[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: And today on the podcast ...

ROBERT: We're gonna talk about ...

JAD: Containers!

ROBERT: Well, no.

JAD: Yeah. Why not?

ROBERT: Well, because it's bigger than containers. It's categories.

JAD: Ugh!

ROBERT: Because ...

JAD: That's a boring way—that's a boring word for 'containers.'

ROBERT: No, it's not at all boring.

JAD: Taxonomy. Can we say that?

ROBERT: Yes, you could—yes.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: This is a story about what goes where and what doesn't go there and what should go there if you were only smarter about it.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Ike Sriskandarajah, are you around?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah, that's what I want to talk about.

ROBERT: All right, so you have a story to tell us, right?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you tell us your story.

JAD: Yeah, set it up for us, Ike.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, let's start back in 1993.

ROBERT: Okay.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: With two customs attorneys.

SHERRY SINGER: I'm Sherry Singer.

INDI SINGH: My name is Indi Singh.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Singer and Singh.

JAD: Singer and Singh!

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And one day, the two of them are looking at this customs book called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule.

JAD: What was it called again? The Harmon what?

INDI SINGH: Harmonized Tariff Schedule.

SHERRY SINGER: Harmonized Tariff Schedule.

JAD: Harmonized Tariff Schedule. You almost harmonized at the Harmonized Tariff thing.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: It's this huge book chock full of customs classifications.

INDI SINGH: Meat products, milk products, vegetables.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: It's got everything in it.

SHERRY SINGER: Literally thousands of provisions.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: So they're flipping through this big book. And what they noticed that day is that in this book were the following words:

SHERRY SINGER: "Representing only human beings."

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: They saw this fateful phrase right next to the word 'doll.'

INDI SINGH: Under the Harmonized, a doll was something that represented only a human being.

JAD: A doll represented a human being.

INDI SINGH: Only a human.

JAD: Only a human being.

INDI SINGH: Yeah. It could not be any other creature but a human being.

JAD: So Barbie is a doll.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Right, but here's the thing. In this big book, right next to dolls is this whole other category called 'Toys.'

SHERRY SINGER: Toys.

JAD: Toys.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Which covers ...

INDI SINGH: Things like monsters, robots, angels ...

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Basically anything that isn't only representing a human.

JAD: So the dolls are human and the toys are not human.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah. And where it gets weird is that these two categories were being taxed differently.

ROBERT: How? How differently?

SHERRY SINGER: Twelve percent for dolls and 6.8 percent for toys.

JAD: Really? So getting a Barbie doll into the country would be more expensive than, like, importing a Transformer or something?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah.

JAD: Why?

SHERRY SINGER: I assume it was because there was a domestic industry.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: A domestic doll industry.

SHERRY SINGER: That wanted and needed protection.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Do you think there was a powerful doll lobby?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Anyhow, you got these two categories, you got these two ladies. And they have a client called Marvel Comics.

ROBERT: Marvel Comics. This is the home of men with capes.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And superpowers.

JAD: Yes!

ROBERT: And beautiful boots.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Tights.

ROBERT: Marvel, yes.

JAD: What about Marvel?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, Marvel Comics has this universe of action figures ...

JAD: Yeah!

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Coming into our ports as dolls.

JAD: Wait. All their action figures are being classified as dolls?

SHERRY SINGER: Everything was a doll!

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah.

INDI SINGH: At 12 percent rate of duty.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And Sherry and Indi realized that there's a huge opportunity here. If they can convince the government to remove the Marvel Action Heroes from the human-y barbie doll category and push them into the robot, demon-y toy category, they could save a huge amount of money.

INDI SINGH: We saw dollars.

ROBERT: Tens of thousands, of maybe hundreds of dollars.

JAD: Well, though, how much?

ROBERT: Thousands of dollars!

INDI SINGH: [laughs]

JAD: Jeez.

ROBERT: Fifty, a million dollars?

SHERRY SINGER: and then some.

ROBERT: More than a million dollars?

JAD: Because they wouldn't be taxed as high.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: This about more than business. This is about more than Saturday morning cartoons. This is about what it means to be a human.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: What. What do you mean?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, think about it. They have to convince government officials that under US law, these characters are not considered human.

ROBERT: Ooh. Dastardly, really.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: So Sherry and Indi headed to customs.

SHERRY SINGER: Customs Headquarters.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: In DC, with a giant bag full of superheroes.

SHERRY SINGER: We actually went down there. We had a meeting, we brought samples of all of the items and ...

JAD: Of action figures, you mean?

SHERRY SINGER: We had 60 or 80 figures.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And one by one ...

SHERRY SINGER: We tried to convince them that these figures ...

INDI SINGH: ... do not represent a human being.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And believe it or not, this meeting ended up in a series of court cases that went on for 10 years.

JAD: Ten years?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Because where it got really complicated and interesting is when they got to Marvel's crown jewel: The X-Men.

INDI SINGH: We didn't even really read the stories. Sherry and I were not familiar with comic books.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Well, they should have, because it's a great story. I mean, the story of X-Men is kinda about the next phase of human evolution. Regular parents having regular kids but some of these kids, around their awkward teen years, start to develop these strange mutant powers.

JAD: So the story is humans who mutate.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah, Well, that's what makes this so legally tricky. I mean, are these characters still human or have they evolved somehow out of humanness, into something entirely different?

ROBERT: Now the government says that all of the imported action figures, they are representations of human beings if they have things like a head ...

INDI SINGH: Right.

ROBERT: ... a mouth, eyes, nose, hair, arms, torso, breasts, muscles. If you look at any of these guys, Cyclops, he has all the basic elements that are the government's definition of a human being. And what do you say?

SHERRY SINGER: Well ...

INDI SINGH: Um.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Eventually, to make their point, Sherry and Indi pulled out a blue furry guy that X-Men fans might know as Beast.

SHERRY SINGER: We can look at Beast.

ROBERT: This is Beast.

SHERRY SINGER: This is one that we won early on.

JAD: Well, he's called Beast.

SHERRY SINGER: Even customs agreed ...

INDI SINGH: But he has a head, he has a head, he has two arms, he has two legs ...

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: He does have those.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: He wears glasses.

INDI SINGH: ...In response to Robert's comment.

JAD: But, you know, Beast, in the X-Men story line, he's a pretty like sophisticated guy. He's a thoughtful intellectual, am I right, Ike?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Yeah, he'd be the first X-Men to quote Shakespeare to you.

ROBERT: He wears glasses!

JAD: He quoted Shakespeare!

ROBERT: He quotes Shakespeare!

JAD: He quotes Shakespeare!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And men in England now-a-bed shall will count their manhoods cheap!]

ROBERT: So don't you think that would puts him somewhere down the human sort of bell curve?

INDI SINGH: Well, in this case, our argument would be, human beings do not have blue skin.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: the judge agreed.

INDI SINGH: And it doesn't resemble a human being!

SHERRY SINGER: And they don't have horns ...

JAD: That's a pretty safe argument.

ROBERT: There are people— there are human beings of blueish skin, you should know.

JOE LIEBMAN: Beast is harder to fit into the mold of what we customarily know as human.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: That's Joe Liebman, he worked on the case for the government side.

JOE LIEBMAN: He has aspects that perhaps are closer to the monster.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: But it gets trickier. Take the most popular X-Man.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Who's that?]

ROBERT: Wolverine!

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Wolverine!

JOE LIEBMAN: He's got muscular arms and legs.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: He puts on a coat and a flannel shirt and he's a logger.

JOE LIEBMAN: Sure.

INDI SINGH: But the eyes, they just didn't look human. And that's what our basic argument ...

SHERRY SINGER: And the claws also.

INDI SINGH: And the claws.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Metal claws.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN: Razor-like, adamantium claws.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And in the story, a mad scientist implanted them in his arms under his skin.

SHERRY SINGER: Right.

JAD: But that just means he's a guy who had a little augmentation.

SHERRY SINGER: No.

JOE LIEBMAN: Well, he's developed something we don't know to actually exist. That does not mean ...

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: ... that it might not exist in future humans.

JOE LIEBMAN: In a world that we have not yet seen.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Joe's basic point is, "Don't rule it out." He pointed to this runner, Oscar Pistorius.

[NEWS CLIP: They call him the Blade Runner. The world's fastest man on no legs.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: The double amputee runner from South Africa who wears prosthetic legs that some people claim actually increase his speed.

[NEWS CLIP: Saying his prosthetic legs had more spring than human legs.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And some people say he should be disqualified from competing against able-bodied humans.

[NEWS CLIP: The body that governs track and field banned him from competition.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: But forget about augmentation. What if we're just talking mutation? I mean, as a human, we have about 20,000 genes.

ROBERT: And if one of them just gives you claws, that doesn't mean that the other 19,999 genes aren't keeping you pretty much in the human classification.

INDI SINGH: I studied—my undergraduate degree is in microbiology and biochemistry.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: Huh.

INDI SINGH: So I know we have mutations going on in our body constantly.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Constantly.

JAD: So we're all mutants.

INDI SINGH: But in common language and in science fiction, when you use the word 'mutant' ...

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: She says you mean something or someone that's ...

INDI SINGH: Disfigured ...

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Alien. That's no longer like us. So colloquially, if Marvel calls the X-Men "mutants", then ...

INDI SINGH: They are not human.

ROBERT: On the Wolverine case, did you win or lose?

INDI SINGH: We won.

SHERRY SINGER: We won.

JAD: It's all—how do you feel about this, Ike?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: I—I don't know. I'm kind of seeing red.

JAD: [laughs]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: No, but seriously! Here's the thing: in the X-Men universe, all the X-Men are trying to do is fit into our world.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: I don't want to hurt you, Eric. I never did.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: To feel like a human being.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: It's the truth.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Marvel Comics has created this world where mutants want to be treated like humans and the government is persecuting them as monsters. But in the real world, it's exactly the opposite. You got Marvel saying, "They're monsters." And you've got the government saying, "No, let them be human!"

BRIAN SINGER: In the X-Men universe, humans are very often out to get the mutants. They're dismissive of the mutants, fearful of the mutants, liquidating them, experimenting on them.

ROBERT: First of all, tell us who you are.

BRIAN SINGER: I am Brian Singer. I'm a filmmaker.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Brian directed a bunch of the X-Men movies.

BRIAN SINGER: X-Men 1, X-Men 2, X-Men United.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And he says all the movies, at their heart, are parables about living in a world where you don't fit, where you're not the right category. In fact, the first X-Men he directed, US government fears mutants so much that this US senator puts forth legislation called the "Mutant Registration Act."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Mutants are very real. And they are among us. We must know who they are and above all, we must know what they can do.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: That Us-Them conflict is key to the entire saga.

BRIAN SINGER: Well, yeah. And it's no coincidence that it was born during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

ROBERT: Oh so this is like—so this is modeled then on the Civil—on a moment in world history where people were trying to figure out how to either get along or not get along.

BRIAN SINGER: Yeah, absolutely.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And this tension plays out within the mutants themselves, where you have two groups. The X-Men ...

BRIAN SINGER: Who chose to take the stance to defend a world that hates and fears them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Don't give up on them, Eric.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And then you've got this other group of mutants led by Magneto.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN MOVIE: What would you have me do, Charles?]

BRIAN SINGER: And he doesn't have faith that humanity's every gonna embrace mutants.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN MOVIE: We are the future, Charles, not them. They'll no longer matter.]

BRIAN SINGER: He saw that what happens when you're different is that you get rounded up ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-MEN MOVIE: Experimented on, eliminated.]

BRIAN SINGER: And you're gassed.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: It's interesting to hear you describe that, because when I walked out of the most recent movie, I felt such a strong, maybe a stronger connection to Magneto after you saw what he went through.

BRIAN SINGER: Yeah, you see the imminent victimization of him, and you root for him because he's ultimately facing a monster.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: And when he was making these movies, he had that monster of intolerance and prejudice on his mind and it was actually pretty personal to him.

BRIAN SINGER: There's a photo album my family has and it starts in the '20s. And I was looking through it and I recognized the lineage and then there were a few pages of just these portraits of different people, I didn't know who they were. And I said to my dad, "Who are these people?" And my dad goes, "They're all gone. They're the ones that are gone from Poland. They're just all gone. They're erased. There's no records, there's no property, there's no nothing."

ROBERT: So he doesn't even know their names?

BRIAN SINGER: No, we just know that they were people that were part of the neighborhood and the family in the '30s that never left Poland like my grandparents did and disappeared.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: I know this sounds pretty heavy for a comic book, but over the years, the X-Men have been a stand-in for, well, first the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s, and most recent, the story works as an allegory for gay rights.

BRIAN SINGER: In fact, in X-Men 2, we actually had a coming-out scene.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: In the scene, this kid Bobby Drake, he's hiding some of the X-Men in his parents' house.

BRIAN SINGER: And then his parents come home and find him with these strangers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Aren't you supposed to be at school?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Bobby, who is this guy?]

BRIAN SINGER: And he is forced, basically, to show his parents that he's a mutant.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: There's something I need to tell you.]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Everyone takes a seat in the living room and Bobby, using his special mutant powers ...

BRIAN SINGER: He freezes a little cup of coffee.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: [coffee cup freezing]]

BRIAN SINGER: And the parents react in panic.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Bobby ...]

BRIAN SINGER: And the mother says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, X-Men: Have you tried not being a mutant?]

ROBERT: Really?

BRIAN SINGER: Like it's a choice.

JAD: Mmm, it is ...

ROBERT: We have to get to—we have to find like what the ultimate legal disposition of this case was.

JAD: Yeah, so did they— did they in the end say these characters were human? Or did they perpetuate this retail bigotry, I can say that they were non-humans?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: You guys really want to know?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: We have to know, we have to finish the story.

JAD: Yeah come on, yeah exactly, tell us.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Non-humans.

JAD: Aw! Seriously?

ROBERT: Really?

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: Eventually, the judge ruled that all Marvel heroes, not just the X-Men, are not human.

JAD: Hmm, so Sherry and Indi won.

SHERRY SINGER: We're not civil rights attorneys ...

INDI SINGH: [laughs]

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: So when you're having your nice meal after the case ends, you don't feel at all that you've just robbed humanity from a whole population?

JAD: [laughs]

SHERRY SINGER: [laughs] No we had absolutely no guilt at all, like none.

JAD: Wow. Well, thank you Ike.

IKE SRISKANDARAJAH: You're welcome, Jad.

ROBERT: That would be Ike Sriskandarajah, our reporter on this story. We also had a fine producer.

JAD: Matthew Kielty, who has just left us for greener pastures. Thank you, Matt.

ROBERT: I am Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And I am Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And thanks for listening, whatever you might be.

JAD: [laughs]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Mary from Douglas, Wyoming. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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