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The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
Ant writes "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters is a published paper about the reality of movie-monster anatomy in 2003. In the paper, Michael C. LaBarbera explores the implications of extremely large and extremely small fantasy creatures, whose mass, volume and surface-area scale at different rates as they are shrunk/enlarged (e.g., ants can carry many times their body-weight, but if they were the size of tigers, they'd be crushed under their own carapaces). Other issues covered include the respiratory difficulties of Mothra, the biomechanics of Jurassic Park dinosaurs, and the reason E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial is so effing cute.."
Sadly, LaBarbera completely avoids the issue of whether Godzilla steaks taste like chicken. Enquiring minds want to know.
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I don't think anyone expected Hollywood to actually WANT to have accurate physics in their movies, all that counts is "how cool" they look. It's not a bad thing, mind you. Who'd want to see a King Kong that would die 'cause his bones snapped from the shear weight of his body? Pretty cool read though... shocking to see an article that isn't split into 14 pages to cash in on advertisers.
When my dad and I first watched Cocoon http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088933/, few words were exchanged for most of the movie. toward the end, when the old people were on the boat fleeing the US Coast Guard, my dad stood up and shouted, "There is no way in hell that a little pleasure yacht like that could outrun a Coast Guard cutter!"
So he was totally satisfied that intergalactics and geriatrics would hit it off, he believed without question that aliens visited earth in the first place, and did not quiestion that the first notion the US government would have had was to chase down a pleasure boat, but once that boat had exceeded its real-world limitations, he was totally disillusioned.
So my dad is a boat man. This guy is a body size ratio man. Neither seem to posess the skill of suspension of disbelief, a prerequisite for watching a movie. I further the "waste of time" motion.
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Old sci-fi/monster movies are very cool, I wish we could see more of them re-broadcast instead of the current shaky camera scenes of might-be monsters. Might I add that most "horror" movies these days are actually "startle" movies.
Watching AVP right now, it looks like WWF/WWE had *way* too much influence.
i think it would be absolutely impossible to explore the subject matter he does without talking about Alien (and i suppose its followup, Aliens as well, with its exposition of social insect behavior)
Alien is almost an excellent primer on parasitology, taking some of the more bizarre lifecycle aspects of certain parasites and insects, and exploding it into a scifi universe where humans are the host (with some great neato "what if" aspects of contemplative exobiology like acid for blood, organometallics for an exoskeleton that can resist the vacuum of space, the mouth-within-a-mouth, etc.)
wikipedia has a good exploration of the subject
the point is, Alien satisfies both mass audiences with requisite scares, but it also satisfies the scientifically-minded audience, because it begins with a good grounding in biology and expands upon it in a scholarly manner. Alien is entertaining on both a shallow bug out manner, and is also fodder for intellectual rumination as well. so many movies are just one or the other (usually the former), and it is very rare to find a movie that can do both very successfully like Alien
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I think its perfectly natural to forgive inaccuracies like that if you aren't familiar with the material. For instance, my mother is horrible with computers, she knows that they can't do half the things they do in the movies, but it doesn't really bother her. Now have her sit down and watch tv show House (She's a doctor) and she will fret the whole way through. What am I getting at? It's easy to look past the 1 or 2 facts you know about a subject and enjoy the fiction, but if you are an expert it's natural for your mind to dissect it.
So while I watch House and think "I doubt that that many people could get soo many rare diseases" she thinks "Those test results aren't indicitive of that, why don't they screen for this? That disease can't progress that quickly. That disease doesn't present symptoms like that at all! Doctors don't go to patients houses like that. " etc etc It's hard to shut that voice out.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
The point of the article isn't to make fun of B-movies. The point is to teach science in an entertaining way.
consists, surprisingly, of two parts. The part about inertia is famous. The other part is about scaling laws, why bones must become thicker if you scale up an animal and so on.