility.
A zombie male and a healthy female is a possibility,
a healthy male and a zombie female also a possibility.
But it depends on which kind of zombie we’re going to use. Now, number one, we can immediately take that off the list and
say absolutely they can produce a child because them being a zombie in this case is more metaphysical than actually physical.
Because I’ve lost my mind. My mind is now being controlled by Dracula in this case.
It means my bodily functions are all exactly the same.
So since my bodily functions are exactly the same,
there’s absolutely no problem with me having a
baby be it male or female on either part of the
matrix because everything’s in working order.
We have to assume we’re going to go ahead and just assume
everything’s in working order for this point.
Only problem then becomes a complete lack of consent,
but I think that is something we can say for all four
types of zombies is that consent kind of goes out the window.
If we jump straight to number four, where a disease is turning people into zombies,
I think if you catch it early enough in the disease,
everyone is okay here because a healthy male and a
zombie or a healthy male and a zombie female because
she has a very virulent flu, doesn’t mean that her
body is broken down, doesn’t mean those things
don’t work anymore. So they could produce a child.
Same with the zombie male human female, if it was
early enough in the flu aspect. Now the question
is the disease, how much does it ravage the
body, what does it impact that would need to be
defined to actually go any further than that
because pretty quickly disease is shut down
reproductive functions. So there’s a whole secondary
question was can a zombie male get an erection?
Because that is let’s say technically required
for the functioning of producing a child.
I have actually done a whole episode, I think it
was in the old Velocipod guest, where I talked about
whether or not vampires could get boners and I
came out with two solutions, one, they could,
because they could just use magic and make a
magical boner because there’s some kind of magic
keeping them alive, or two, since they don’t have
a heart that beats because they’re essentially
undead as well, there is no blood pumping through
their body and therefore they cannot produce an erection.
To really answer the question, can a
vampire get a boner, you need some more definitive
aspects about the vampires physiology?
The same applies to these 2000 plus zombies, where it’s
a disease that’s keeping them alive, making them
hyper aggressive, that kind of stuff.
The walking dead falls into either number two or number three.
Now I remember at the end of season two,
they did talk about something. I think they did
the disease one, but it managed to reanimate the
bodies, but I don’t remember enough because I
didn’t watch that show because it got real boring, real fast.
Season two is when they lost me when they decided, hey, let’s take this show where
we’re going to go across the country and you
know, encounter zombies in different situations
and just keep them in a house for a while.
They went on for seasons after that where they tried to
make up for it, they couldn’t keep me. But I’m going
to stick with the chart I’ve laid out here with
the 80s and 90s because this is the ones where it
gets very difficult to actually decide, because
if you use magic to reanimate your corpse, that
magic could have a variety of impacts on the body.
So zombie mail and zombie female, it doesn’t actually matter.
We need a definition of how the magic recreates the body. So I think the main thing
is because in the 80s, number two, hell is full,
magic is reanimating corpses. It depends how
decomposed the actual body is when it’s reanimated.
So you have a corpse who’s just died like minutes ago and you reanimate that,
everything might be still in place to be fully functional.
But if you think about the movies from
the 80s, it was usually like a skeleton hand comes
up with half a chest and half their face ripped
off all that kind of stuff because of decomposition.
So that decomposition is going to affect
all the organs within. And I would say in that
case, you cannot produce a child, be it mail or
female in any part of the matrix here.
But if you get to the magic part, you might be getting to this
whole Satan aspect where there’s magic involved
where demons Satan himself decides to implant a baby
within one of the corpses. The question is, if it’s magic, then the magic could
impact the body of the zombie so that it can
produce a child because it’s magic, the zombie mail
impregnating a healthy female would mean that
you’re getting genetic material impacted by magic.
And so that would, the question then becomes what
kind of baby would you be producing?
Would you be producing a half zombie baby?
Would you be producing a super baby? Would you be producing a demon baby?
Because the magic is the big question mark
because it’s very difficult to decide what magic is
until you have to sort of create a universe in a
story where the magic has sort of its own set of
rules, a demon maybe wants to create an error or
wants to be reborn so it has a zombie impregnate
a healthy female so that then it can be reborn itself.
So you might actually be producing a demon.
Same kind of goes for the healthy mail to the zombie female.
That happens and then you end up with
some kind of demon baby being incubated in the zombie female.
Or maybe the magic in the zombie female that’s reanimating it is what creates
this strange offspring. But the offspring itself
becomes a big question. So I think in this case,
in the number two, you would be most likely to
produce a baby between zombies and humans or
zombies and zombies. It would be a very interesting
question does a zombie mail producing offspring
with a zombie female produce a super zombie
or produce some other kind of creature that has
the attributes and the strengths of a zombie but
also the genetic material of healthy humans?
That’s a whole different question. The 90s chemical one
leads us to the same problem but I think it’s less
likely to produce offspring because the chemical
is reanimating corpses. If it’s reanimating
corpses, then the damage has already been done and
there’s no magic element to like rebuild.
Now you could do the super soldier serum kind of story
where the genetic material where the genetic
material provided by the zombie mail or the zombie
female has attributes that increases the actual
viability of the baby. But again, that doesn’t
seem to be that way. It seems like in the 90s,
the chemical that was going into the ground
was just detrimental. The only thing it seemed to
do was create zombies that would come up and just
desire to eat human brains. It’s where in my
head, the brains, brains, give me brains, hunger
brains, that kind of stuff. That’s where that came
from in my mind. It probably came a little early
like late 80s but I’m trying to make this again
very clear transition so it’s just really easy to define.
I’m going to cross that out because I
think too much damage has been done to the zombie
male and the zombie female to be able to viable
produce offspring. But the question asker did not
define enough elements of the question to actually
come up with an answer. So I think if you wanted
a zombie to produce an offspring of any sort, be
it healthy male to zombie female, zombie male to
healthy female, zombie male to zombie female, that kind of thing.
I think the one you need to go through
is the one you need to go to is sort of the 80s
magic driven hell is full demonic possession
style zombies that come up from the ground because
since they’re imbued with magic, they have more
opportunities to do more opportunities.
There’s more viability for them to be able to do something
like produce offspring using the magic that’s reanimating them in the first place.
I was throwing out some kids books and I
came across Star Wars phonics. Friends to the
end and on the cover is Han Solo and Chewbacca.
And I thought I would read this story and go through
once reading, reviewing this story is the kind
of thing that happens when you have little kids
and you’re feeding them children oriented content.
In this case, supposed to appeal to the child
and the parent because I’m a Star Wars fan.
I love the Star Wars. So this actually appeals to me
as a Star Wars fan, but hopefully we’ll also
appeal to my child. But then as I read it,
I started doing some, let’s say, criticism, let’s
say a little sort of analysis of what was actually
going on in the book and things they were kind of by choice leaving out of the story
when we’re teaching our childrens for phonics
about Han Solo and Chewbacca. So I’m going to read
this story and then stop every now and then and
give you a little bit of information that came to
my mind when I was reading this story to my child.
This is Chewy and Han. They do not look the same.
They do not talk the same, but they are best friends.
Good message. Happy with that. No notes.
Han flies the ship. Chewy helps him.
That bugs me a little bit because they’re co pilots.
Chewy can fly the ship by himself. Han can fly the
ship by himself. They fly it together.
They’re equals in this. In this book, they actually
make Chewy take a secondary role and that really
sort of bothered me because to me, true friendship
is about equality. They should be seen as equals.
The next page says they jet right.
They jet left there in space. They could jet up and down.
They could jet sort of on angles. I think you’d be a little more creative with that.
But I get what you’re trying to do.
Sometimes they need to get away fast, fast, fast, fast.
Now here’s an interesting question. Why do they have to get away fast, fast, fast?
In the original story, Han Solo was running away from the empire and the huts.
The reason he was running away from the huts was
because he had dumped in the Star Wars universe.
There are things called death sticks.
Now we would know them as human beings on earth as cigarettes.
But in the Star Wars universe, they created death
sticks as one of the more illegal drugs in the universe.
Han Solo was transporting death sticks
to another planet for the huts. He was a smuggler.
He was smuggling contraband, this contraband being a drug.
So he is essentially a drug mule, a drug smuggler. And then he was caught
by an imperial ship and he had to dump his payload.
Now the thing is, when you dump your load, I keep wanting to make poopy jokes now.
If you dump your load, the huts want to get paid back.
That was the whole conflict between
Han Solo and the huts. They just drift right past
that one in a second. Now they’re using a scene
in the book where they’re approaching the cloud city.
I can tell because in the background there
are those two like pod ships that are stuck together that make zero sense to me.
They weren’t running away at that time until
the end when they were trying to escape.
But the next sentence is chewy steps up to help. They jet away, zoom.
Jet is now really bugging me because I don’t think spaceships jet.
I’m sure they have some other term for it.
Sometimes the ship will not jet.
Who can help Han fix it? Chewy can lend a hand.
Now here’s the problem I have with this.
This is when it actually really sort of stuck in my
gourd and I felt I needed to do an analysis of
this in front of other people. Sometimes the
ship will not jet. Yes, it’s a ship that breaks down a lot.
That’s true. No question there.
Who can help Han fix it? Well, who can fix it should
be the question because Chewy is the primary mechanic.
He’s actually really good with machines.
He’s better at fixing the ship than Han Solo.
Han Solo often gets in the way. So for me, this is
again the inequality that they’ve built up here.
It’s like they truly don’t understand the
relationship or what these two characters bring to
their relationship because Chewy maintains and fixes the ship.
Han Solo, he helps Chewy.
So this sentence should be the opposite.
Who can help Chewy fix it? Han can lend a hand and then he
probably will mess it up. So Chewy will kick him
out of the ship and probably get an astromech
to help him instead. Sometimes Chewy yells.
Who can tell what Chewy says? Han can tell.
I don’t have any real problem with that. Han can tell the Wookiee language.
He can… I guess he did Wookiee in high
school or something. I’m not really sure how you
would learn that. Sometimes Chewy gets stuck.
He needs help to get out. He needs a friend.
The picture they’re showing is when he’s in his
cell and Imperial cell and he’s just been tortured.
This is actually Han Solo is thrown into the
same cell and he’s blind and he starts to regain his vision and Chewy hugs him.
But it’s not Chewy is stuck. They are both stuck and they need
to help each other. He doesn’t need a friend.
His friend comes back to very happy.
I don’t have really problem with that. But, again, they’re
showing sort of an imbalance in the ineptitude
of both these characters because Han Solo, if you
really look at it, is the more inept yet
charming character whereas Chewy is the far more
competent of the two when it comes to just doing regular stuff.
Friends help each other in good times.
Friends help each other in bad times.
I’m okay with that. But you’ll notice it’s Chewy carrying
C3PO and Chewy, helping R2D2 after he’s been
blasted by the machine that he plugged into,
it’s Chewy helping out everybody.
Whereas Han Solo, I think at this point he’s actually been
frozen in carbonite. Chewy and Han are best
friends to the end and we know this is true because
they’re still friends when Han Solo dies in the Force Awakens.
