The Legend of Bigfoot USA, G, 76 m, 1976
Released in 1976 to a handful of drive-ins, The Legend of Bigfoot has long been an object of ridicule by “serious” Sasquatch hunters, most of whom dismiss the show’s star, Ivan Marx, as an utter charlatan. No doubt about it, Marx (with a little help from director Harry Winer) has fashioned a tall tale here that might’ve made Baron Münchhausen go red, but the Ingagi-style hucksterism that governs every second of this accursed thing doesn’t figure in to why I want to drain my lizard on it. You see, if The Legend of Bigfoot had taken the trouble to be even halfway diverting (only a fool would expect it to be educational), I most likely would’ve given it a pass (I’m nothing if not charitable), but the sad fact is that it’s duller than watching an Eton wall game. No, scratch that. It’s duller than watching one of Al Gore’s little slideshows about global warming. (Sheesh, my eyelids grow heavy at the mere thought of that stiff droning on about greenhouse gasses and continental drift and stranded polar bears.) Worse, it has no sense of humor about itself, which, given its outlandish subject, is inexcusable. Marx guides us through The Legend of Bigfoot with all the wit and charm of a used car salesman. (He probably missed his true calling.) A “tracker” by trade, his life took an unexpected turn when he was summoned to Kodiak, Alaska to figure out what in tarnation had been going through the cattle there like so many Slim Jims. Most of the ranchers in the area suspected the Kodiak bear, the furry backside of which they marked with a $5K bounty. But ol’ Ivan knew the local yokels were barking up the wrong Sitka spruce: the Kodiak bear, which is “as fine a fisherman as you’ll ever see,” had access to enough salmon-rich streams that it didn’t need to mess around with critters that were earmarked for the Golden Arches. So, if the world’s most beloved snuff mascot wasn’t eviscerating the bossies, what was? Well, one of the cowpokes had a theory (or at least as close as a tobacky-chewin’ country boy who ain’t much for fancy book-learnin’ can get to a theory): Bigfoot did it. Yessir, Bigfoot. (You know, that huge, unkempt cryptid that has been the stuff of campfire tales since Christ was in short pants.) Needless to say, our hero (who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to convince us of what a straight shooter he is) found the rancher’s story to have an odor vaguely reminiscent of the icky matter that seeps out of a lactose-intolerant bear’s fanny hole after it’s gorged all day on yogurt, cottage cheese, pudding, iced cream, and buttermilk pancakes topped with liberal dollops of creamery butter. (And yet even the most nostril-singeing stool smells like gypsophila next to the stench that this bogus picture gives off.) In the end, Ivan posited that the cows had died of malnutrition (the grass they fed on was waterlogged and therefore lacking in protein) and that Boog, Smokey, and Yogi couldn’t see letting those lip-smacking remains go to waste. (How many dead presidents he pocketed for that bit of conjecture isn’t revealed.) Ivan’s next stop was Arizona to round up a javelina for some college kids to torture, er, study. But just as he was starting to dig on the distance between him and “those crazies in Alaska,” his brother-in-law gave him the nickel tour of the Land of Petrified Wood, a 700-year-old Indian ruin. Carved into its walls were pictures that told a story about a monster with oversized feet and hands that came in the night to steal away the red skins’ chillun. And now Ivan’s little head was, as he puts it, “reeling with Bigfoot.” Did he owe himself a reevaluation of what he had long believed to be a “load of hogwash”? Uh huh, and it was at this point that the mild irritation I felt watching The Legend of Bigfoot ballooned into nostril-flaring, fist-clenching, foot-stomping rage. Why the H.E. Double Toothpicks would such a supposed dyed-in-the-wool doubting Thomas have to juggle around with his viewpoint after taking in little more than some primeval doodles and a shitkicker’s whiskey-induced fantasy? You don’t have to be Frank Pembleton to intuit that this character was never any more of a convert to the whole Bushman thing than the man in the moon. Anyway, while hot on the trail of a mountain lion somewhere north, Ivan stumbled upon a string of weird footprints in the snow. They were 18 inches or so in length, the “hugest” Ivan had ever seen, and so deep that the animal that left them must’ve weighed at least a quarter of a ton. Ivan was “mystified,” so he made some plaster casts and sent them to a lab for analysis. The results, not surprisingly, were inconclusive. This made Ivan “uncomfortable.” Well, it wasn’t long before Ivan came across those mysterious tracks again; only this time they surrounded the carcass of a renegade bear he had been hunting. The bear’s neck was broken, and in its maw was a clump of really strange hair. Ivan’s suspicions were confirmed when he fortuitously ran into the bearer of the hair: “a 500-pound, 8-foot-tall, vicious creature” with “glowing red eyes” and “a nauseating musky odor.” Oh my, Oh-mah! Unfortunately (and, I must say, rather conveniently), Ivan wasn’t prepared for such an encounter (no camera with which to take the thing’s picture and no gun with which to blast it to kingdom come if it attacked), so he hightailed it back to civilization, soiling his britches all the way. Shiverin’ shinbones, who was going to buy his story? Ivan then remembered that the monster had left behind some imprints of its whopping tootsies in the muddy earth, but before he could show them to his flannel-shirt-wearing cronies, a storm came up and washed them all away. I tell ya, the bullshit piles up so high in this crock of a doc that you need Condorman-style wings to stay above it. Now that Ivan was a true believer, all the fun ‘n’ games the culture was having with the Wild Man of the Woods made him “mad.” Determined to shame the skeptics, he spent the next several years looking for evidence that even James Randi couldn’t throw light on. What that ultimately amounted to was some blurry home movies of Bigfoot doing the Texas Two-Step in the hills outside of Bossburg, WA. The footage was screened for fellow Sasquatch enthusiasts, who knew the lay of the land well enough to observe that Ivan did not photograph his subject anywhere near the area he said he did. “Experts,” Ivan sneers. “Experts who questioned my words but claimed credit for my film and profited from it on lecture circuits.” This, according to Peter Byrne, the former head of “The Bigfoot Project,” is a barefaced lie. On his website, www.bigfootencounters.com, Byrne recounts how Mr. Marx tried to sell the film to his organization for $25,000, but when confronted with questions about its dubious origin, the “amateur cine photographer and mediocre woodsman” took off faster than Snyder’s hound. The supposed master, which remained sealed in the possession of Byrne’s lawyer until the authenticity of the working print could be determined, turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of clips from old Mickey Mouse cartoons. Though I tried like
the dickens to give it a fair shake, I came out of The Legend of Bigfoot
an even bigger skeptic than I was going in. It wasn’t so much the out-of-focus
pictures of Ivan (or his wife, Peggy) prancing about in a slightly modified
gorilla suit that had me rolling my eyes, it was the plethora of kooky
explanations our narrator gives us as to why he at last can’t come up with
anything in the way of hard proof. For example, the reason nobody has ever
found a Bigfoot corpse is because they’re all buried somewhere in the Arctic
Circle. “The creatures carry their dead over thousands of miles just to
deposit them in the crevices that open up in the spring thaw…The constant
movement of the glaciers could either crush the remains or wash them to the
sea.” No wonder the cryptozoologists have no use for this
screwball! July 30, 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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