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| source// Disney |
It’s that time again, time to gleefully pick holes in well-loved classics, just because I can.
We all know that our favourite films probably aren’t particularly scientifically accurate – as somebody who loves science, that would make them face-clawingly dull.
We also all know that everybody loves a happy ending, so it’s probably a good thing that filmmakers aren’t exactly fastidious in their scientific accuracy. The world is a cruel, cruel place and, had the harsh realities of life been included in some of your favourite classics, we’d have a generation of very scarred and disturbed children on our hands.
However, we’re all grown-ups now and, if the internet is anything to go by, we have a sadistic obsession with ruining our own childhoods.
So, ready to find out just how dark and savage the real world is? Let’s start with The Lion King shall we?
7. The Lion King: Simba Kills All The Cubs
The last two and a half minutes of The Lion King never fails to bring a nostalgic lump to the throat, but the reality is probably even more upsetting.
As Simba ascends Pride Rock and assumes leadership of the pride, his majestic roar heralds a reign of terror that is soon about to begin.
For a start, the cute, seemingly monogamous, relationship between Simba and Nala would be slightly more one-sided, as the alpha male in a pride of lions will mate with all of the females, sometimes every 20 minutes.
Secondly, leadership struggles in the pride of lions are almost always bloody affairs. When a new male takes charge of the pride (which happens twice in TLK), one of the first things he will usually do is kill any cubs under 9 months old. It is estimated that as much as a quarter of the cubs that die in their first year are victims of infanticide.
Doing this brings the females into heat again so that he can put his own little buns in their ovens and begin his own bloodline. You can be sure as hell that Scar did this when he took over, so the virtuous Simba would probably do the same, taking out all of the little Scars running around his castle.
Hakuna Matata?
6. Sleeping Beauty: Not Exactly Beauty Sleep
Side-stepping, for a moment, the problematic issues of smooching someone in their sleep, we can still well and truly ruin Sleeping Beauty’s happy ending.
Far from fluttering her eyes open and dancing into the sunset with her prince, Sleeping Beauty would be in a right state by the time true love’s first kiss got anywhere near her. In the fairy tale, the titular princess is put into an “enchanted sleep” by an evil witch. In real life, we call this a coma, and a coma is not quite so pretty.
In the source text, Briar Rose (as she is originally called) sleeps for 100 years. Now, the obvious issue with this slumber is that, by the time the prince got his smooch on, she would be suffering from a medical condition known as Dead. In the Disney film, Aurora’s enchanted sleep is scaled back to an enchanted nap of few hours. If we go somewhere in between these two and imagine that our princess has snored away for 50 years or so.
Aside from the scaly skin and bad breath brought on by dehydration, the princess’s body would also be covered in angry sores and ulcers caused by the constant, concentrated pressure at the points where her body touches the bed. She would be incontinent which would worsen the ulcers and also send the risk of infection sky high.
The princess’s muscles would atrophy and the limbs may become contracted and immovable, causing her to slowly curl up like a dead spider. She would also probably wake up with pneumonia due to the inability to regulate secretions in the lungs and would be vulnerable to lung collapse.
Now, I’ve had some pretty bad hangovers, but waking up in this state would not put me in the state of mind to go tripping the light fantastic with Prince Charming.
5. The Martian: Watney Probably Got Cancer
Sand storms and exposure to the vacuum of space aside, one of the major dangers facing Mark Watney during his time on Mars would have been completely invisible.
Turns out that there’s a lot of radiation flying around in space. Down here on Earth, we’re fairly well protected by the magnetosphere, which deflects most of the dangerous stuff. However, once you leave the protective bosom of the Earth’s magnetic field, you open yourself up to serious damage.
Ionizing radiation is measured in sieverts. One sievert is generally associated with a 5.5% increase in in the risk of developing fatal cancer; on Earth we’re exposed to 0.00001 sieverts of daily background radiation, Mars, however, with its thin atmosphere and no magnetic field, could expose astronauts to a 0.66 daily dose. The equivalent of a weekly full-body CT scan.
This is not even taking into account the exposure endured during the trips to and from Mars through open space, where the dosage is higher still – a factor that should have been taken into account by the crew when planning their heroic rescue mission.
So, that lovely, heart-warming ending in The Martian that shows Mark Watney living a nice, normal life after his ordeal? Probs not.
4. Princess And The Frog: One Kiss Causes Nuclear Winter
If the idea of kissing a frog to turn it into a prince is some kind of analogy for those new-relationship “fireworks”, then it’s a good one.
Due to the laws of the conservation of mass, the frog would have to draw energy from its surroundings in order to make up the difference in mass and turn into a prince. We know from Einstein that mass and energy are pretty much interchangeable in physics, and since molecules can’t be absorbed as easily as energy, converting energy to mass is the better way to do it.
Note I said “better” way, because it is still by no means a good thing.
All this energy has gotta to come from somewhere. More specifically, the kinetic energy from the surrounding air – and by “surrounding air”, I mean almost all of the air in the atmosphere.
Turns out that stripping the kinetic energy from air is not a good idea as it would immediately create an absolute zero temperature environment (that’s the equivalent of -273.15°C, fact fans), and transforming the two most abundant gases in the atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, into liquids.
So, ask yourself the question, is your prince charming worth immediately drowning in liquid nitrogen?
Probably best to just try speed dating or something.
3. Star Wars: Death Star Explosion Would Have Been Catastrophic
“The Ewoks are dead. All of them.”
So begins the white paper detailing the extinction event known as the Endor Holocaust.
Far from the triumphant finale it appears to be, the destruction of the Death Star would have heralded the apocalypse for the poor unfortunate creatures on the surface of Endor.
The main threat to the inhabitants of Endor would probably not be the destruction itself, but the shrapnel. By calculating the relative size and orbits of both Endor and the Death Star, the paper’s author manages to deduce that the fragments from the destroyed ship would not be moving at the required velocity to keep them in orbit.
In other words, they go screaming towards the moon like fiery meteors.
It is estimated that a Death Star-sized mass of debris falling from the sky would create an impact crater 700km wide, four times the size of the Chicxulub crater formed by the impact that killed the dinosaurs on Earth.
The impact would flatten everything on the surface. To add insult to injury, as the material that was thrown into the air by the impact reenters the atmosphere, it will superheat it to the point that all water on the surface vapourises. Anything that didn’t die in the cataclysm certainly will eventually.
2. Fight Club: Everyone Gets Cancer
It’s a scene that has stuck with a generation. It’s not often that the destruction of multiple buildings could be seen as uplifting, but it gave the latest crop of angsty teenagers something to find, like, so deep.
Despite the fact that there was no one in the buildings at the time, the fallout from that level of unplanned demolition would have been catastrophic. You can’t just reduce an entire district to rubble and not face consequences.
During the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the towers’ collapse released a colossal, toxic dust cloud that thundered through the city. By 2010, just nine years on, over 900 responders to the attacks were dead from related health problems, 2,500 now have cancer and 15,000 are thought to suffer from chronic diseases caused by inhaling the death dust.
This was all from the collapse of two buildings, the narrator flattens at least five. So there weren’t people in them, you’re still just condemning everyone in the surrounding area to a much slower, more painful death.
Ah well, cue The Pixies.
1. WALL-E: The Human Race Ends With Not A Bang, But A Whimper
WALL-E proved that, yes, the public was ready to fall in love with a glorified garbage truck.
However, the optimistic note on which the film ends slightly glosses over some of the more, er, depressing, realities.
Even if we ignore the slightly alarming overtones of what is essentially class-cleansing, with the super-rich jetting off in their starships, leaving the poor to rot on Earth, the implications for the human race in WALL-E are pretty disturbing.
The original humans left the Earth in its appalling state are by now presumably all dead after 700 years of interstellar travel. The morbidly obese blobs of humans that come back are the descendents of these super-rich pioneers, that have known nothing but their shipboard environment.
Just their physiologies would prove to be disastrous. Not only are they all horrifically, probably irreversibly obese, but their totally sedentary lives will have wrought havoc on their musculoskeletal structures. The effect would be further compounded in a low-gravity environment such as, you know, space.
The result of this would be that the humans, far from restoring the Earth to a hippy’s paradise, would hit the deck at the first tug of Earth’s gravity, creating a landscape of scattered, gasping, fleshy mounds like jellyfish washed up on the beach.
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