What’s In Your Yeti Collection?
Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 4th, 2008
Henry Stokes is to be congratulated for taking his passion for Yeti, and turning it into an important and significant online archive of Yeti in popular culture.
His site, “I Love the Yeti” definitely deserves your visits, now and then. Of course, being a devotee of the Abominable Snowmen, Snowwomen, and Snowpeople, in general, myself, I love Henry’s love site.
But I am always interested in pulling the curtain aside. So, the other day, I asked Henry to send me a photograph of his own personal collection of Yeti and related kin collectibles.
He did and also posted it at his site. Here it is below: “My Yeti Collection.
Okay, what do you notice? Right, they are all white. The reality appears entirely different.
What kind of Yeti replicas and toys do you have? Show me yours.
Meanwhile, Henry and I are posting two separate but linked blogs about the evolution of Yeti in popular culture.
Stay tuned.
Last night in Belfast, I was interested to hear you talk about the fact that the abominable snow man is often portrayed as white but is, in fact, brownish or redish in color. It is too bad there is yet another highly popularized misconception about a cryptid.
A note on color and culture: in the Yeti episode of Jonny Quest (the original series from the 70s), the bad guys using yeti disguises wore brown fur. The real yeti, who had a brief appearance at the end of the episode, was white.
Added thought: the color confusion in popular culture seems likely related to the mistaken assumption that the yeti lives in the snowfields. If you live in a snowy area all or most of the time, white fur makes sense. If you live in the high forested valleys (which is more likely, since there is food there) and only transit snowy areas, then you are more likely to go with a brownish coat. There are exceptions (e.g., pandas), but most mammals dress to fit their environment.
And, gee, we wouldn’t think the moniker “snowman” had anything to do with this white-yeti stuff, would we…?
Does someone, in their yeti collection, have, say, access to a yeti database? If there’s something like that out there, I’d love to know about it. I think that the evidence I’ve read for an unknown primate in the Himalayan region seems pretty compelling. But I haven’t seen anything like the BFRO or the TBRC have to back that up.