An admired human services pioneer and motivational speaker, Thor was also known in New York for three seasons of a UHF talk show. Now he's taken his talents to free Internet radio.

Also featuring Munnin, "The Barbarian Chronicles" is a magazine program that follows the couple's legend in the making, delves into mythic-flavored popular entertainment (e.g. comics), and explores the occult and unusual at Moosemeals. An artist who creates their costumes and creates colorfully symbolic drawings, Munnin's also the hand behind "The Barbarians" comic strip version of the family's adventures. Like modern-day Rasputins, the progressive pair quickly mesmerized e.c. with tales of their heroic life choices.

What does it mean to be a Barbarian?

Thor: Well, I'm big. I'm hairy. I'm strong. I have tattoos. Those are the outward type of things. I'm bold and I'm an outsider. I'm definitely not someone who has ever been content to play the standard roles that our society has set out. I don't feel victimized by that. I've been in the human service field for over a quarter of a century. There I've earned a name and a reputation for myself. And as with anything, if people are really good at what they do, people tolerate their eccentricities. So if you're a university or a college and you want to deal with me, I'm Thor the Barbarian. To the Department of Labor of New Jersey, I'm Thor the Barbarian, Superhero of Human Services. To the Department of Education in New York, I'm Thor the Barbarian, Consultant.

Munnin: There are two different kind of Barbarians. The historical ones and the sword and sorcery ones. The sword and sorcery ones fight the monsters. The metaphor here is, he's fighting social ills. They're the new monsters - Poverty, people not being educated about computers.

And that's what "The Age of Heroes" is all about?

Thor: Right. That's a pilot we made that's in focus groups right now. I'm going to fix it up and try to get investors. But it's about real life people at non-for-profit organizations that are doing good things in the world, very invisibly. People say, "Somebody should do something about teenage mothers who are homeless," or "Somebody should do something about substance abuse." Well, there are lots of people doing things about it, but you don't really know anything about them. So the pilot dealt with real non-for-profits dealing with real issues around the digital divide. Computerization is creating a whole new class division and there are agencies trying to teach people the basic skills that they need to access information from computers. A lot of people who live in low-income areas are afraid of computers.

It's like a mythic documentary?

Thor: Correct. Our life is a mythic documentary. We're Thor and Munnin in and out of the costumes. Even the places that we cover with the Nemeton section - that's the part of the show where we focus on the paranormal and the unusual - it's about real people and real places. There are a lot of exciting places that are right there outside your door and a lot of people spend their lives toiling all day and then they come home and relax and watch TV or they remain glued there in front of the computer.

Munnin: They go into a vegetative state. A lot of people are living other people's lives or they're living Friends' lives on television instead of their own.

Thor: And then they go to sleep and they repeat the cycle endlessly. I used to close the TV show with. "OK shut off the TV and go live now." We do cover the games and comic books and things like that, but a big part of the show is how can you do it yourself. This fuels us. We're not trapped in it. We don't want to be Conan or these characters and although we occasionally play games, we're not "game players." And every day we try to find something to do outside.

What was your TV show like?

Munnin: It was the world's strangest reality show.

Thor: It started off with, "I want to make TV." And I had no idea how I was going to make TV but not knowing how I'm going to do something has never stopped me before. So the show was kind of like, "watch me learn how to make TV." I had guests from Troma Entertainment - you know, Toxic Avernger, Killer Condom. I had local community activists. I had Richard Ashford - he was an editor of the Conan comics for Marvel.

Conan, your cousin?

Thor: Yes, Conan the Barbarian, my inspiration. I had a show where I had UFO abductees. It was whatever you could do inside a studio with people talking. And I had a large sword and I did the news my own way. By the end of the first season I had learned about segments - filming outside and showing clips. I got a sketch comedy troupe together toward the end of season two and then, September 11th happened. Advertisers all of the sudden didn't want to pay money to TV because nobody knew what was going on. The Twin Towers had just fallen and everyone was in a panic. So, for a while I kept the show going out of my own pocket and that didn't prove doable in the long run. UHF isn't as expensive as cable but it's still paid television and then there are production costs. So I made a vow to the universe that I would make season three without any money, without any sponsorship and it would be better than my other seasons and I'd make a movie besides. And that's what I did. Season three was very well done and people who've seen the episodes think I spent $7,000 to $10,000 per episode and I spent nowhere near that.

Your heritage is Greek, but Thor is a Norse god?

Thor: I was actually conceived in Greece and my name is (unpronounceable). No one in this country has been able to deal with it. So way back when I was doing convention-based entertainment, The Village Voice wrote an article they said I looked like Thor the Norse God of Thunder and I liked that. It kind of resonated. Thor was heroic. He fought monsters. That's what I'd already decided to do with my life so it's been Thor now for over a decade.

And Munnin was actually a bird.

Munnin: Yes. That's one of Odin's ravens that eats memory. Modern day has many cadences of past times that people see everyday but they don't really think about or really analyze. My best example is probably the FTD florist guy. It's Mercury or Hermes, the messenger of the gods, with the winged sandals. But it goes right past people. They have no idea what it's from. Or Easter eggs. Why eggs? They're symbols of fertility. Easter itself is a Celtic goddess of spring and renewal. So it's not because I have good memory myself, but because I'm here to remind people. I also really like ravens. They're one of the more intelligent birds on the planet. They've shown incredible problem solving skills, some of them riviling chimps at times with what they figure out. There was one recently that figured out how to crack nuts by using traffic. It would put the nut in a walkway during a time when it was safe for it to do so, fly up, let the traffic crush the nut, come down, get its nut all cracked. They're very, very smart. I do costuming so when I made my dress, I put a raven on the back of my dress.

Thor: She put a saber tooth on the back of this (vest).

Munnin: It's all hand-sewn.

I guess it would be hard to find in the store.

Munnin: You would never. That's one of the things that attracted me to costume making. When I was growing up, I liked to dress up. Halloween was my favorite holiday and anytime I had a chance to do it I would. Most of the time I had to make my own costumes. You just couldn't buy them in the store and if you did, they were very cheesey looking with the whole plastic mask and the plastic bag that looked like a garbage bag. It's one way to start exploring things. There are probably a lot of things that interested you as a child. Pursuit one. Back in high school I was very much into primatology. As soon as I could read, and I started reading by the time I was in Kindergarten I was reading TimeLife books. Comparative Religion. I always had a fascination with animals and if you look now at all the interests I've had - costume making, heroic writing, the occult - I'm using them all now. One of the things I always like to say is everyone's a little bit crazy... Make the craziness work for you. It can work for you as long as you're not dysfunctional with it. It can work and you can actually enjoy it. It's part of you life.

Thor: A good place for people to start is to find who your hero is. Everybody has these figures that inspired them in some way. It doesn't have to be a figure in entertainment, it can be a figure in somebody's life. Somebody's mom, somebody's grandfather. Some central figure that provided a fuel a direction. An easy way to find your heroic archetype is - where to you go for entertainment. Now with computers, VCRs and DVDs you can pick what you want to escape into and everybody has a favorite thing that they like escaping into and that's the key to telling you who you are. What are the central themes in your life? What do you feel is lacking? Because when you go to these types of entertainment, you identify with some part of them. So it's you and it's providing you with things that you're not getting in your daily life. What you want to do when you escape tells you a lot about what your heroic archetype might be.Grand Theft Auto vice city ripped me off by the way. They have a character in there called Thor the Motivational Viking. And it spoofs all my early work.

Munnin: They really do paraphrase him on a lot of things.

Thor: I guess it's a tribute of a sort.

Imitation is a form of flattery.

Munnin: An unacknowledged tribute.

Thor: I talked to an intellectual property attorney and he said I'd have to show that it had hurt me in some way. And I couldn't think of anyway it hurt me so I said, OK, fine.

So you're an artist?

Munnin: I do a variety of art. There's a more simplistic form for the comic strip and I do other things for when eventually we do a book. I've got a copy of Big News in here, too. It's the homeless newspaper that helps raise money for the homeless. They buy copies for 20 cents and they can sell them for $1 to make money. Our comic strip "The Barbarians" appears in here. A lot of the time it's stuff that happened to us or things we're doing but we deal with it in a mythical sort of way.

Thor: Big News supports the homeless and helps them to make money without panhandling so it's a pretty good cause.

Munnin: They have a very large interest in outsider art so that works in very well with what we are doing.

Thor: They're actually having a homeless Olympics next year.

Wow. Here you are in the grocery store.

Munnin: This is a (picture of) a Squonk. It's a mythical Pennsylvania creature that lives in the Hemlock forest and cries a lot because he feels very, very sorry for himself because he's so ugly. And if you capture him in a bag he'll just dissolve into a puddle of tears because he's just that miserable and you won't have a squonk to bring home with you. Here's an original I finished just last night. This is the Pennsylvania Big Foot. It's based on a Lenni Lanape legend.

Thor: A lot of people think people see bigfoot all over the place because people know about it but the Lanape had a legend about this creature that goes back their whole history.

Munnin: All the Indian tribes tend to have a hairy man of the woods icon and they believe that it's a spirit, that it's not an actual animal and they think it's actually funny that the white men are trying to get physical evidence for it. Thor and I both have very strong cat totems.

What do you mean by "cat totem"?

Thor: Totem is another one of those things, like people stick labels on themselves. Like we have Barbarian and Changeling. And more primitive people identify with animals. So they would say I have a lion spirit and that makes me courageous and bold, that makes me a leader. I have a deer spirit - I'm very fleet of foot and gentle or whatever. So the totems embody those qualities and people have collectively as groups identified with animals. The United States has the bald eagle. That's a totem of our country. Russia has the bear.

Munin: And the lenape had their tribes broken into the turtle, the wolf and a turkey.

Like horoscopes, in a way.

Munnin: Yeah. A lot of people say very proudly, "I'm Aries the Ram." And they get things like coffee cups with Aries on it or rings. We also do shapeshifters. Here are a wereleopard and a weretiger. Thor's totem is the bear and the saber tooth. So that's what this cartoon is all about. He's doing his body building and having trouble with his diet so I say, "Ask your totem animals for guidance." They're telling him to eat meat because that's what they think about all the time but he says, "I already eat lots of meat. You guys just never had ice cream." So in the last frame we have the totem animals fighting over the creamy vanilla bean.

Who's this Tiger Man?

Thor: He's a motivational person in Pennsylvania who goes around and preaches anti-violence. He's part of some church group, but he paints himself like a tiger. We know a lot about Pennsylvania and the strange people that are here. They're part of the cultural heritage of a place. Everyplace has its eccentrics or uniques or personalities. We want to celebrate that. A lot of times they're treated like a freak show but we can appreciate eccentrics because we're eccentrics. It will actually be a celebration of the divergent viewpoints that eccentrics feel passionately about and try to live out.

Munnin: It's a type of heroism. There are two ways to look at it. If everybody's wearing tan and gray and someone walks in wearing red, you're going to notice the person in red. On the other hand there's the problem of rhesus monkeys. If you dye a rhesus monkey pink and put him in with a bunch of brown rhesus monkeys, they'll tear him to shreds. So you get one extreme or another. It can be very negative attention and so it takes a lot of courage to do something different. And usually your immediate family and friends are the first ones to go, "Oh, that's stupid." Or they'll put it down right away because it isn't what they did. Anything that's new or different, you're going to get people that don't like it but then you'll get someone so different sometimes they'll be great. Other people will like it.

Thor: Black Bull who's been on our show a lot - he's been on the Best of Conan O'Brien - he walks around in a wizard robe. He walks around New York in a wizard's costume and he lives in Harlem. For years he's was trying to get Guiliani to make him New York's official wizard and I convinced him, why don't you just be New York's unofficial wizard. So now he's the unofficial wizard. But it takes a lot of courage to walk around. You get some abuse. He's rude so people react negatively to him. He's the only person I know who's been harassed by Christmas Elves and Hare Krishnas.
Munnin: We said we have to bring him to Pennsylvania so the Quakers can beat him up.

Why did you move to PA?

Thor: After we started dating and were thinking about getting married. It was kind of like, OK we've lived half our lives already. We're both 45. And so what are we going to do with the other 45 years and we started talking about our dreams and since dream making is what we're all about, we kind of imagined in a nice place in the woods. We actually drew pictures of what we wanted in a house and the location and we found something except instead of being on the top of a hill it's kind of on the side of a hill. It was exactly what we had visualized. And so we're happy here. We're Barbarians and I commute right now because I still work in the city but like all commuters, I want to settle here and make this my home base of operations.

Munnin: It's a beautiful area with the forest and the animals and the people are nice too it's a much more laid back, relaxed atmosphere. People are very friendly. You don't get the typical New York/ New Jersey crowd that they want it five minutes ago.

The Internet show is free on line, so people are pulling it up from -
Munnin: All over the world.

Thor: Georgia Jones, she's an Internet pioneer. She actually created radio on demand where you could record things and pull them up on the Internet. She's helping us on the show and she keeps track of all that. So she can track the numbers and the demographics. And it will always be free on the Internet but we are going to start drawing in advertising sometime soon.

Munnin: And fairly soon we're going to have a special membership that you can get bells and whistles, like other articles and exclusives that no one else can get.