4 Absolutely Bonkers Pop Culture Questions Fans Finally Figured Out
We here at Cracked just love showing off the commitment of superfans, academics, actual scientists, and sometimes just your regular Joe's who looked at a movie and wondered aloud, "How much can the giant monster in this movie poop?" Yes, we are a special species, and answering wild and dumb pop culture questions is totally our jam. We have proven that we won't rest until we've learnt just how rich billionaire wizards really are. Similarly, we will not tire in our quest to find out exactly how much the Witcher truly is packing. We've done it with Luigi, and by Jove, we'll do it again!
Lucky for us, there are at least some answers that random but equally impressive people have gone on to determine. Behold:
The Real Godzilla vs. Kong: Who Can Take The Biggest Dump?
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Do not tell us you've never wondered whose poop would be bigger between the colossal ape king and the nuke lizard. We'll never believe you.
Consider the giant King of Kong. According to an actual doctor and primate expert, gorillas like to poop. A lot (and also everywhere). They have a pretty high-fiber diet — what with all that chewing on plant sticks all the time — and they have to eat a lot of it due to plants' low-nutritional content. A healthy gorilla takes a dump every couple of hours and would usually produce about half a pound of feces at a time. Considering Kong's incredibly gigantic size — in Godzilla vs. Kong, he's somewhere between 350-400 feet tall and easily weighs around 4220 pounds (a normal adult gorilla will weigh in at 350 pounds) — you'd expect the giant ape to be expelling a carload of turds a day. Well, try a load the size of a freaking helicopter.
Yes, the math points to the huge ape guy backing out 6.6 tons of turd a day, roughly the weight of an Apache helicopter. With Kong totally crushing it in the poop department, let's consider Godzilla, the other, other Lizard King. For the Zilla, we have a doctor and researcher on reptiles and amphibians weighing in on the subject because "Komodo dragon, only giant and also nuclear" remains the best way to describe everyone's favorite beastie from Japan. Komodo dragons are our largest living lizards, and while they can pack a lunch, they don't eat very often. Still, their waste deposits are said to be spectacular in the size department, even though it apparently looks a bit like bird poop, thanks to the uric acid they produce.
Godzilla is also a sea lizard, so all that fish he's definitely eating will probably result in his poop being slimier. Essentially, a dump by Godzilla would resemble that of an oil spill.
Godzilla's poop just isn't going to beat the sheer amount Kong is able to unleash upon the poor, unexpected creature who happens to be in its way. Seriously, gorillas will poop in the middle of the road; they don't give a crap. Komodo dragons — and surely Godzilla, too — are cold-blooded creatures with sluggish metabolisms. Some of them only poop a dozen times per year! Sure, you could argue that with all its fire-breathing ability, Godzilla has a completely different biology and could perhaps have a way faster metabolism. But that only means you could also argue that his nuclear innards could incinerate his waste for him.
Point is, probably not even Zilla would want to be around when Kong assumes his squatting position for the seventh time that day.
How To Ultimately Survive The World Of A Quiet Place (Know Your Decibels)
Have you ever wondered how you, a real savvy Indiana Jones-type movie buff with some nifty tricks you've picked up along the way, would fare in that world where John Krasinksi made everyone wear Grandma sweaters?
Paramount Pictures
Of course, you have. You totally thought about it for ten seconds before concluding that you'll simply live near one of those waterfalls. Not only will you have a supply of running water, but it'll drown out all of your millions of farts. Good thinking. You win another sweater.
The guys over at The Film Theorist, however, decided that such a hilariously easy solution to the movie's main problem was just too easy. No, they wanted to figure out which sounds to avoid instead. See, every sound has a decibel measurement, and these fanboys managed to determine that in order to evade the Anti-Noise Pollution Aliens, you need to stay below the 50dB sound mark lest you want this to happen:
Sand walking? Good, it's nice and soft and makes very little noise. Playing with an electronic toy that makes annoying electronic toy sounds? Yeah, that's going to make you a monster's minute-meal. These guys found a similar toy to that little rocket ship and measured it at 105dB. They then calculated how far the Purveyor-Of-Silence Monster was when it heard that sound … based on the car chase scene at the beginning of the film because that is how you do that and also we totally knew that.
They continued to measure all the other sounds that get these funky-looking Sound Flowers all riled up and concluded that they all have two things in common: They're sounds that do not naturally occur (like glass breaking and doors closing), and they're all above 50dB. The movie seems to have done its homework. For the most part, that is, because it's been questioned how they managed to tend to that corn crop without summoning the Noise Brigade.
Paramount Pictures
Furthermore, while talking normally clocks in at 60dB, but whispering brings it down to 30dB, one must always account for acoustics potentially wreaking havoc on these frequencies. Also, sound travels further at night (because science.) Honestly, it sounds exhausting living in this world filled with noise-hating monsters and that guy from The Office telling you to shush it all the time. At least we now know how. (Dibs on that waterfall.)
The Math Proves It: Vampires And Humans Can't Coexist
There have been many questions posed over the years regarding the idea of the fictional world of vampires crossing over with the real, boring one. We really would be nothing without our imaginations. There's also been a surprising amount of academic studies about how long it would take for vampires to wipe out humankind because scientists are nerds, too. Heck, a physicist created an actual online calculator based on scientific models and game theory that will calculate a Vampire Apocalypse for you. We should never, ever stop being like this.
Maybe all these actual scientific studies have to do with the fact that, like bloodsucking vampires who can infect and/or turn a human by biting them, viruses can quickly travel and take out a person in the same vein. Or maybe people are just secretly so tired of having to constantly deal with their own mortality that the fantasy of dying and just getting it over with so they can live forever or whatever has become a form of escapism for some.
Madman Entertainment
In 1982, two scholars probably tripping on garlic published a paper called The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable Resources. Their work looked at the bloodsucking habits of vampires (of which there are three kinds, apparently) and calculated that there simply wouldn't be enough human blood to sustain a vampire takeover.
In their own words: "We are facing a typical consumption-resource trade-off. The vampire society derives utility from consumption of blood, but in sucking the blood of a human being and in turning him to a vampire, the resource of human beings is reduced, whereas the number of vampires is increased. Both of these effects diminish the resource of humans per vampire, curtailing future possibilities of consumption."
The following year these two published another paper on vampirism and a closer look at self-sustainability models because even scholars can be goth AF sometimes. Unsurprisingly (but also cowardly, if you ask us), no further paper on the mathematics of vampire sustainability was published for nearly two decades after. It was only in 2007 that two new scholars, Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi, boldly brought forth a paper stating their doomed view of a human race having to face a rise of vamps.
Titled Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies, the two posited that if, hypothetically, a vampire only needs to feed once a month, the human race would be wiped out in three years. They obviously used some very smart equations to figure all this out, but it basically concludes with the fact that vampires would never be able to exist because there would be no humans left for them to exist.
Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies
Said the two true Van Helsings: "Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses." Of course, even Van Helsing had his critics, and one professor piggybacked published a paper the following year bemoaning Efthimiou and Gandhi's greedy take on vampires, suggesting that vamps may well be more logic and strategic when it comes to their human resources. Sure, Professor. Bloodlusting creatures are totally known for their incredible self-control.
A more recent analysis of How Long Will Humans Hurrah Before A Complete Vampire Takeout puts it that we'll lose 80% of all mortal butts within the first 165 days of vampires existing. It's a rad paper not only for people who mainline math and graphs — seriously, this paper has a lot of those — but also for cinephiles because they draw from big vampire titles in popular culture. There is, for instance, a Stoker-King model based on Bram Stoker's vampires and Stephen King's Salem's Lot that says a vampire outbreak would pretty much be on par with an epidemic outbreak in scale and numbers. There's also the Anne Rice model, and then there's the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model based on the True Blood novels, Twilight, and Kostova's The Historian. This last model gives a more shiny outlook on the fate of humans under attack by a bunch of anemic fiends because maybe … women can just woo them? Yeah, we're going to agree with literally all the other models and outcomes here.
This YouTube video from Logically Answered looks at how much Gus Fring makes. Or made, we guess. That is in no way a spoiler, people who haven't seen the show, because it's near impossible to spoil the sight of the fate of Gus Fring. Here's what you need to know, though: Gus is the megalord of his own meth empire that he runs through the Los Pollos Hermanos food chain. It is one stellar and gigantic operation, and it has made Gus, just, insanely rich.
As the video states, at one point Jesse tells Walt that Gus could easily be bringing in more than $96 million in revenue in a mere three months.
AMC
The video looks at similar businesses to Los Pollos Hermanos (like KFC) to figure out that Gus' relatively new up-and-comer is pulling between $1 mill - $2 mill per store in revenue each year. Conservatively, that means at least $14 million a year from the stores alone. They then calculate profit margins and market valuations and get all number-y about it but also remind us that we're not sure if Gus actually owns the entire chain and how much of it is owned by the parent company, Madrigal. If it's a 50/50 deal, that would mean, all in all, and over Gus's entire career, Los Pollos Hermanos has given him around $5 million in total income.
Which is nothing compared to his empire of drugs. Calculating the street value of meth in the show, adding how much of it Gus was moving per week, deducting the costs of hard labor and infrastructure, and keeping it all in conservative margins leads to Gus making around $28 million a year in income. In his twenty years of business, that would end up being $565 million dollars. Of course, when Gus cut the cartel out of the equation, his income shot up to $100 million a year. But, you know, then he died and stuff.
Which makes Walt's $80 million earned in less than two years a pretty impressive number. But then, you know, he also died.
Bet there's a message in there somewhere.
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