The Last Unicorn

Yeah, not the greatest prize pack, unfortunately.

[beep] Episode 380, The Last Unicorn.

Welcome to Mythological Beast Enthusiast.

It's co-host Dean.

Maybe we'll do, um, some mythical beast stuff on the wrap-up.

I would love that.

Because, uh, this week, people are expecting The Last Unicorn.

Right.

It's such a perfect phrase.

Let's dig into two profoundly different movies that perfectly illustrate this: The Last Unicorn and She's the Man.

Let's start with the animated classic The Last Unicorn.

The original source material is a remarkably beautiful melancholy fantasy novel written by Peter S. Beagle.

It is stunning.

Which she helpfully notes is a Canadian chain very similar to Blockbuster.

Right.

She'd beg to go there so she could rent the VHS copy of The Last Unicorn, and she had absolutely no idea until she was a teenager that it was actually a book she could have been reading the entire time.

I went on this tear of like I have to get all these medieval '80s, uh, you know, like animated movies, so I just started gobbling them up.

The Last Unicorn, Black Cauldron, like so many others.

Yeah.

Black Cauldron, like during COVID I sat down and read all the Prydain Chronicles, and turns out the dude who wrote them, I live in, near Philly now, and so he lived near here, and he wrote those books.

[laughs] Let's just talk about it.

[upbeat music] My favorite movie is The Last Unicorn, and the only thing that could have improved it is if the unicorn had wings, which would make it a pegacorn, also known as an alicorn.

It's kind of funny that I've spent most of my career studying hybridization, because technically a pegacorn is a hybrid, a unicorn crossed with a pegasus carrying features of each, and of course, all the magic in the world.

The fact that anyone was surprised when I came out as gay is still puzzling to me.

So.

Even the ones they made really bad in the 80s, they got us addicted to them, so I'm, The Last Unicorn-

It worked

... was so bad.

Cool.

And then The Last Unicorn.

Nice.

I put, allegedly, I put this in my baby book as my favorite book when I was like really little.

Good one.

The Last Unicorn.

I never heard of

that.

For real? Nah, I've never heard of The Last Unicorn.

What the heck is that? Serge, what the...

Big Surge.

What the hell you doing watching something called The Last Unicorn, bro? We've all been children before.

Yeah.

But were you familiar with The Last Unicorn or...

Well, they're both Rake and Bask movies.

There was The Hobbit in 1977.

And then they did do A Return of the King in 1980.

But they also did a movie called The Last Unicorn, which we talked about last week with the poetic critic.

I didn't know if you recalled that one because that was on Disney and HBO a lot when we were kids.

Yeah, we were talking about that.

They told her that she was a Habsburg unicorn, and the Habsburgs were the monarchy of, uh, you know, they, they had, they did it in a different way with their breeding systems and their, their marriage, but they, they ruled the Holy Roman Empire, [laughs] you know? And, uh, and the way that she was programmed, Kerry was, uh, you know, sh- there were unicorns everywhere.

They used that symbolism, and they used the, these movies like, um, you know, The Last Unicorn, the cartoon, and the other, like the, the Tom Cruise movie there with the unicorn in it, and, uh, Tim Curry as the devil.

Like, these...

Anyway, they used child movies to program- Mm-hmm ... uh, scripts into their, into the victims and, um, and that's just like Nutcracker, which was, uh...