How A Missed Movie Opportunity Led To Bones' The Truth In The Myth Episode

When you're a long-running network TV series with 20-plus hours of material to deliver every season, you're inevitably going to take some wild swings to meet your quota. "Bones" was as formulaic as any other television procedural, but it had a good deal more personality and would find ways to spice things up now and then. Sometimes that meant a break in format, like when it showed an entire episode from the perspective of a victim's skull. Other times, that meant inviting further "X-Files" comparisons by forcing its investigating heroes to uncover the truth behind what appears to be an extraordinary crime.

In season 6, episode 19, "The Truth in the Myth," the power couple of forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) are tasked with looking into the death of Lee Coleman (Leigh McCloskey), a myth-buster — not that kind — who hosted a TV show where he looked into and debunked myths like Bigfoot. Irony of ironies, how else should Lee have died but seemingly at the hands (er, claws) of the legendary chupacabra? Bones, ever the pragmatist, immediately calls BS, only for a closer examination to reveal reptile scales and mammal hair on Lee's corpse. Dun dun dun.

"The Truth in the Myth" treats its central mystery with the flippancy it deserves thanks to co-writers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the writer-director duo who would later helm the modern comedy classic that is "Game Night" and the deliriously funny fantasy film "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves." In fact, it was the pair's love of real-world myths and mythical creatures that inspired their "Bones" episode after their plans for a related movie fell apart.

Remember in the 2010s when, suddenly, it felt like every other studio was coming out with an animated movie about yetis? There was Warner Bros.' "Smallfoot" (Zendaya is Meechee, did you know?), DreamWorks and Pearl Studio teamed up for the visually imaginative "Abominable" (a film that asks the question, "What if 'E.T.' but furry?"), and even Laika came out with "Missing Link," a gorgeous stop-motion comedy adventure that featured both yetis and a sasquatch. As fate would have it, Daley and Goldstein had also pitched an animated feature about yetis and other mythical creatures years earlier, before channeling their idea into "The Truth in the Myth" instead.

Here's what Daley (who also starred in "Bones" as the spring chicken Dr. Lance Sweets) told Entertainment Weekly back in 2011:

"It's funny; we had an idea for an animated movie awhile back that would star mythological creatures, like the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti and all that. And we didn't really pursue it for a long time and found out after the fact that [someone] was doing exactly that, an animated movie with those creatures — we missed it. So we still thought that the world of mythological creatures is fun and hasn't really been tapped into a lot. And I figured out a way to incorporate it into a crime-solving show."

Judging by the timeline of events, it's hard to tell if Daley and Goldstein had gotten wind of one of the aforementioned yeti movies (it seems just a tad early, even knowing how long animated films can take to come together) or some other, possibly never-realized project. Either way, as much as I love the pair's creative output in general, the world doesn't seem all that worse off with one less animated yeti flick in it.