I’m going to tell you about one of the ancient mysteries of my life, one that’s been haunting and vexing me since I was very young, and is still unsolved. In 2019 I started telling far more of my friends about this than I used to, even though the mystery started in a year much closer to 2001. The mystery was the identity and origin of a giant mythological creature that can devastate villages, and probably cities. I must say, this thing doesn’t really make me feel afraid when I think about it, but the nature of the creature from a fictional standpoint is pretty terrifying, and it’s unnerving that it’s a mystery that’s been following me in the ways it does for so long.
My earliest memory of this so-called creature was of a coloured cartoon I was witnessing – which at this point could have been a broadcast on TV or a short dream, I do not know – in which it towers with its black and red stripes above a pre-colonial Maori settlement near the sea, likely in New Zealand, laying waste to the indigenous buildings around it. I believe some cartoony Maori folk came ashore on a traditional waka and noticed this monster, discussing quite direly what plans they should put into action.
Now, if you live in New Zealand like me and know about the culture, you will probably be very quick to say “Oh! It’s a Taniwha! Problem solved!” Instead of asking you to take an exercise in thinking critically, I will skip ahead and just outright explain why this simply does not bring us any closer to solving the mystery.
Taniwha are a vague idea, and do not look the same as the beast I’m describing in an web-based “Taniwha” image search even after thousands of pixels worth of scrolling down, even though the specific design of what a Taniwha looks like changes from image result to image result. I’ve always seen Taniwha as an aquatic sort of beast, with fish-like features, and they’ve always been viewed as a pretty terrifying monster, I think, but no amount of people comparing them to what’s been haunting me has ever made a difference.
The earliest memory was good enough to give me a strong description of the creature. It was like a humanoid giant with harsh red and black stripes all over, with a round but tall tiki face for a face – which was also striped the same way. The face had intimidatingly wide eyes that were probably all whiteness and pupils, without irises, and the expression was that of a violent scowl. Its arms and legs were like that of a human, only much more cylindrical, and I don’t remember what sort of hands or feet it had.
The memory didn’t go on much longer, and I never saw how the creature was taken down or how the arc was resolved. It was in fact extremely short. This is one of the reasons I think it’s likely that it was a dream, not an actual episode of something I saw on TV. I have no adjacent situational memories telling me I was in a room with other stuff happening to link it to a real situation, and the viewport of the memory was just like my other dreams about cartoons and videogames – there is no screen in front of you bordered by a monitor sitting in front of you in your reality: the screen IS the reality. This aspect of my dreams is probably one of the reasons why it was so damn scary when I was having that Monsters Inc: Scare Island dream and my player character Sullivan got hit by a car in a dead-end of an alleyway.
The other primary memory is one that clearly scared me more, as I can still remember the kind of fear I felt, though I was not in any real danger. This one was almost certainly real life, and it wasn’t a memory of watching a TV cartoon.
I was at a house owned by somebody who I think was a friend of my mother’s, and I was probably younger than five years. I was in some wooden room after probably toddling off away from the rest of the human beings, the ones who were actually adults, and then I looked up at the wall.
Oh god, this part was fucked up. There was some kind of large, black and yellow mask hanging on the wall, with a face that looked almost exactly like a live-action version of the face of you know what. This thing fucking scared me, and at some times – such as a few dozen seconds ago as I continued to write this thing – I can viscerally remember a trace of the feeling I felt. This shit was fucking scary when it happened, and I guess I walked off and tried to get mum to console me about it or something. Then the memory ended. Looking back, I think the face came from some kind of tribal mask-hybrid-shield thing, and was part of a collection.
Asking for my mother’s help with identifying which of her friends’ houses this happened at in a more modern conversation reveals that nobody I know has the ability to track this mask down again. Not willing to let me make a fool of myself, I searched the Internet for a picture of this thing, and did not find anything.
So, lots of time passed and I turned 23. I was finally waking up to the fact that I could consciously search for the solution to this thing. Who was it, what was its species called, where do I go to see the images of it that I remember? To this day, I don’t know. But telling people the story about it and hoping they would know something has brought me closer.
The start of me telling the
story and hoping somebody would know something seemingly happened in
2019 during the time I was living with my oldest brother in Australia,
and so did my next hint, though it was dubious. I had a dream about some
casual friendly scenario with cartoonish Maori characters and some kind
of “tiki restaurant”, and this concept we call a dream, this active
authority on all things mysteriously weird and weirdly mysterious, was
kind enough to bless me with its mystical interpretation, giving me two
words that I could finally use to name the beast, and the beast’s
species:
Wawoo – The Specimen
Wakawuwu – The Species
From that day forward, even though the dream didn’t empirically prove anything, I started using these words to describe it all. Then, I could finally articulately ask myself… Who was Wawoo?
More time passed, and I was living in New Zealand again. I still didn’t know what the cartoon I remembered was, but I was soon to find out. When talking to a certain cool woman who I used to visit, I finally found out that somebody knew about a cartoon that looked the way the cartoon in my first Wawoo memory did. Enter Tamatoa the Brave Warrior.
This bloody thing and its characters basically looked just like the first memory of Wawoo did, even though I noted a brightness of colours that I didn’t quite remember being part of it. This friend of mine told me that it was basically a lost work, and that some people she knew really wanted to watch more episodes of it as there were only three obtainable episodes left. I’ve always been no good at finding episodes of TV shows that were lost to time, but I cheekily emailed a YouTube video essayist called Saberspark some info about Tamatoa the Brave Warrior, thinking that if it’s as interesting to him as the other weird cartoons he frequently gives a review, I might have an easy shot at getting somebody to find more episodes for me, or at least finding out some things I didn’t know about the show. It was a very cheeky move.
Within the week, I watched all three available episodes of Tamatoa the Brave Warrior. It was a simple, child-friendly, not top-tier collection of TV episodes, with durations of about 10 minutes. I’m glad it was more than just clips, though, as full episodes would just about be the only right way to experience it. It’s just a cutesy show about pre-colonial Maori people living in New Zealand, enjoying life. Nothing scary so far.
One of the three remaining Tamatoa the Brave Warrior episodes had a pointedly interesting name. It was called The Taniwha. Naturally I had to watch this one as well, and for some reason I feel like it’s the one I watched last.
That is the Taniwha from the episode, being looked at by a Maori kid and a talking Tuatara. Sorry buddy, but you are not Wawoo, even if your face is really scowly and red. There’s no striping, no black, no mass destruction or strong villainy in the episode, and even the height is too lowballed to match. I think we’ve got a game of comparing an oven to a volcano here.
So that was it. The most recent piece of progress toward figuring out who Wawoo is and where to go to see his feature again was a 2019 hint about a cartoon show with 3 available episodes, and I’ve come no closer since then. Seeing a Taniwha that tries and fails to be Wawoo was disappointing, but I’m very grateful for the fact that I now know what the show Tamatoa the Brave Warrior is, as this has been a massive step forward in figuring this thing out. It gives me an extra bit of closure that I didn’t have before.