Beast Legends (2010) s01e01 Episode Script
The Kraken
In this episode of Beast Legends: The team investigates a giant see monster said to attack ships.
I've never seen anything like that on any other animal.
A creature with incredible intelligence and strength.
That's what I'm talking about.
A creature fully loaded with weapons.
This thing is going to be the most fierce beast that I think we'll build.
Absolutely insane.
The team must face their fears As they search for the source of the Kraken.
That's absolutely enormous.
Stories of terrifying monsters are told the world over.
Some are myths but others are believed to be real.
Now a team of investigators will track down clues and find evidence for the beast behind the legend.
The quest, to build the creature, bring it to life and unleash on the modern world.
Steve Leonard is in the North Pacific, about to go diving for a giant sea creature that may hold clues to the Kraken.
This has very, very powerful suckers.
That's crazy.
The rest of the team are at the Beast Lab, searching for the origins of the legend.
This thing has to be wicked, something that would just scare the living crap out of you when you see it.
We could do that.
Let's have a look at the legend.
Deep in the dark depths of distant seas, a predator lurks, that strikes fear into the hearts of mariners.
A vast writhing mass of muscle, rising from the waves to tower above their masts, mesmerizing men with its piercing gaze and snapping ships with powerful limbs, dragging sailors and ships to a watery doom, the Kraken.
This story has inspired the team to imagine what this beast might be and bring it to virtual life.
So here's what we know about the Kraken.
So it's this huge, multi-armed creature that could bring down ships.
The first versions that were written down were in the 1500s.
Well, I mean, these are our basic three culprits here: the giant squid, colossal squid and the giant Pacific octopus.
So squid and octopuses are cephalopods.
It's a lineage of animals that's been around for 500 million years, way, way older than the origin of mammals on land.
They're the biggest multi-armed animals in the world's oceans.
Right, well, I think the best thing to do to make this Kraken really wicked is if we take the best of those three and make like a super beast.
I mean this is the Kraken.
It's not a squid and it's not an octopus.
Absolutely.
The giant Pacific octopus is going to be ourest bet.
I mean, Steve's going to have a reasonable chance of finding one of those.
These two, it's going to be virtually impossible.
The best place to find a giant Pacific octopus is off the coast of Vancouver Island, Canada.
My job is to find one, catch it, and get it onboard our boat for a close-up look.
I want to see what features of this octopus could inspire a Kraken.
I've come to Canada to team up with Jim Cosgrove and also Kevin Van Clemput.
These two guys know more than anyone about the giant Pacific octopus.
Jim Cosgrove is a renowned octopus researcher.
He's been tracking and catching them for thirty years.
if you ever found, you know, a 100' Kraken that had the strength that an octopus has, that would just be an absolutely fearsome beast.
Yeah, that's great.
That's just what we need.
Even with the expert help, this will be tough.
Octopuses are notoriously crafty and elusive.
While we're dealing with this octopus, he may attach very firmly to our masks Yeah.
And he may want to remove them.
Okay.
Bear in mind he hasn't got vengeance or killing in mind initially.
No.
"Initially.
" Yeah, okay.
I'm not so keen on icy water, but octopuses love it.
They hang out in dens on the ocean floor, in rocky crevasses like this.
Then they wait for just the right moment to pounce on their prey.
These are incredibly smart predators.
I can see the suckers.
There's definitely one in there.
Where did he go? Okay, found it.
Jim, can you get it? How heavy do you think this one is? I would guess this is probably 20 kilos or better.
But this is nowhere near as big as they get.
Oh, no, no, they get bigger, up into 150 kilos.
150 kilos? Yeah.
Oh, my hat, that is amazing.
Isn't he a beautiful animal? That is spectacular.
Yeah.
We've just got to watch him, because he's Yeah, he will find his way out.
Yeah, he's going to look for an exit and Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look, he's really hanging onto the He's lifting that mat up.
Yeah.
And that's exactly how he would take apart a ship, the same way.
He would grab onto the side of the ship and then pull it apart.
They're just all muscle by the sounds of things, you know? Yeah.
Muscle and a brain.
Come and put your hands on him right now and just feel the flexing of the muscle.
You put your hands where mine are.
Oh, yeah.
And put a little bit of squeeze on him.
Yeah.
And you can feel his muscles flexing in underneath there.
Absolutely, yeah.
And then all these suckers, you know, acting like you say, independently.
Yeah.
Oh, look at the size of them there as well.
Yeah, about 1/3 of the way down the arms you've got the great big suckers, and each one of those suckers can hold about 35 lb.
So he's got power.
Excellent.
He's getting shy.
It's time to get this bad boy back in the ocean.
But the guy is stubborn.
He's clamped his suckers right onto the tank and will not budge.
It wobbles but you can just feel it's like It's like a tree.
Yeah, a tree bends, yeah, but you're not going to pull it up by its roots.
There he goes.
Now he's starting to move.
There we go.
Yeah.
There we go.
He's in.
Yeah, you know, if he didn't decide to let go You're not going to pull him off.
No.
It's not a big stretch for our Kraken to do this to a ship, then? No.
Brilliant.
Just what we need.
Yeah.
We know from the legend that the Kraken is capable of taking down tall ships weighing 200 tons.
So it has to be incredibly strong.
It could definitely use the muscular arms and sucker strength of a giant Pacific.
In fact, the first ever mention of a Kraken, from 18th-century Norway, sounds just like an oversized octopus: a speckled brown animal with a broad head and arms that fluctuate like seaweed.
I think an octopus is a good place to start.
We definitely need something more aggressive.
You know, I think we need something that will make it sharper and more menacing looking.
Spikes.
Spikes, you know.
Lots and lots of spikes.
I mean, spikes are you know, there's nothing like this in the natural world.
You don't need all these spikes.
This looks like something out of a comic book.
The thing is, I really want it to be more dangerous.
Well, we can I mean we can make it more fierce, but, I mean, let's get our inspiration from the natural world.
I mean, there's no reason to make stuff up.
I think they're both right.
The Kraken needs to be fiercer, but the natural world has plenty of that.
Kathryn is headed to France to meet a guy who had a terrifying encounter in 2003 by a Kraken-like beast.
So I'm in Brest, France, in the North Atlantic, which is the right place to be for the Kraken legend, since this is where it all started.
And I'm here to talk to a world-famous sailor named Didier Ragot.
So you've been sailing your whole life? So it was attached to the boat? Not on the hull of the boat but on the rudder.
Attached to the rudder of the boat? That's extraordinary.
What was it? I'm wondering if what you saw would be big enough to pull down a small boat.
Yeah.
Small boat? Yeah.
This eyewitness account of a giant squid is extremely rare.
These beasts are almost never seen alive.
And according to Didier, they might be strong enough to pull over a boat.
Sounds like we need to add some squid features to our Kraken.
That's crazy.
Yeah, I mean, what I like about that is that it went after the boat.
That shows a lot of aggression.
That's what we need in our Kraken.
Our Kraken is about to get one vicious makeover, complete with the gnarliest weapons ever.
We're trying to build a Kraken, the biggest sea monster in history.
So far it's looking a lot like an octopus.
But thanks to a sailing champion's recent encounter, we're about to turn our attention to the squid.
So we basically have no footage of a giant squid actually hunting.
What I can show you is some footage of a Humboldt squid.
These guys are actually very aggressive.
They have attacked divers before.
They're attacking the camera right now, I think.
Yeah.
Oh, that's cool.
And you can see they've got these amazing fins near the back that propel them forward and backward.
Very They're very fast.
So I think we'll have to have the fins in there.
And that will make it more agile, yeah? It's almost like a torpedo, you know? Yeah.
All right, I'm going to add the squid fins, but I'm going to keep the octopus arms just 'cause they look stronger.
Pound for pound, octopus arms are stronger than squid arms.
They have to be.
They're making their living on the ocean floor.
They're hoisting up rocks to make their dens.
Whereas squid only use their arms to catch prey and to put it in their mouth.
All right, guys, now that I've added the fin, here's what it's going to kind of look like in the beast movie.
Awesome.
I like the way you've combined and morphed the squid head with the octopus head, you know? A bit of the smarts and the speed at the same time.
It still doesn't look mean enouououough, though.
I mean, this thing has to be so scary it's going to scare the living crap out of a drunken sailor.
Well, if you want bigger and badder, I know where you need to go: New Zealand.
You and Steve need to get to Wellington.
That's where you'll find the biggest, scariest, baddest colossal squid ever captured.
This colossal squid that Francis and I are going to see was caught by accident in a fisherman's net.
Super sweetness! It's dead now, of course.
But even a dead colossal squid is worth its weight in gold.
No one's ever studied one alive.
So little is known about it, about where they live, what they do, what they eat.
So much of the biology is missing, because they live at tremendous depths for most of the time.
And we only get glimpses of dead ones or bits of ones and things like that.
The Museum of New Zealand has the world's only footage of a colossal squid when it was still alive.
Oh, my God, you see it's actually grabbing hold here.
Look at that! These fishermen caught it in 2007 in the Ross Sea in Antarctic!.
They took this video just before it died.
Oh, my God! That's it.
That's no wonder they call them colossal.
The body is now on display here at the museum.
It's 14' long and weighs an incredible 1,091 lbs.
The guy who studied it most is Steve O'Shea, an authority on all things squid.
This is one seriously evil monster.
It's not down there sipping cups of plankton.
This is only half grown.
This is half grown? This is only half grown, yeah.
And we don't know what the male looks like.
And I reckon this is a female.
I reckon the male is even more aggressive than this.
Nobody's ever seen one of these hunt.
That's my dream.
I know.
I know.
Yeah, I got ideas.
At the base of each one of those tentacles there is a series of suckers and knobs.
So that's these feeding ones here? Those are the feeding ones.
And it's just going to snake those at you like a pair of anacondas.
And then, wham, before you even know it, it's got you.
And then it'll pull you back in.
Squid have killer weapons two long tentacles that lash out and grab prey at lightning-quick speed.
Oh, my goodness.
That's high-speed footage showing a long-finned squid in action.
Because that's the only way you're ever going to actually see it, because it is that fast.
A well choreographed dance of death.
Exactly.
That's right! Definitely, our Kraken will need these feeding tentacles.
Absolutely.
Going to be much more in line with the behavior of this Kraken to have these predatory tentacles.
This is probably the last thing that any prey would see.
Sucked into its underside.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wicked.
All right, so this is what it might look like when I bring it to life.
That's wicked.
How thick is the squid's skin? Because in terms of the legend of the Kraken, it can take down a tall ship and just bring it down.
Now, I know this doesn't make sense realistically.
You're not going to say armor, are you? I'm going to say armor.
You're going to say armor.
Don't say armor.
The thing is No, no, no, no.
Here's the thing, all right? Here's the thing.
Yeah, no.
Should we give it lasers as well? No, but okay, here's the thing, right? I think adding something to the tentacle that will make it more powerful will make a difference between a Kraken and a colossal squid.
What I would say is that we don't need to.
We don't Evolution has come up with a great design for taking down live prey.
Maybe armor is what's throwing you guys.
Think of it like the scales of a snake.
I just want those damn armors, Steve.
You really want armor, don't you? I really want the armor.
I know you want armor but Because, you know I want it to be I want it to be a squid relative, because it looks like a squid, it behaves like a squid, you know, and, therefore, it should be It is a squid relative.
Yes.
With armor.
Right, we may have to arm-wrestle over this.
I kind of like where Francis is going here.
I don't.
I'm going to put armor on him.
I'm going to try it.
I can't believe you're doing this.
Oh, come on.
I like it.
No, that's ridiculous.
I mean, the whole point is that they've got to be pliable, flexible, fast.
No, and you're right, though.
They have to be really stretchy, don't they? Yeah, I mean it's just not going to work.
No, look, let's just leave the armor off.
I mean, maybe we can make it big or fierce in other ways, but let's leave the armor off.
Armour aside, what made the Kraken so terrifying was its incredible size and strength.
As a Norwegian bishop wrote in 1755, the Kraken's arms reached as high as the mast of a mid-sized vessel.
We need to find a tall ship, get out on the water, and figure out how our Kraken would take it down.
Have you ever been on a boat in water doing this? Yeah.
Good.
Yeah? Were you sick? No.
Then I don't think you'll get seasick.
You should be fine.
Easy for him to say.
He can swim.
I can't, not a single stroke.
Deep water? My absolute worst nightmare.
Steve and I are on the north-eastern tip of New Zealand where we found just the thing to help us figure out how our Kraken takes down a boat.
The Soren Larsen, it's about the same size as the tall ships that sailed in Scandinavia back in the 18th century.
A couple hundred years ago, sailors would have lived in boats just like this for months on end.
I have no idea how they did it.
Battling storms, swells, fearing death by tentacle.
I'm so in the wrong place.
Yeah, we'll see.
I can't really swim.
Okay, this will be a big adventure then.
Yeah, it is.
This ship is 300 tons of solid oak.
Our Kraken has to be truly massive to sink it.
Oh, that is awesome.
That's amazing.
They're beautiful, aren't they? That's Kraken prey.
It's too small for them.
That's like a A bite-size appetizer.
There's plenty of prey out there: large fin whales, sperm whales, blue whales.
It could live off whales.
Yeah.
With all those tasty meals out there, why would a Kraken go after a ship, which is basically a bowl of wood? It makes no sense to me.
Okay, guys, the plan is to get under the boat and have a good look at it.
What we need to do is see the Kraken-eye view of its prey, basically, this boat.
You know, it's going to attack it for some reason.
Can you see the bottom of the ocean? Over.
If you look sideways down there, you can't see anything.
You look up; you do get silhouettes.
But it was enough to just get a bit of the silhouette of the boat or not even? You can see a big lump.
But in many ways that's interesting, because you can't tell it's a boat.
Yeah.
I think this is a case of mistaken identity.
Maybe the Kraken thinks this boat is a whale.
If the silhouette looks like a whale, similar to how when sharks are underwater and they see surfers, they think it's a seal, right? So, if a Kraken thinks it's a whale and it eats whale, how huge is this thing? The Kraken could reach to the top of the tallest mast.
That is ridiculously high.
That's pretty high, eh? It's the fact that it moves so much, I think, will be the biggest thing.
One minute you're over the boat; the next minute you're over the sea.
Exactly.
The aspect of falling and drowning and This is like every phobia all rolled into one.
You got my fear of drowning 'cause I can't swim.
Okay.
And then you got my fear of heights.
You've got a fear of heights as well? Yeah.
If I'm going to draw this beast in action, I need to know what it looks like from up there.
Drawing is all about perspective.
So Steve and I have come up with this totally insane plan.
We're going to haul a long roll of fabric to the top of the mast, simulating what a tentacle would look like.
That means I'm going up there.
It's the least perfect weather to do it in.
I'm sure it could get a lot worse but it could be a lot more stable.
The ship's sailing at about 11 miles an hour.
If I fall in, it ain't stopping.
Basically, if I fall, I die.
How's it feeling, Francis? Uh, pretty scary.
Now, you know what to cling onto? Like when you're just climbing up, it feels all right.
But when you think about it within context of where you are, that's when it sort of all comes together, the freakiness of the magnitude of what we're doing.
This is what I'm hooking on to? Yes, yeah, absolutely, yes.
Francis and I are now 55' up, about the sixth floor of an office building.
We still have more than 30' to go.
It's quite a view.
It's nice.
Only just got to get up there now.
Oh, jeez.
This is the scariest thing I've ever done.
Oh.
Man.
I don't know if I can do this.
I'm seven stories up the main mast of the Soren Larsen and still climbing.
If I reach the top, this will likely help me figure out how big and strong our Kraken tentacles have to be.
That's if I don't die first.
Oh,.
This is scary as hell, dude.
I know that you're used to this, but this isn't my bag of tea, you know? No, I know what you're saying.
This This mast looks a lot taer from up here than it does down there, doesn't it? Oh, jeez.
Just stand up.
Slip inside.
Were you in danger of having too much fun at any point? I was in danger of possibly needing new pants.
Unbelievable, I actually made it, pants unsoiled, to 85', as high as we can get.
It's another 13' to the tip of the mast.
Time to raise our cloth tentacle.
Oh, yeah! Oh, that looks great.
Look at that! Oh, I like it! That is great! That is perfect.
Oh, yeah! If that was like Kraken tentacles, it's got to be the scariest thing.
Yeah.
When you get the sense of the scale of a ship from up here, and you think of something engulfing it Now imagine like tentacles of freaking Kraken coming up this high.
That is ridiculous, absolutely insane.
Now I have what I need to draw the Kraken attacking the ship.
I know how long the tentacles are and how strong the body has to be to lift them to the top of the mast.
This thing is going to be the most fierce beast that I think we'll build.
Absolutely insane.
It's sad saying goodbye to the Soren Larsen, but now that we have the tentacles sorted, we need to find dry land and scale up the rest of our beast.
We talked about scale on the ship, so we're going to apply that hopefully on this beach.
Using colossal-squid morphology, I reckon the Kraken's body should be about the same length as the tentacles.
These feeding tentacles, if they're going to reach the top of the mast, that's 100'.
That makes the whole beastie 200'.
Yeah.
Okay? That looks about right.
So that's enormous.
Five, six, seven 200'? Yeah, that sounds pretty big.
Okay, so we're going to have to make this a little Just a little bit bigger.
A lot bigger.
All right.
Oh, my God.
Okay, this is not even 200.
This is maybe halfway.
That's already seriously creepy.
I'm at the head! All right.
Well, let's do the fin.
Let's draw the eyes.
So the arms.
This would be 200' here.
Deeply unnerving? Yeah.
That's impressive, right? That's pretty big.
It wouldn't need to even bite you.
It could just swallow you.
Yeah.
That's absolutely enormous.
Our super-sized cephalopod is a length of five city buses.
Wow.
Look at the size of those suckers.
Any one of them would just engulf your entire body.
All right, so now I've got to make these massive Kraken arms move.
Mm-hmm.
You know, what's interesting, if you look at the word "cephalopod" and break it down, it just means "head" and "foot.
" The "head" part is just about the intelligence.
But the feet or, you know, the arms, as we usually call them, they're just directly attached to the head.
And they can be doing totally different things all at the same time, move independently.
And I think we need that for our Kraken.
That is really coming together.
Nice.
Too nice, I say.
The Kraken should be all bad.
So Steve O'Shea has gotten us into an off-limits research lab.
He swears the weaponry we're about to see will blow our minds.
Steve and I are in a research lab in Wellington, New Zealand, looking for some wicked weapons to add to our Kraken.
This giant squid is the grossest 15' of carcass I've ever seen.
I'm never eating calamari again.
Here we go.
Stuck in there, we've got the beaks.
Now, you're just looking at the tip.
There's a lot more beak.
Oh, that's pretty sharp.
Yeah, a lot more beak hidden in behind there.
That is certainly capable of a degree of protrusion.
But look what you've got here.
Now this is getting a bit meaner, do you think? You like that? Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, that's from a fully mature female, I'd say.
So it's got the serrated ring.
Yeah.
Is that evil enough for you? What about longer? You want bigger and longer.
You want spikier.
Spikier, like teeth.
There we go.
Now a colossal squid, its tentacles take evil to a whole new level.
Look at that.
Yeah, thought you might like that.
That's what I'm talking about.
It feels almost mechanical.
That's very strange.
I've never seen anything like that on any other animal before.
That degree of rotation is amazing.
That's going to stop them snapping off.
Now, if I were to latch that either side of you Now struggle, struggle.
You like that? Ah, it hurts! Ugh! I got like Squid juice.
Squid juice on me.
But we need to make, obviously, versions of these much, much bigger.
Yeah.
Well, you've got to admit: that is a fantastic, fantastic specimen.
And what could be more fantastic than a Kraken-size tentacle hook? I want Mike to see just how scary these hooks need to be.
So we're going to build one to scale.
This is a workshop for making movie special effects, which is cool.
It's exactly what we need.
Hey.
Hey, are you Steve? Hey, guys, yeah.
Hey.
Welcome to my nightmare.
Thank you.
We're making a monster.
What we'd like to physically make today is the weapons it's got.
Yeah.
And what we got a sense of is the size and shape and sort of just how nasty they would look on a full-size animal.
You were saying it would be 15' to 20' in full scale.
It's only 10' in total.
So these bit here, the hooks, were probably going to be yea big.
You know, with like a Okay, that's truly evil.
This is where, like, you find out that I'm your father.
That's a wicked piece of That's just like one out of Probably, you know, 20, 30 each side, you know, in the finished beast.
There you go.
You're done.
Go and practice maiming something.
Look at that.
That is absolutely barm.
I'm sorry, man.
I hope they fit in your van.
You'll hear about this on the news.
See you, guys.
You know what? You go ahead.
Yeah.
There you go.
That looks like it's going to come down on me.
I'm going on this side.
Sorry, but I just have to put my killer hook to the test and see how much damage it can do, something the esteemed novelist Victor Hugo contemplated back in 1866.
The suckers on a Kraken's tentacles, he wrote, were cylindrical, horny and livid.
They could pierce more than an inch of the flesh of their prey.
Let's go.
So what kind of damage could a Kraken hook do to a wood boat? This oak barrel is the perfect stand-in.
Boats are phenomenally strong.
Ah, this is exactly the same construction method.
Nice seams.
Is it thicker than this, even? Oh, way thicker.
Oh, then yeah, yeah.
All right.
Let's compare the damage.
Look, that's the deepest we got.
Yeah, it's It's nothing, is it? So I think the Kraken is going to use the3e hooks to hang on.
Yeah, just to hang on.
And then its sheer weight And then bring it in and then like bear-hug crush it, you know? Okay, bear-hug crush that.
Go for it! Imagine it's really, really strong, right? Jt's made of muscle.
It's made of the same things.
So what I think happens is our Kraken grabs hold of it, and it's the sheer weight that it sinks it.
It can trash all the mast, the rigging, the lines, the wheelhouse, everything, but it's not going to It's not going to damage the hull.
But it's going to drag it under the water.
Yeah.
Grab on with hooks; smother with tentacles.
Use the body weight to drag the ship under.
Picture how disappointed the Kraken would be if there's nothing to eat but a couple of bony sailors.
If the Kraken's anything like a colossal squid, it has to live in really deep water, and it needs plenty of food to sustain itself.
I'm thinking it should live somewhere like the Kaikoura Canyon just off the coast of the South Island.
The canyon is part of a massive trench that stretches nearly 1,000 miles and connects to one of the deepest spots on earth.
It's dark.
It's deep.
It's dangerous.
And right where we're headed.
Francis and I have just reached the Kaikoura Canyon in New Zealand, where we hope to find the Kraken's perfect meal.
These waters are an all-you-can-eat pile-up-the-plate seafood buffet.
These are fur seals but they're like a sea lion.
But the reason they're here in the first place and the reason there's so much kelp and everything else is because this is such a rich sea.
And there's plenty more animal species farther out in the canyon.
The strong currents make it way too dangerous for diving, so the best way to see the sea life, the food our Kraken might eat, is from the air.
All right, here we go.
Let's roll.
Woo.
Less than a mile offshore, the canyon drops down to a whopping 2,600'.
The currents push nutrient-rich water up against the wall, attracting fish, which bring in bigger animals like dolphins.
Oh, wow, look at that.
I mean, this would be like equivalent to a shrimp platter for a Kraken.
At the top of the food chain is the world's largest carnivore, the sperm whale.
Oh, beautiful.
Oh, wow, look at that.
And what it's doing is re-oxygenating.
nutes of doing this, he's going to dive away and be gone for about 45 minutes, average.
But the longest recorded dive out here is 2 hours and 17 minutes.
Two hours and 17 minutes? Yeah.
That's mental.
They're quite capable of diving up to 2,000 m.
high fat, high cal, just what a Kraken needs to get through a day.
He's diving.
There you go.
Watch his tail now, Francis.
There it goes, classic.
Look at that.
That's absolutely gorgeous.
Okay, guys, this is where we're going to make our Kraken live.
We want it to live in deep water with lots of things for it to feed on.
The sperm whale can devour giant and colossal squid.
We knoóthis from the scars on their bodies and the beaks in their stomachs.
But one-on-one against a Kraken, my money is on the Kraken.
Now that we've figured out where our Kraken lives and what it eats, we can put the finishing touches on our beast.
So it's over and out from New Zealand.
We've got a beast movie to watch.
Let's take a peek at this thing.
Oh! That's awesome.
Oh, that is so cool! The key to building this beast? Figuring out how a sea monster could take down a tall ship.
By giving our Kraken the intellect and arms of an octopus, the vicious weaponry and tentacles of a squid, all blown up to gargantuan size, we've got ourselves a beast legend.
I've never seen anything like that on any other animal.
A creature with incredible intelligence and strength.
That's what I'm talking about.
A creature fully loaded with weapons.
This thing is going to be the most fierce beast that I think we'll build.
Absolutely insane.
The team must face their fears As they search for the source of the Kraken.
That's absolutely enormous.
Stories of terrifying monsters are told the world over.
Some are myths but others are believed to be real.
Now a team of investigators will track down clues and find evidence for the beast behind the legend.
The quest, to build the creature, bring it to life and unleash on the modern world.
Steve Leonard is in the North Pacific, about to go diving for a giant sea creature that may hold clues to the Kraken.
This has very, very powerful suckers.
That's crazy.
The rest of the team are at the Beast Lab, searching for the origins of the legend.
This thing has to be wicked, something that would just scare the living crap out of you when you see it.
We could do that.
Let's have a look at the legend.
Deep in the dark depths of distant seas, a predator lurks, that strikes fear into the hearts of mariners.
A vast writhing mass of muscle, rising from the waves to tower above their masts, mesmerizing men with its piercing gaze and snapping ships with powerful limbs, dragging sailors and ships to a watery doom, the Kraken.
This story has inspired the team to imagine what this beast might be and bring it to virtual life.
So here's what we know about the Kraken.
So it's this huge, multi-armed creature that could bring down ships.
The first versions that were written down were in the 1500s.
Well, I mean, these are our basic three culprits here: the giant squid, colossal squid and the giant Pacific octopus.
So squid and octopuses are cephalopods.
It's a lineage of animals that's been around for 500 million years, way, way older than the origin of mammals on land.
They're the biggest multi-armed animals in the world's oceans.
Right, well, I think the best thing to do to make this Kraken really wicked is if we take the best of those three and make like a super beast.
I mean this is the Kraken.
It's not a squid and it's not an octopus.
Absolutely.
The giant Pacific octopus is going to be ourest bet.
I mean, Steve's going to have a reasonable chance of finding one of those.
These two, it's going to be virtually impossible.
The best place to find a giant Pacific octopus is off the coast of Vancouver Island, Canada.
My job is to find one, catch it, and get it onboard our boat for a close-up look.
I want to see what features of this octopus could inspire a Kraken.
I've come to Canada to team up with Jim Cosgrove and also Kevin Van Clemput.
These two guys know more than anyone about the giant Pacific octopus.
Jim Cosgrove is a renowned octopus researcher.
He's been tracking and catching them for thirty years.
if you ever found, you know, a 100' Kraken that had the strength that an octopus has, that would just be an absolutely fearsome beast.
Yeah, that's great.
That's just what we need.
Even with the expert help, this will be tough.
Octopuses are notoriously crafty and elusive.
While we're dealing with this octopus, he may attach very firmly to our masks Yeah.
And he may want to remove them.
Okay.
Bear in mind he hasn't got vengeance or killing in mind initially.
No.
"Initially.
" Yeah, okay.
I'm not so keen on icy water, but octopuses love it.
They hang out in dens on the ocean floor, in rocky crevasses like this.
Then they wait for just the right moment to pounce on their prey.
These are incredibly smart predators.
I can see the suckers.
There's definitely one in there.
Where did he go? Okay, found it.
Jim, can you get it? How heavy do you think this one is? I would guess this is probably 20 kilos or better.
But this is nowhere near as big as they get.
Oh, no, no, they get bigger, up into 150 kilos.
150 kilos? Yeah.
Oh, my hat, that is amazing.
Isn't he a beautiful animal? That is spectacular.
Yeah.
We've just got to watch him, because he's Yeah, he will find his way out.
Yeah, he's going to look for an exit and Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look, he's really hanging onto the He's lifting that mat up.
Yeah.
And that's exactly how he would take apart a ship, the same way.
He would grab onto the side of the ship and then pull it apart.
They're just all muscle by the sounds of things, you know? Yeah.
Muscle and a brain.
Come and put your hands on him right now and just feel the flexing of the muscle.
You put your hands where mine are.
Oh, yeah.
And put a little bit of squeeze on him.
Yeah.
And you can feel his muscles flexing in underneath there.
Absolutely, yeah.
And then all these suckers, you know, acting like you say, independently.
Yeah.
Oh, look at the size of them there as well.
Yeah, about 1/3 of the way down the arms you've got the great big suckers, and each one of those suckers can hold about 35 lb.
So he's got power.
Excellent.
He's getting shy.
It's time to get this bad boy back in the ocean.
But the guy is stubborn.
He's clamped his suckers right onto the tank and will not budge.
It wobbles but you can just feel it's like It's like a tree.
Yeah, a tree bends, yeah, but you're not going to pull it up by its roots.
There he goes.
Now he's starting to move.
There we go.
Yeah.
There we go.
He's in.
Yeah, you know, if he didn't decide to let go You're not going to pull him off.
No.
It's not a big stretch for our Kraken to do this to a ship, then? No.
Brilliant.
Just what we need.
Yeah.
We know from the legend that the Kraken is capable of taking down tall ships weighing 200 tons.
So it has to be incredibly strong.
It could definitely use the muscular arms and sucker strength of a giant Pacific.
In fact, the first ever mention of a Kraken, from 18th-century Norway, sounds just like an oversized octopus: a speckled brown animal with a broad head and arms that fluctuate like seaweed.
I think an octopus is a good place to start.
We definitely need something more aggressive.
You know, I think we need something that will make it sharper and more menacing looking.
Spikes.
Spikes, you know.
Lots and lots of spikes.
I mean, spikes are you know, there's nothing like this in the natural world.
You don't need all these spikes.
This looks like something out of a comic book.
The thing is, I really want it to be more dangerous.
Well, we can I mean we can make it more fierce, but, I mean, let's get our inspiration from the natural world.
I mean, there's no reason to make stuff up.
I think they're both right.
The Kraken needs to be fiercer, but the natural world has plenty of that.
Kathryn is headed to France to meet a guy who had a terrifying encounter in 2003 by a Kraken-like beast.
So I'm in Brest, France, in the North Atlantic, which is the right place to be for the Kraken legend, since this is where it all started.
And I'm here to talk to a world-famous sailor named Didier Ragot.
So you've been sailing your whole life? So it was attached to the boat? Not on the hull of the boat but on the rudder.
Attached to the rudder of the boat? That's extraordinary.
What was it? I'm wondering if what you saw would be big enough to pull down a small boat.
Yeah.
Small boat? Yeah.
This eyewitness account of a giant squid is extremely rare.
These beasts are almost never seen alive.
And according to Didier, they might be strong enough to pull over a boat.
Sounds like we need to add some squid features to our Kraken.
That's crazy.
Yeah, I mean, what I like about that is that it went after the boat.
That shows a lot of aggression.
That's what we need in our Kraken.
Our Kraken is about to get one vicious makeover, complete with the gnarliest weapons ever.
We're trying to build a Kraken, the biggest sea monster in history.
So far it's looking a lot like an octopus.
But thanks to a sailing champion's recent encounter, we're about to turn our attention to the squid.
So we basically have no footage of a giant squid actually hunting.
What I can show you is some footage of a Humboldt squid.
These guys are actually very aggressive.
They have attacked divers before.
They're attacking the camera right now, I think.
Yeah.
Oh, that's cool.
And you can see they've got these amazing fins near the back that propel them forward and backward.
Very They're very fast.
So I think we'll have to have the fins in there.
And that will make it more agile, yeah? It's almost like a torpedo, you know? Yeah.
All right, I'm going to add the squid fins, but I'm going to keep the octopus arms just 'cause they look stronger.
Pound for pound, octopus arms are stronger than squid arms.
They have to be.
They're making their living on the ocean floor.
They're hoisting up rocks to make their dens.
Whereas squid only use their arms to catch prey and to put it in their mouth.
All right, guys, now that I've added the fin, here's what it's going to kind of look like in the beast movie.
Awesome.
I like the way you've combined and morphed the squid head with the octopus head, you know? A bit of the smarts and the speed at the same time.
It still doesn't look mean enouououough, though.
I mean, this thing has to be so scary it's going to scare the living crap out of a drunken sailor.
Well, if you want bigger and badder, I know where you need to go: New Zealand.
You and Steve need to get to Wellington.
That's where you'll find the biggest, scariest, baddest colossal squid ever captured.
This colossal squid that Francis and I are going to see was caught by accident in a fisherman's net.
Super sweetness! It's dead now, of course.
But even a dead colossal squid is worth its weight in gold.
No one's ever studied one alive.
So little is known about it, about where they live, what they do, what they eat.
So much of the biology is missing, because they live at tremendous depths for most of the time.
And we only get glimpses of dead ones or bits of ones and things like that.
The Museum of New Zealand has the world's only footage of a colossal squid when it was still alive.
Oh, my God, you see it's actually grabbing hold here.
Look at that! These fishermen caught it in 2007 in the Ross Sea in Antarctic!.
They took this video just before it died.
Oh, my God! That's it.
That's no wonder they call them colossal.
The body is now on display here at the museum.
It's 14' long and weighs an incredible 1,091 lbs.
The guy who studied it most is Steve O'Shea, an authority on all things squid.
This is one seriously evil monster.
It's not down there sipping cups of plankton.
This is only half grown.
This is half grown? This is only half grown, yeah.
And we don't know what the male looks like.
And I reckon this is a female.
I reckon the male is even more aggressive than this.
Nobody's ever seen one of these hunt.
That's my dream.
I know.
I know.
Yeah, I got ideas.
At the base of each one of those tentacles there is a series of suckers and knobs.
So that's these feeding ones here? Those are the feeding ones.
And it's just going to snake those at you like a pair of anacondas.
And then, wham, before you even know it, it's got you.
And then it'll pull you back in.
Squid have killer weapons two long tentacles that lash out and grab prey at lightning-quick speed.
Oh, my goodness.
That's high-speed footage showing a long-finned squid in action.
Because that's the only way you're ever going to actually see it, because it is that fast.
A well choreographed dance of death.
Exactly.
That's right! Definitely, our Kraken will need these feeding tentacles.
Absolutely.
Going to be much more in line with the behavior of this Kraken to have these predatory tentacles.
This is probably the last thing that any prey would see.
Sucked into its underside.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wicked.
All right, so this is what it might look like when I bring it to life.
That's wicked.
How thick is the squid's skin? Because in terms of the legend of the Kraken, it can take down a tall ship and just bring it down.
Now, I know this doesn't make sense realistically.
You're not going to say armor, are you? I'm going to say armor.
You're going to say armor.
Don't say armor.
The thing is No, no, no, no.
Here's the thing, all right? Here's the thing.
Yeah, no.
Should we give it lasers as well? No, but okay, here's the thing, right? I think adding something to the tentacle that will make it more powerful will make a difference between a Kraken and a colossal squid.
What I would say is that we don't need to.
We don't Evolution has come up with a great design for taking down live prey.
Maybe armor is what's throwing you guys.
Think of it like the scales of a snake.
I just want those damn armors, Steve.
You really want armor, don't you? I really want the armor.
I know you want armor but Because, you know I want it to be I want it to be a squid relative, because it looks like a squid, it behaves like a squid, you know, and, therefore, it should be It is a squid relative.
Yes.
With armor.
Right, we may have to arm-wrestle over this.
I kind of like where Francis is going here.
I don't.
I'm going to put armor on him.
I'm going to try it.
I can't believe you're doing this.
Oh, come on.
I like it.
No, that's ridiculous.
I mean, the whole point is that they've got to be pliable, flexible, fast.
No, and you're right, though.
They have to be really stretchy, don't they? Yeah, I mean it's just not going to work.
No, look, let's just leave the armor off.
I mean, maybe we can make it big or fierce in other ways, but let's leave the armor off.
Armour aside, what made the Kraken so terrifying was its incredible size and strength.
As a Norwegian bishop wrote in 1755, the Kraken's arms reached as high as the mast of a mid-sized vessel.
We need to find a tall ship, get out on the water, and figure out how our Kraken would take it down.
Have you ever been on a boat in water doing this? Yeah.
Good.
Yeah? Were you sick? No.
Then I don't think you'll get seasick.
You should be fine.
Easy for him to say.
He can swim.
I can't, not a single stroke.
Deep water? My absolute worst nightmare.
Steve and I are on the north-eastern tip of New Zealand where we found just the thing to help us figure out how our Kraken takes down a boat.
The Soren Larsen, it's about the same size as the tall ships that sailed in Scandinavia back in the 18th century.
A couple hundred years ago, sailors would have lived in boats just like this for months on end.
I have no idea how they did it.
Battling storms, swells, fearing death by tentacle.
I'm so in the wrong place.
Yeah, we'll see.
I can't really swim.
Okay, this will be a big adventure then.
Yeah, it is.
This ship is 300 tons of solid oak.
Our Kraken has to be truly massive to sink it.
Oh, that is awesome.
That's amazing.
They're beautiful, aren't they? That's Kraken prey.
It's too small for them.
That's like a A bite-size appetizer.
There's plenty of prey out there: large fin whales, sperm whales, blue whales.
It could live off whales.
Yeah.
With all those tasty meals out there, why would a Kraken go after a ship, which is basically a bowl of wood? It makes no sense to me.
Okay, guys, the plan is to get under the boat and have a good look at it.
What we need to do is see the Kraken-eye view of its prey, basically, this boat.
You know, it's going to attack it for some reason.
Can you see the bottom of the ocean? Over.
If you look sideways down there, you can't see anything.
You look up; you do get silhouettes.
But it was enough to just get a bit of the silhouette of the boat or not even? You can see a big lump.
But in many ways that's interesting, because you can't tell it's a boat.
Yeah.
I think this is a case of mistaken identity.
Maybe the Kraken thinks this boat is a whale.
If the silhouette looks like a whale, similar to how when sharks are underwater and they see surfers, they think it's a seal, right? So, if a Kraken thinks it's a whale and it eats whale, how huge is this thing? The Kraken could reach to the top of the tallest mast.
That is ridiculously high.
That's pretty high, eh? It's the fact that it moves so much, I think, will be the biggest thing.
One minute you're over the boat; the next minute you're over the sea.
Exactly.
The aspect of falling and drowning and This is like every phobia all rolled into one.
You got my fear of drowning 'cause I can't swim.
Okay.
And then you got my fear of heights.
You've got a fear of heights as well? Yeah.
If I'm going to draw this beast in action, I need to know what it looks like from up there.
Drawing is all about perspective.
So Steve and I have come up with this totally insane plan.
We're going to haul a long roll of fabric to the top of the mast, simulating what a tentacle would look like.
That means I'm going up there.
It's the least perfect weather to do it in.
I'm sure it could get a lot worse but it could be a lot more stable.
The ship's sailing at about 11 miles an hour.
If I fall in, it ain't stopping.
Basically, if I fall, I die.
How's it feeling, Francis? Uh, pretty scary.
Now, you know what to cling onto? Like when you're just climbing up, it feels all right.
But when you think about it within context of where you are, that's when it sort of all comes together, the freakiness of the magnitude of what we're doing.
This is what I'm hooking on to? Yes, yeah, absolutely, yes.
Francis and I are now 55' up, about the sixth floor of an office building.
We still have more than 30' to go.
It's quite a view.
It's nice.
Only just got to get up there now.
Oh, jeez.
This is the scariest thing I've ever done.
Oh.
Man.
I don't know if I can do this.
I'm seven stories up the main mast of the Soren Larsen and still climbing.
If I reach the top, this will likely help me figure out how big and strong our Kraken tentacles have to be.
That's if I don't die first.
Oh,.
This is scary as hell, dude.
I know that you're used to this, but this isn't my bag of tea, you know? No, I know what you're saying.
This This mast looks a lot taer from up here than it does down there, doesn't it? Oh, jeez.
Just stand up.
Slip inside.
Were you in danger of having too much fun at any point? I was in danger of possibly needing new pants.
Unbelievable, I actually made it, pants unsoiled, to 85', as high as we can get.
It's another 13' to the tip of the mast.
Time to raise our cloth tentacle.
Oh, yeah! Oh, that looks great.
Look at that! Oh, I like it! That is great! That is perfect.
Oh, yeah! If that was like Kraken tentacles, it's got to be the scariest thing.
Yeah.
When you get the sense of the scale of a ship from up here, and you think of something engulfing it Now imagine like tentacles of freaking Kraken coming up this high.
That is ridiculous, absolutely insane.
Now I have what I need to draw the Kraken attacking the ship.
I know how long the tentacles are and how strong the body has to be to lift them to the top of the mast.
This thing is going to be the most fierce beast that I think we'll build.
Absolutely insane.
It's sad saying goodbye to the Soren Larsen, but now that we have the tentacles sorted, we need to find dry land and scale up the rest of our beast.
We talked about scale on the ship, so we're going to apply that hopefully on this beach.
Using colossal-squid morphology, I reckon the Kraken's body should be about the same length as the tentacles.
These feeding tentacles, if they're going to reach the top of the mast, that's 100'.
That makes the whole beastie 200'.
Yeah.
Okay? That looks about right.
So that's enormous.
Five, six, seven 200'? Yeah, that sounds pretty big.
Okay, so we're going to have to make this a little Just a little bit bigger.
A lot bigger.
All right.
Oh, my God.
Okay, this is not even 200.
This is maybe halfway.
That's already seriously creepy.
I'm at the head! All right.
Well, let's do the fin.
Let's draw the eyes.
So the arms.
This would be 200' here.
Deeply unnerving? Yeah.
That's impressive, right? That's pretty big.
It wouldn't need to even bite you.
It could just swallow you.
Yeah.
That's absolutely enormous.
Our super-sized cephalopod is a length of five city buses.
Wow.
Look at the size of those suckers.
Any one of them would just engulf your entire body.
All right, so now I've got to make these massive Kraken arms move.
Mm-hmm.
You know, what's interesting, if you look at the word "cephalopod" and break it down, it just means "head" and "foot.
" The "head" part is just about the intelligence.
But the feet or, you know, the arms, as we usually call them, they're just directly attached to the head.
And they can be doing totally different things all at the same time, move independently.
And I think we need that for our Kraken.
That is really coming together.
Nice.
Too nice, I say.
The Kraken should be all bad.
So Steve O'Shea has gotten us into an off-limits research lab.
He swears the weaponry we're about to see will blow our minds.
Steve and I are in a research lab in Wellington, New Zealand, looking for some wicked weapons to add to our Kraken.
This giant squid is the grossest 15' of carcass I've ever seen.
I'm never eating calamari again.
Here we go.
Stuck in there, we've got the beaks.
Now, you're just looking at the tip.
There's a lot more beak.
Oh, that's pretty sharp.
Yeah, a lot more beak hidden in behind there.
That is certainly capable of a degree of protrusion.
But look what you've got here.
Now this is getting a bit meaner, do you think? You like that? Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, that's from a fully mature female, I'd say.
So it's got the serrated ring.
Yeah.
Is that evil enough for you? What about longer? You want bigger and longer.
You want spikier.
Spikier, like teeth.
There we go.
Now a colossal squid, its tentacles take evil to a whole new level.
Look at that.
Yeah, thought you might like that.
That's what I'm talking about.
It feels almost mechanical.
That's very strange.
I've never seen anything like that on any other animal before.
That degree of rotation is amazing.
That's going to stop them snapping off.
Now, if I were to latch that either side of you Now struggle, struggle.
You like that? Ah, it hurts! Ugh! I got like Squid juice.
Squid juice on me.
But we need to make, obviously, versions of these much, much bigger.
Yeah.
Well, you've got to admit: that is a fantastic, fantastic specimen.
And what could be more fantastic than a Kraken-size tentacle hook? I want Mike to see just how scary these hooks need to be.
So we're going to build one to scale.
This is a workshop for making movie special effects, which is cool.
It's exactly what we need.
Hey.
Hey, are you Steve? Hey, guys, yeah.
Hey.
Welcome to my nightmare.
Thank you.
We're making a monster.
What we'd like to physically make today is the weapons it's got.
Yeah.
And what we got a sense of is the size and shape and sort of just how nasty they would look on a full-size animal.
You were saying it would be 15' to 20' in full scale.
It's only 10' in total.
So these bit here, the hooks, were probably going to be yea big.
You know, with like a Okay, that's truly evil.
This is where, like, you find out that I'm your father.
That's a wicked piece of That's just like one out of Probably, you know, 20, 30 each side, you know, in the finished beast.
There you go.
You're done.
Go and practice maiming something.
Look at that.
That is absolutely barm.
I'm sorry, man.
I hope they fit in your van.
You'll hear about this on the news.
See you, guys.
You know what? You go ahead.
Yeah.
There you go.
That looks like it's going to come down on me.
I'm going on this side.
Sorry, but I just have to put my killer hook to the test and see how much damage it can do, something the esteemed novelist Victor Hugo contemplated back in 1866.
The suckers on a Kraken's tentacles, he wrote, were cylindrical, horny and livid.
They could pierce more than an inch of the flesh of their prey.
Let's go.
So what kind of damage could a Kraken hook do to a wood boat? This oak barrel is the perfect stand-in.
Boats are phenomenally strong.
Ah, this is exactly the same construction method.
Nice seams.
Is it thicker than this, even? Oh, way thicker.
Oh, then yeah, yeah.
All right.
Let's compare the damage.
Look, that's the deepest we got.
Yeah, it's It's nothing, is it? So I think the Kraken is going to use the3e hooks to hang on.
Yeah, just to hang on.
And then its sheer weight And then bring it in and then like bear-hug crush it, you know? Okay, bear-hug crush that.
Go for it! Imagine it's really, really strong, right? Jt's made of muscle.
It's made of the same things.
So what I think happens is our Kraken grabs hold of it, and it's the sheer weight that it sinks it.
It can trash all the mast, the rigging, the lines, the wheelhouse, everything, but it's not going to It's not going to damage the hull.
But it's going to drag it under the water.
Yeah.
Grab on with hooks; smother with tentacles.
Use the body weight to drag the ship under.
Picture how disappointed the Kraken would be if there's nothing to eat but a couple of bony sailors.
If the Kraken's anything like a colossal squid, it has to live in really deep water, and it needs plenty of food to sustain itself.
I'm thinking it should live somewhere like the Kaikoura Canyon just off the coast of the South Island.
The canyon is part of a massive trench that stretches nearly 1,000 miles and connects to one of the deepest spots on earth.
It's dark.
It's deep.
It's dangerous.
And right where we're headed.
Francis and I have just reached the Kaikoura Canyon in New Zealand, where we hope to find the Kraken's perfect meal.
These waters are an all-you-can-eat pile-up-the-plate seafood buffet.
These are fur seals but they're like a sea lion.
But the reason they're here in the first place and the reason there's so much kelp and everything else is because this is such a rich sea.
And there's plenty more animal species farther out in the canyon.
The strong currents make it way too dangerous for diving, so the best way to see the sea life, the food our Kraken might eat, is from the air.
All right, here we go.
Let's roll.
Woo.
Less than a mile offshore, the canyon drops down to a whopping 2,600'.
The currents push nutrient-rich water up against the wall, attracting fish, which bring in bigger animals like dolphins.
Oh, wow, look at that.
I mean, this would be like equivalent to a shrimp platter for a Kraken.
At the top of the food chain is the world's largest carnivore, the sperm whale.
Oh, beautiful.
Oh, wow, look at that.
And what it's doing is re-oxygenating.
nutes of doing this, he's going to dive away and be gone for about 45 minutes, average.
But the longest recorded dive out here is 2 hours and 17 minutes.
Two hours and 17 minutes? Yeah.
That's mental.
They're quite capable of diving up to 2,000 m.
high fat, high cal, just what a Kraken needs to get through a day.
He's diving.
There you go.
Watch his tail now, Francis.
There it goes, classic.
Look at that.
That's absolutely gorgeous.
Okay, guys, this is where we're going to make our Kraken live.
We want it to live in deep water with lots of things for it to feed on.
The sperm whale can devour giant and colossal squid.
We knoóthis from the scars on their bodies and the beaks in their stomachs.
But one-on-one against a Kraken, my money is on the Kraken.
Now that we've figured out where our Kraken lives and what it eats, we can put the finishing touches on our beast.
So it's over and out from New Zealand.
We've got a beast movie to watch.
Let's take a peek at this thing.
Oh! That's awesome.
Oh, that is so cool! The key to building this beast? Figuring out how a sea monster could take down a tall ship.
By giving our Kraken the intellect and arms of an octopus, the vicious weaponry and tentacles of a squid, all blown up to gargantuan size, we've got ourselves a beast legend.