Courage the Cowardly Dog

In each episode, Courage and his owners are thrown into paranormal or supernatural adventures. 

My kids used to watch Courage the Cowardly Dog. I never paid much attention to it and didn't realize it had a theme of paranormal or supernatural events. 

Bugs Bunny can stand on nothing and justifies defying the law of gravity with "I never studied law." The Roadrunner can run through tunnels painted on the side of something by Wile E. Coyote and Wile E. Coyote slams into the wall when he tries to follow because he knows it's a painting. 

Cartoons are frequently completely ridiculous and routinely include bits that are extremely unrealistic. But with learning that is a theme of the show and thinking a bit about it, I'm thinking it really is New Mexico inspired and the author didn't want to admit that because the state already has kind of a reputation as a joke where everyone believes in aliens and nonsense. 

Here is a picture of the exterior of the mall in Manhattan, Kansas. I used to live in Manhattan, Kansas, AKA The Little Apple. That kind of stone building is something I've seen nowhere else. It always makes me think "No one ever told me the US has castles and they're in Kansas."

I've seen wooden rural homes in New Mexico with the flavor of the house in the show and the landscape it's set in. A pathetic wooden house like that wouldn't survive for long in Tornado Alley. That's why the best kept tourism secret in the US is "Kansas has some flavor of American CASTLE. We call them malls and courthouses."

I skimmed this article about the show and listened to part of a video linked within it. I didn't finish listening to it because it goes on some long tangent about skin walkers. 

That's not really something I want to hear by someone taking that seriously in a creepy way. I grew up in a household with a lot of superstitious beliefs and I've spent decades trying to figure out how to relate more constructively to various things and not throw the baby out with the bath water.

So for me that's triggering. I have baggage from a childhood filled with scary stories wrapped up in an assumption that if that's real, you are HELPLESS.

I believe in psychic phenomenon and astrology and aliens and ghosts and that dreams sometimes really do predict the future. But for most people things like that boil down to fear of the unknown and it's not possible to have any kind of reasoned discussion about the topic.

If they are Native and believe in skin walkers, either you agree or you're a racist asshole disrespecting their beliefs. For a lot of Anglos, it's just NONSENSE, full stop, and they do NOT want to hear that maybe it's not just nonsense.

I think it's possible to say "It's probably based on something real, but maybe it's not what people imagine it is." 

My understanding is the vast majority of dreams that successfully predict the future are in symbolic form. Only a tiny percent are like watching a film of the events. 

So most are probably the brain crunching data and spitting back a conclusion. It's predicting the future the same way we predict the weather.

That tiny percentage of dreams that is like watching a film of the events probably are actually psychic phenomenon. But the vast majority aren't and, furthermore, the best use of a prediction of disaster is to use that foreknowledge to try to mitigate the problem rather than feeling "It is FORETOLD, ergo there's NOTHING to do about it!!!!"

Natives of the Pacific Northwest have a legend or story about the land floating in a bowl of water and describes earthquakes as some god pushing it down on one end. If you don't take it too literally, it's an extremely good mental model for how coastal earthquakes cause tsunamis to inundate the land with water afterwards. 

Copilot says:

Thunderbird Mythology: In many Indigenous North American cultures, the Thunderbird is a powerful supernatural being often associated with thunder, lightning, and storms. It’s seen as a protector and a symbol of strength.  

From Wikipedia:

American science historian and folklorist Adrienne Mayor and British historian Tom Holland have both suggested that indigenous thunderbird stories are based on discoveries of pterosaur fossils by Native Americans.

Wow, such contempt by people pretending to be scientific and pretending to take the myths seriously in some fashion and believe the people aren't just dope-smoking ignorant fools making stuff up.

I saw a video once of a small child picked up and carried a few dozen feet by a large bird. Large birds are known to frequently travel on the strong headwinds of storms, in part because those headwinds have adequate lift.

It's extremely hard to judge the size of a bird as it flies. The visual background is the sky and you can't tell if it's big and far, far away or modest sized and closer. 

The ostrich is a flightless bird of Africa that can exceed 9 feet in height. The whooping crane is an endangered flighted bird in North America that can exceed 5 feet in height. 

And a bird doesn't have to be that big to be a real danger to humans. Golden eagles only get to be up to 40 inches tall but can have a wingspan of 7'8", just shy of 8 feet. They are known to hunt and kill deer via surprise attack, in spite of being incapable of lifting a full grown deer.

If there were an uncataloged large bird species of the Americas, Natives probably saw them and it's not unreasonable to think they tended to be seen prior to storms due to traveling on the strong headwinds. I always heard the Thunderbird brought the storm and here is a site titled Thunderbird -- The Stormbringer.

It's not unreasonable to think the storm brought the bird but because the bird arrived ahead of the storm, Natives believed the bird brought the storm. Or even merely knew it arrived ahead of the storm and was a reliable predictor of a storm and something was lost in translation.

In the movie The Thirteenth Warrior, the wyrm (dragon) turns out to be cavalry carrying torches in the fog. For whatever reason, the Vikings know the wyrm only comes during fog.

If they attack poorly armed villages on foggy nights and wipe everyone out, nearby villages see only a fiery wyrm snaking its way through the landscape and a torched village.

In the same movie, the main character is initially freaked out by warriors in costume. He learns "It's a man." and can cope after that. 

If you have enemies, encouraging them to misinterpret something you do as supernatural can be a huge tactical advantage and in nature many species use camouflage of some sort, some -- like chameleons and octopi -- even change color.

I know a skin walker as a monster that shows up in video games. I'm not familiar with the stories from Natives and I'm not up for listening to "ghost stories" so to speak. 

But I wish the modern world would take such stories seriously as evidence of something real instead of feeling like either you have to accept the traditional "boogeyman" explanation whole cloth or you must say they are deluded stupid people in the name of science.