Just watched the end of the 1981 Clash of the Titans, a simple story of boy meets girl, girl’s mother commits blasphemy, one god tries to take her revenge, other god works to spike that revenge, giant sea monster (with navel) is destroyed, boy gets girl. Flying horse, mechanical owl, Mt Olympus, yada yada yada. In several shots of the Kraken, supposed to be the instrument of revenge, we see what is unmistakably a humanoid torso with a navel. (Also at one point the girl who is supposed to be the Kraken’s tasty treat appears to look down in horror, as if she has seen what sits beneath that navel. We can only imagine.)
This little detail led me into byways of speculation that interfered with my attention to the movie (it didn’t take much interference, really). Was this character design given much thought, or just thrown together by some 2nd-assistant art director?
Movies are full of oddities of this sort, I’m hoping in this thread to read about the tiniest, most trivial ones you can think of. Please oblige me with any that you know about.
Well, it was designed by special effects legend Ray Harryhausen, so, probably not that.
In story, why shouldn’t the kraken have a belly button? Greek monsters in general tend to be born, not made, and tend to follow the, “Conglomeration of animal parts,” school of monster design. Take, for example, the minotaur, which was born after a woman fucked a divine bull. Presumably, somewhere in the past history of Clash of the Titans’s Greece, there was also a divine octopus.
In terms of movie making, the real over sight here is that nobody making the film seems to have noticed that the kraken isn’t from Greek myth. It’s originally Scandinavian.
In the actual myth, the monster that tries to eat Andromeda and is killed by Perseus is Cetus, sometimes called “Ethiopian Cetus”, so as not to be confused with Trojan Cetus, who’s killed by Hercules, obviously in Troy.
So you are postulating that a female humanoid gave birth at some point to the Kraken after mating with a sea monster? How very Japanese. To me that just seems like a retcon to account for the otherwise unaccountable appearance of the Kraken in this movie.
The Kraken in the 2010 movie looks much more like the Scandinavian legend, I wonder if that was research or just monster-creation coincidence?
Except the myth had nothing to do with Scandinavian legend so that’s no more correct.
The monster in question was the offspring of the deities Phorcys and Ceto (who also happened to be siblings). Ceto was a regular looking goddess type in most accounts but Phorcys had a monstrous lower half with serpentine, fish and crustacean attributes. Their pairing created a host of horrific children including the gorgons and Echidna, a snake-legged woman who herself went on the become mother of famous critters such as Cerberus, the chimera and the hydra.
Anyway, if we’re honestly worried about whether or not the Kraken (really Ketos/Cetus but he’s not the first actor to get name-changed by Hollywood) as depicted in Clash of the titans could have a navel, sure why not since he was born of a human-shaped goddess.
Also, we need not speculate on what he looked like under the navel as there was a rockin’ toy made of him in the 80’s which did battle with my Godzilla, Rodan (with 3’ wing span!) and that Shogun robot dude with the rocket nipples.
The occurrence of a navel is always a problem in a variety of fantasy models. Some possibilities are:
1). As was stated, monster was born from some sort of placental mammal.
2). Monster was nurtured inside Gaia, or Nyx or maybe even Hera, or Zeus’s inner thigh, or his own forehead. Or some non-anthropomorphic divine source. If the monster is growing gradually, and nurtured during development, then it needs some connection. That the nurturer isn’t a placental mammal is kinda secondary. At least for legends formed by poorly informed males.
3). Monster needs a navel to appear “normal” either in the art form, or perhaps even in the myth. Aphrodite, born from sea foam, in ancient Greek sculpture is definitely depicted nude or semi nude with a navel. I don’t know if Athena is ever depicted semi nude in ancient Greek art, but she certainly is depicted with a feminine form. Even though she sprang fully armed from Zeus’s head. Endless debate surrounds whether Adam and Eve had navels: how could they, were they grown from somewhere else? How could they not, and have proper shape for recognition of their procreated offspring. Maybe God created them with navels just because it would eventually look right. Maybe we need them in art forms to look correct at first glance.
4). No citation, but I believe some egg born animals have a dimple or “something” where the yolk sack attached. It can be visible, from time to time, in chicks. So that can be the source of ubiquitous navels, in reptiloid or maybe even, Barsoom specimens.
