The Science Behind Disney: Separating Fact from Fiction

In this episode of Wildly Curious (formerly For the Love of Nature), co-hosts Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole dive into the world of Disney movies, exploring the scientific accuracies and inaccuracies hidden in your favorite animated films. From The Emperor’s New Groove to A Bug’s Life, the duo breaks down which Disney depictions of animals and nature hold up to scrutiny and which fall far from reality. Tune in to discover the surprising science behind the magic of Disney, with plenty of laughs and insights along the way.

Perfect for Disney fans, science enthusiasts, and anyone curious about how well fiction matches up with nature.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to For the Love of Nature, a podcast where we tell you everything you need to know about nature and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Laure.
And I'm Katy. And this is gonna be another, I think, fun episode. They're all fun, but still.
I hope so.
I'm gonna enjoy this one at least. But we're gonna be talking about, can we say Disney on the air? We're gonna be talking about-
I think as long as you're critiquing, it's like how on YouTube you can use clips as long as it's like analysis.
Let's go with that, an analysis.
This is an analysis.
Of the inaccuracies within Disney movies.
It's just scientifically accurate. So I was gonna talk about the accuracies and inaccuracies.
I'm solely focusing on the inaccuracies because I don't know, it's just way more fun for me to find problems and solutions sometimes. Alrighty.
But big spoiler alert episode because if you haven't seen these movies, don't listen to this episode because it's gonna ruin it for you.
Both of mine, if you haven't seen these, I don't think you have plans to anytime soon probably.
Skip over the old nature news. Is there anything we need to talk about?
Let me think here.
Wildfires suck. That smoke keeps coming down my way.
Yeah. We even had one in Texas here, not too far from us. It was just over a hundred acres, but thankfully they got it.
They didn't think they were gonna be able to get it contained as quickly as they did, but because everything's so freaking, it's been 115 degrees down here and everything's been so dry. Yeah, that they-
You see Death Valley? Reached the highest it's ever been. I think it was 132.
And freaking-
132.
And people are going there to experience it. I'm like, you know what? Why don't you just dabble your feet in Texas a little bit?
And there's no difference between 115, like just come here and feel the heat and die and leave.
I think it was on Twitter, there was like rangers posing with it. They have a thermometer there and it says 132. And it was like, just imagine the dinosaurs posing with an asteroid.
Look at this horrible number we've reached. As the world was literally burning. Yeah, like the Canadian wildfire smoke just keeps coming down here.
And it's nothing compared to higher north, but we're still getting into the orange, where people who are sensitive should be wearing a mask outside.
Crazy.
Visibility is impacted and we're in Maryland.
Yeah. We've been having air quality days out the wazoo down here because it has been so hot. Just too hot to be outside.
Like stupid hot.
Hopefully it'll, we have a few more weeks and then it should at least, like when I say the heat's been going in, I think it was last year or the year before, we were still seeing some high 90 days in September.
I remember, but we were too. Ours wasn't that high, but it was like absurdly high for September around these parts.
Yeah. So hopefully it'll start to one more month and then start to somewhat cool off here. So we'll see.
Alrighty. Disney movies.
Scientifically accurate Disney movies.
So just like how I did the Inactive Fairytales, I did a brief overview and then I went into examples. Alrighty.
Okay, go for it.
All right. So the first one that I did was The Emperor's New Groove.
Yes. I freaking love that movie.
Me too, me too.
Love that movie. I could watch that movie all the time.
It's a 2000 animated. It's a very funny comedy. This is truly like an unsung one of-
They never talk about this. But if you like it, everyone talks about it and it's so freaking quotable. There's so many good one-liners in that movie.
Yep.
But I would never see this movie and think it was in any way, shape or form is scientifically accurate.
Oh no, but I caught out some very specific things.
Okay, cause I was like, is there almost anything in it that's accurate?
There are, but the two that I found are just wildly inaccurate. So the movie is set in Incan kingdom and it follows the story of Emperor Cusco, a young and selfish ruler who is obsessed with himself and his own interests. Cusco is so selfish that he plans to destroy an entire village in order to build himself a summer palace called Cuscotopia, complete with a waterslide, as he says.
In enters Paca, a huge, humble peasant, who is at first unknowingly serves as an advisor to Cuscotopia, but then confronts Cusco and tries to convince him to change his mind. Meanwhile, Cusco's advisor, Esma, again, one of my all-time favorite Disney characters, is plotting to overthrow Cusco and take the throne for herself. She then makes a plan to kill Cusco and enlist the help of her dim-witted henchman, Cronk, my all-time favorite Disney.
So funny to carry out the plan.
Poison for Cusco. There's a girl on TikTok who reenacts movies, and she did the whole movie with her significant other. It's so good, like it chunks.
I'll have to look at it.
She's got false eyelashes and everything.
I'll have to find it then. Cronk, so they make a whole plan to kill Cusco. Cronk accidentally botches the whole plan of poisoning to kill him, and Cusco is instead turned into a llama instead of being put to death.
Yzma orders Cronk to take and kill the llama then, which then leads to one of my hands down favorite Disney moments when Cronk goes full mission impossible and makes his own theme music, which again, when he pauses, I still laugh every time. I'll watch it with my son and I start cracking up and I'd explain to him like why that was so funny. Not only was he making his own theme music and as everybody's watching him, then he pauses whenever the people walk by, he's like, huh?
And then he just picks up. It's like the subtle things is so funny. So anyway, so Cronk in true Cronk fashion is unable to complete his task to kill Cusco.
And after a series of events, Cusco, now the llama, ends up lost and alone in the middle of the jungle. Him and Paca end up crossing paths again and hoping that Paca can help Cusco get back to the palace and reverse the spell. And it just goes on from there.
There's so many funny things. So anyway, I don't want to, again, I don't want to give away all the spoilers because I feel like either the people who are listening to this must stop at this moment and watch it. Dude, if you don't need to explain anymore.
Yes, if you have not seen The Emperor's New Groove. Yeah, you have to stop and go watch it. But anyway, so the first inaccuracy that I'm going to talk about is a Disney hallmark is the disproportionate sizes of the bodies.
All right.
And we all know that he's got a lot of weird ones.
It does. And we all know that Disney is famous for creating insane body proportions for effect. But let's just talk about what these body sizes would actually look like in the repercussions of them.
We're going to talk about my favorite character, Kronk. Now, Kronk in the movie is portrayed by being really tall with an abnormally large chest, and he's very muscular. The voice of Kronk is Patrick Warburton, who also plays another lovable aloof putty in the TV show Seinfeld.
Patrick Warburton is a really big dude. People have said they built Kronk off of him because he is a big guy. He's already 6'3, and again, just a big guy.
But if we try to estimate how tall Kronk would be in real life based on his appearance in the movie, just like with anything else, it would be speculation.
Except for one very brief moment, he stands next to stuff, but Kronk actually tells us his size. I remember that. During the supposed funeral for Kuzco, the royal dresser comes running in, that little old guy, and Kronk says that he's kind of hard to fit because he wears a 66 long and a 31 waist.
So a 66 long refers to his coat size and suits, typically. That's whatever you're saying that. And then 31, of course, is his waist.
So when you take this and compare it to sizes that we would commonly see, 66 long would be like a 6XL.
Oh my gosh.
In the jacket, plus add the long to it, which adds like a little bit more in the length of the torso and everything. But 6XL, and 66 inches, if you go around the barrel of your chest, that's about five and a half feet around his chest. So I'm five foot one.
Right.
I'm five foot one.
You wrapped around it.
Right.
Or you couldn't touch your own toes around the chest.
Like pool noodle style. I couldn't wrap around it. So in reality, a chest of that size would be incredibly difficult to maintain as far as like lifting and everything goes.
That's just that's a lot of like chicken and broccoli. Yeah. Right.
And it would likely require significance about broccoli. I mean, that's all they say.
That's what the rock does.
Chicken and broccoli. Speaking of the rock, Dwayne Johnson, or as what Melania was calling, I was just about to look up what size his chest is. Way ahead of you.
He has a 52 inch chest and a 36 inch waist. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a huge chest, even bigger than Dwayne Johnson at 57 inches. And 57 inches is still nowhere on Cronk.
So is there anyone out there who beats Cronk? And the answer is yes. One individual, Isaac Dr. Size Nesser, beats Cronk with a measurement of 74 inches.
What? Okay, well, who is it?
Isaac Nesser, N-E-S-E-R. His nickname was Dr. Size.
Let me see him. Okay. Oh, okay.
Okay.
So it's worth noting that such a large chest can put strain on the body from back issues, heart problems, breathing difficulties. So there's gym bros that put all that time into the gym and they just want to keep getting bigger and bigger. That comes with complications.
Your body, your bones, everything can only support so much. So it just gets to be worse and worse. Then add to Kronk's almost world-breaking chest size, he has a 31 inch waist.
Yeah, right. Which is 31 inch waist is basically one size away from shopping in the boys section. So even if we took-
I was gonna say, I bet my waist is bigger than 31.
Probably, most are. That is so tiny. So even if we did take the voice actor Kronk-
It's the perfect triangle.
No, it really legitimately is though. Because it is just the point of a waist. That's all that it is.
So even if we took the voice actor for Kronk at 6'3, and gave him a 66 chest and a 31 waist, that would just be like insane. Like-
Oh, yeah.
There's just, there's no way.
Just fall over.
Right? Especially since the average height of a person around the time of Inca time was 5'2. He's already like a giant anyway, which if you look, most of the characters in that movie, except for the main characters are really tiny, which is funny.
Except for Orpaka, yeah.
Yeah.
Orpaka's pretty big.
Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. The main characters, even Orpaka's wife is, she's pretty tall, but everybody else is, if you look, is really tiny. So he's a big dude, but regardless, other characters in the movie are also disproportionate.
Look at Yzma. Yzma is like so disgustingly thin. And that's what adds to her creepy-
The skeleton.
Yeah, her creepy oldness is she's literally just like bones and flesh. So gross. But just trying to guess anybody as I'll height and weight, whatnot, would all be speculation because Cronk is, he actually tells us his sizes.
And so we can actually say this is what he is. And when I started this, I was like, oh, you know what? I can go through and I can just see like how high, you know, how tall things are and estimate size, body sizes that way.
And then I was like, oh my gosh, no. And then I found, I was like, he does say his size. And it's that one scene, one little snippet.
And that's all he talks about. All right, so there's Cronk and his ginormous pecs, but now let's move on to the next subject, the physics of falling and survival. So if you remember-
Are we talking about the log?
Yeah, the waterfall. Yep.
Yeah.
So if you remember in the movie, there is a scene where Pocka and Kuzco are tied to a log and fall down a waterfall. They survive the fall though, and the story continues. However, could someone survive a fall of that height?
Okay, let's do some math here. You know, what I'm best at. All right.
If you watch the movie, Kuzco and Pocka fall for approximately six seconds, which means, according to an online calculator I found, if they fell for six seconds, that means the waterfall would be about 579 feet tall. But we did not factor in how fast the water was moving at the top to chuck Kuzco and Pocka over the edge. So I looked up a bunch of different waterfalls, basically did way more research on a waterfall trajectory speeds.
Because I know what was funny is I should have screenshot these text messages. I actually think I did. And I'll have to see if I can find them, if I still have them.
Because I was texting my ex, cause he is an engineer. And I was like, okay, he could probably help me with the math and verify that my train of thought is right. Cause I suck at math.
But I started, and I was like, can't remember the first thing I texted him about, but I was like, hey, could you figure out the height of something if you knew how long it was falling for? One text message and then the next text message. Like a body, that's all I said.
Then I was like, I should probably clarify. So I looked up all sorts of waterfalls and in the Inca Empire region, and there are no waterfalls or possibilities of waterfalls that look similar to the ones in the movie. However-
Interesting.
Yeah, in South America though, there is a waterfall that is slightly in comparison of this and that's Caterer Falls in Guyana, which is still in Northern South America anyway. Now this waterfall is approximately 370 feet or 113 meters wide and an average flow rate of 663 meters cubed per second. Put this with some math and it gives us Cusco and Paca flying off the edge of the waterfall at approximately initial velocity of 5.86 meters per second off the top before you would reach the full gravitational pull and all that jazz.
Because eventually you would reach terminal velocity. But because of the time of falling for six seconds, according to this again, online calculator verified by an engineer and some really nice people on Reddit who know a lot more math than I do, this would mean that the waterfall is approximately 694 feet or about 211 meters tall. So the largest waterfall in the world is actually 800 meters.
Question still remains though, could Cusco and Paco live? There have been spotted stories across the internet of people going over waterfalls and surviving. One well-documented attempt has been kayakers going over Palouse Falls in Washington state.
The waterfall is 189 feet tall.
That's insane, dude.
Right? You're in a kayak.
You know the death could happen and you're okay with it.
And you're okay with it. And just think, you know what, I'm gonna do this. Why?
Because. So because you're in a kayak, you pull your kayak into the water, certainly to your death. And there was not one, not two, but three knuckleheads that have actually voluntarily done this on a kayak.
And if you Google and watch some of the footage of Tyler Bratt, brand? Bratt, it's B-R-A-D-T. Knox Hammock or James Schmizu, it is insanity because their technique basically is like paddle.
As fast as you can.
And then as you're going down, ditch the paddle, like chuck the paddle away, bend forward and grab onto the front handle of your kayak for dear life. That's it. And that's for 189 feet.
That's what they do. But Cusco and Pacas trip is estimated to be 600, almost 700 feet. More notoriously was Niagara Falls on the Canadian US border, which people have been either intentionally or unintentionally going over for years.
The largest of the falls, the Horseshoe Falls in Canada, is approximately 188 vertical feet. The one that these other guys went over is technically a foot or so higher than even what these ones are. So starting-
But the volume of water is just really different.
Oh yeah, very much. Starting in 1901 with Annie Edson Taylor and two days prior, her cat, she sent over in a barrel, seeing that the cat survived. She decided to do it for financial gain from basically popularity.
Her barrel constructed of oak and iron and lined with a padded mattress, successfully took the 63 year old over the falls. Which is insane anyway that you're, okay, the whole thing is nuts, but then you're 63 years old and that, that is the point. I think they said she had a bunch of personal stuff going on.
I'm like, listen girl.
Probably loans.
No, it wasn't even that. It was like she got a divorce. She was, and back then you got married because you needed financial stability.
So now she's divorced. She needs a financial.
Hey man, I get it. I get it.
But still, that is, but she saw her cat survived and thought, you know what?
Yeah.
Let's do this.
There's a dude and his turtle once, I know. Like a person and a turtle went over together.
Insane.
But that person didn't make it. The turtle did though.
So even though she survived with all but a small gash in her head, Annie later said, if it was my dying last breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat. I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was about to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the fall. No shit, Annie.
That's how terrible it was.
Yeah, because if you imagine, she just went over it in a barrel lined with mattresses.
And you can't see.
Yeah, you can't.
I'm sure the fall feels a thousand times longer.
Oh, I guarantee it.
And you're not sure. It's like knowing death versus waiting for death has to be worse. Oh my gosh.
So, but Annie is who the queen of the mist is referring to. With all of this said, all of those falls are still under 200 feet. Now, there have been freak accidents of people falling from planes and surviving.
And the highest was a Serbian flight attendant, Vesna Vojlovic, who fell from 33,000 feet without a parachute after her plane was blown up by a bomb in the mid air. So in January, hold on, in January, 1972, Vojlovic's survival is attributed to her being trapped between a food cart and like the wall. So bomb goes off, it was in a suitcase, bomb goes off, destroys the plane, food cart actually flies back and pins her against the wall and keeps her in like the fuselage where everybody else is pretty much just sucked out and free fallen.
So because that food cart had pinned her to that wall, whenever it hit, that's what actually kept her alive.
So the whole plane hit, not just her body.
Yeah, not just her body.
And I thought I was thinking just shh through the air, just one body.
And there have been people though that have fell from thousands and thousands of feet, but it's always into snow. And even this plane hit a very wooded area and then into padded snow. So it was like a double poof.
And most people that have fallen from thousands of feet, it's a nice soft landing. But, so let's get back to Volevich here for one second. So that was in January, 1972.
And when the cabin depressurized, this is the other crazy thing about this. So when the cabin depressurized, the passengers and other flight crew were blown out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths, of course. And there was, I think, she was one of 28 people.
So it was like a smaller aircraft. Investigators, though, believed that the fuselage with Volevich's pinned inside landed at an angle. So it fell down at an angle, not just a splat.
Perfect trajectory.
Yep. And a wooded, snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact. And Volevich's physicians concluded that her history of low blood pressure caused her to pass out quickly after the cabin depressurized and kept her heart from bursting on impact, which I didn't even know that.
Yes, I didn't even know that that was a thing. Yeah.
And I looked it up. What?
Apparently it can.
Bursting?
Yeah. And then it goes back to the old thing of bracing for impact, that if you brace for impact, you're going to see more injuries than not.
I have heard that, like why drunk drivers are better off in an accident.
Yeah, because they don't all tense up.
They're loose.
And so she passed out. So Volevich said that she was aware of her low blood pressure. And again, she's a flight attendant.
So she was aware before applying to become a flight attendant and knew it would result in her failing her medical exam. But she drank an excessive amount of coffee beforehand and it was accepted. So following the crash, Volevich spent days in a coma.
It was hospitalized for several months. She suffered a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, broken legs, broken ribs and a fractured pelvis. So these injuries resulted in her being temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
But she continued to make an almost complete recovery. However, she walked with a limp. That was like the long term repercussions.
After falling 30,000 feet.
No big deal. 33,000 feet.
33,000.
Yeah, because it was above cruising altitude. So yeah, I think if you're going to fall that far, you're going to have a little bit of a limp. Could Paca and Cruzco then survive this fall?
People have survived very high falls. Normally anything, though, above 300 feet when it comes to water. And remember, this waterfall is estimated to be more than double that.
Once you hit 300 feet, that's whenever that water pretty much becomes concrete. For them to have actually survived, it would have to be, again, Volveks in her plane crash, how it's like, oh, she had low blood pressure, she's passed out. Then the plane, she got stuck by a food cart, pinned her against the back wall.
Are they still attached, I don't even remember, are they still attached to the log when it goes over?
Yep, yeah, when it goes over, they're still attached.
So do you think that the log could have broke the surface tension before their bodies hit?
That is my only estimate. That is my only estimate, because you can see that they're still attached when they go over it. And so that was my only guess if they could have realistically survived.
That would have broken it. And too, whenever they come out, then they're not attached to it, so it's almost a cushion, because that took all the impact and not their bodies.
Yeah, splinter apart.
Yeah, that splinter apart and that took all the force, not their bodies. So that's really the only thing that could have possibly happened to where they could have survived.
That is wild.
So that's The Emperor's New Groove, folks.
Geez.
I did way too much math and research on waterfalls for that one.
I did it in a slightly different way than Katy. Our brains normally are similar, but different. I want to start with A Bug's Life.
Oh, that's a good one. I wanted to do movies that I thought would be like half accurate, half inaccurate. I was like, all right, I think they probably got a lot of things right, but I'm sure that they didn't get everything right.
Bug's Life came out in 1998, two years before Emperor's New Groove. It's a Pixar movie. It's one of the early ones.
Real quick synopsis, according to Rotten Tomatoes. Flick is an inventive aunt who always was messing up things for his colony. His latest mishap was destroying the food stores that were supposed to be used to pay off grasshoppers.
Now the strong army insects are demanding that the ants gather double the food or face annihilation. To avert disaster, Flick goes on a journey to recruit fighters to defend the colony. When he meets a band of high-flying circus insects, he thinks he's found his salvation.
That's the synopsis. It doesn't have the ending. Go watch the movie if you haven't.
I did it. What they got right, what they got wrong. I will breeze over what they got right, but I will tell you that they did get a lot of, basically, a lot of insect stuff right.
The basics of the insects, okay? Ants are social. Ants are ants.
Yeah. Birds are the most common predators of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are bigger than ants.
Stuff like that. So I made a list of things. I did more than two.
They'll be short, but I'm just going to shout them out. Here's what they got, like half and half. Ants do follow each other's pheromone trails.
If you remember, the very first image of the movie is this leaf falling.
Again, yeah. I love Pixar in particular. Emperor's New Groove did a good job of picking out the subtle little things, but Pixar, that is what they are known for.
Yeah, yeah. So the leaf falls and they panic, and another ant has to talk them through it. They do follow each other's pheromone trails, but it's not visual.
It's pheromones, which is like by smell. So the leaf probably wouldn't actually have been a huge deal. There is a queen in the movie, but it's not a queen like we think of.
Queen ants don't rule. They just have babies. They don't even leave the colony.
It's not like the queen in this movie. There are young ants depicted in this movie, almost like they're nymphs, but that's not the life cycle of an ant. So ants are born as eggs.
They turn into larvae. They turn into pupa. And then they become adults.
So there are no tiny ants. You come out of your pupa as a full grown ant. That's different kinds of insects.
So that's complete metamorphosis. Gradual metamorphosis is the thing with nymphs, where it's like a tinier one, turning into a bigger one, turning into a bigger one, turning into a bigger one. Grasshoppers would be an example of this.
There could have been children grasshoppers in the gang, but there weren't. There were ants, and the queen in this movie has a pet aphid, which is so cute.
It is really funny. Again, it's the subtle things that give me the giddiness.
And again, kind of, but not quite. So they do farm aphids, but they don't have them as pets. But I think it is pretty cool that ants do herd aphids.
So aphids are like these tiny little insects that suck juices out of plants. So the ants have figured out, or at least certain species of ants, have figured out if they take, basically, escort these little aphids to juicy parts of plants and keep them safe from predators, the aphids produce waste that's really sugary and it's called honeydew. And the ants just basically milk them almost like cows.
They're just drinking the honeydew, like excretions. So yeah, they're just like little farmer ants.
Just your face for a second though, you're like...
It's like poop, but not poop.
I know, but not...
Honeydew.
Honeydew.
Can you imagine if we referred to our own waste as like, honeydew?
We will now. We'll think of a name.
Yeah. Flick at one point goes on his adventure by jumping off on a dandelion seed. I think that's probably happened to an ant once or twice.
Now I want to make it intentional and see if it'll just hang on there. Not for cruelty to ants, but I would do it.
It would survive. It would survive the fall if it let go. My favorite part of the whole movie is when Flick goes to the city, because there are so many hidden gems for adults in this section.
Oh, there are.
There are.
Because no kid would get all of these insect references.
No.
And again, half of them are like kind of right or completely right. One of them was like they're at the circus and the mom, there's a mom holding her baby maggots. And they cry because of something that happens.
Yes, maggots are fly babies, but no, their mothers don't take care of them. But cute. Yes, flies do have compound eyes because the flies are seeing through a fly's eyes at one point a whole bunch of the same image.
It's not really how compound eyes work, but they do have eyes that have lots of different facets. Many bugs, the part where they're like on it, there's like a porch light. It's so beautiful.
And they're like, Just gets zapped. Bugs are attracted to lights. Maybe it's not quite such a compulsion though.
In the bar, the slug is given like a drink and then all of a sudden he starts foaming at the mouth and he says something about, told you not to put salt in it. Yeah. Which, okay, slugs are affected by salt, but it doesn't make them foam with the mouth, instead it makes them slowly dehydrate until they die.
Way more morbid and long.
Yeah.
And then at one point, the black widow spider makes a joke about having 12 dead husbands. And by joke, maybe it's just an anecdote, but that's supposed to seem like a joke because she's a black widow and spiders are supposed to be known for eating their mates. They do occasionally eat their males, but it's not the typical.
No, probably a black widow female would not have eaten 12 of her previous mates. Maybe one, but only if she was feeling not the friendliest. Heimlich the Caterpillar is always hungry in that movie, which is true.
Caterpillars do eat a lot. Crazy fact for you. One Monarch Caterpillar is able to eat 175 to 200 leaps before pupating, which is like a seven pound newborn eating 1400 pounds of formula in two weeks.
That's insane. That's crazy.
1400 pounds of formula. Bananas. Okay, now what they definitely got wrong.
Yes, the ants are social, but there's a lot about this society that does not track. It's very anthropomorphized, which very much Disney. Yeah, it's got to be a good movie.
The ants aren't that interesting.
Yeah, I guess it depends on who you ask. I think they're pretty cool, but they're definitely not that human.
Or coming in hot defending the ants. Hey, they're pretty interesting.
The queen in the movie is training the princess to take her place. But again, not how it works. There's only one female at a time.
The queen's job is to lay all the babies all the time until she dies. And it's very much like bees, which we've covered in a very recent episode about social animals. So it's the same thing.
There's a queen, she lays the eggs. When she's getting old or sick or something, she will have a daughter that will then become the next queen, but there's very little overlap and zero training. Nobody is training the new queen on how to be a queen.
She's just doing her thing.
Which, okay, to be fair, he's still insane to me.
Oh my gosh, yeah, that's even crazier. It would make sense to be trained how to do a job. They don't even need it.
No, they don't need it, but just, even with bees, they just know.
Yeah. I don't think there's really... Man, I'm just like comfortable about anything.
Okay, so let's think of humans here for one second.
What do we instinctually know?
To breathe. I feel like that's about... That's about it.
I think we'd probably figure out sex, and we'd figure out...
Oh, humans would definitely figure out sex.
Yeah, yeah. But I mean, yeah, like instinctually, to reproduce, yeah. Flick is the main character of the movie.
He's a guy. He's a worker ant. There's a lot of worker ants in this movie who are men.
Not how it works, just like bees. All the workers are females. Sorry, Flick.
Males are actually just winged drones.
To be fair, Flick didn't do a whole lot. He didn't really do a whole lot anyway. No, he was a terrible worker.
He just caused a lot of problems, which is accurate for most men. No offense to the men listeners out there, but still.
Males, they're drones, and they have wings. So in the movie, only the queens and the princesses had wings, but actually it's the guys that have wings, except for the female queen. She has wings too.
But typically, the men, their only job is to breed the virgin queens from other colonies. So the whole love story in this thing that ends up panning out.
Not happening.
Flick and the princess would have been siblings, and that's just gross. And even in an ant colony, that would be a big no. You don't mate with your own queen.
You don't mate with your sibling.
Because it's your sibling. Gotta mix up those genetics. And that's like the inaccuracies for the ants.
As far as the grasshoppers, the whole grasshopper-ant conflict thing is just not true. They had to make something in this movie to be the overarching problem. And the problem between ants and grasshoppers is a non-existent problem.
There's no tech in order of these insects. Ants do not collect food for grasshoppers. Grasshoppers don't kill or bully other insects.
Typically. Who knows? Bullying to be determined.
They're herbivores. I've never interviewed a molar insect.
Excuse me. Have you ever been bullied by a grasshopper?
This movie is about ants knowing their place and the order of things. That's not a thing. That's not a thing in the insect world.
In maybe certain social societies within animals, yes, they're higher.
Yeah, but ants just do, ants like very much so do what they need to do because they need to do it.
Yeah, the insects in general, right? They're in the groove. They do their own thing.
Yeah.
But this movie is based on that story of the grasshopper and the ant, which is the whole lesson about if you work hard and you do your thing, you can still... Have you ever heard the story of the grasshopper and the ant? The grasshopper doesn't do anything.
You waste all summer not collecting food. And then he ends up dying in the wintertime. Whereas if you work hard all the time, you'll make it.
Geez, what a capitalistic story. Sounds very...
How Dave Ramsey of them.
Yeah. And then just a couple of other random things I thought were funny, like in the bar, the mosquito orders a drink, but it's a male's voice and male mosquitoes don't drink blood. Only females.
Wrong. And then the pill bugs in the movie, they're supposed to be Hungarian, which I had no idea, but they're Hungarian.
Because yeah, they don't speak English. They don't speak English at all. This is so funny.
We've talked about pill bugs and icepods in our starter insect episode a long time ago. They do curl up into balls, but they do not roll around. They're not like little rolly machines.
Rolly pollies, yes, but they don't actually roll. Two more things. One, the gypsy moth, which is no longer called a gypsy moth.
Man, this whole episode is a throwback to lots of other episodes.
It really is.
Gypsy moth, now called the spongy moth, which I actually saw last weekend and had to come over since they're a bad species. The gypsy moth in the movie is married to a praying mantis, which would not be a good thing. The praying mantis would just eat her.
And she's not even the right color for a gypsy moth. They're not that color, but she needed to be a gypsy moth because of the whole circus thing. Just, this is 1998.
I know.
As far as the ants sticking up for themselves, that would have happened from day one. If a grasshopper would try to go to an ant colony and do anything, those ants would defend their nest and then eat the grasshopper, which would have been a very different Disney movie. Movie over!
They just immediately rise up, butcher the grasshopper, and eat the ant.
The line from Dumb and Dumber comes out where it says our bird's heads are falling off, but instead it's our grasshopper's heads are falling off just all the time.
Yeah, but that's A Bug's Life, so they got a lot right, but they got some stuff wrong too. Let's keep going.
So my next one is not one of... Emperor's New Groove is definitely one of my favorite Disney movies. This one is not one of my favorite Disney movies, but there's a lot that you can make fun of in it, and so that's why I picked it.
So it's Robin Hood. The 1973 cartoon version of Robin Hood.
The one where we all fell in love with a fox. Because he's like a hot fox.
Alright, so just like...
Thanks for sexualizing a fox, Disney. And we can all feel weird about ourselves later.
Or at least Laura, anyway.
I'm definitely not the only one. I feel like some people's first crush is as guys do. I've also heard about guys made Marion was like their crush.
That like female fox.
Again, this movie was made back in 73. And so it is an old... It isn't one of their older cartoons.
Alright, in a nutshell, In the Kingdom of Nottingham, The villainous Prince John, a greedy lion, rules in the absence of his noble brother, King Richard the Lionheart. Prince John levies heavy taxes on the poor, causing hardships and misery for the people. Enter Robin Hood, a charming fox known for his wit, archery skills, and sense of justice.
Alongside him, his loyal companion, little John, who's a bear, Robin Hood and him rob from the rich and corrupt and give back to the poor and downtrodden. Robin's love interest-
His little rabbit friend was always like my favorite.
The one that was always talking like a little kid? Yeah.
He was around our dolly.
Yeah, he always drags the mud everywhere. Robin's love interest is the kind-spirited maid Marion, another fox who shares his desire to help the people of Nottingham. However, their happiness is threatened by the sinister sheriff of Nottingham, a sly wolf who serves Prince John to seek and capture Robin Hood.
As the story unfolds, Robin and his merry band of outlaws, including a rooster and a clever rabbit, the older brother to the one we were just talking about, Skippy, continue to outwit Prince John and the sheriff and unfolds from there. Yeah, it's a Disney movie. They're all going to come out at the end with a lot of historically appropriate things.
Well, plus the real Robin Hood.
Yeah, that Robin Hood story in general.
Is inaccurate. Yeah, because they think now that Robin Hood wasn't a person, but it was a name for almost like a character for a bunch of different people throughout that medieval time period. The people that were like helping, that were really good archers.
So there was like multiple people named Robin Hood. All right. So the first inaccuracy then I want to talk about, though, that is highly unlikely is shooting a Robin Hood, as it's called, just shooting an arrow through another arrow.
But even more broadly. But even more broadly, I want to talk about the whole archery tournament in general, because I learned just just like I learned way too much about waterfalls. I learned way too much about medieval archery tournaments during the research for this one.
Let's talk real quick about what bow and arrows back then in medieval times made from. All right. So bow materials, the primary material used to make bows in the medieval times was, of course, wood.
And the choice of wood varied depending on the availability of local resources and the desired properties of the bow. Because there were different types in longbow, crossbow, a few different types. The most common type of bow used, though, was the longbow.
Because again, the longbow, you could shoot very far, and I'll get into this, but they were pretty much always ready for war during the medieval times. And so the longbow was very useful. But the common types of wood was yew, ash, oak, and elm.
Yew in particular was highly prized for its combination of flexibility and strength. Of course, it's what you need in a bow. Make it an excellent material for high quality longbows.
The process of crafting the bows involved carefully selecting suitable piece of wood, shaping it to the desired bow design, and carefully bending the limbs to achieve the weight and everything that would give you the actual draw of the bow. If you don't know anything about archery, they talk about the poundage, and that's basically like whenever you pull the string back, the force of which is going to come out, you can manipulate how much that bow bends or doesn't bend, and how much you have to pull it, and so it gives you your pound. So the arrow shafts were made from wood, usually chosen for its lightness and straightness.
Popular wood arrow shafts included birch, poplar, and pine. To ensure a straight arrow, the wood was carefully seasoned and straightened using heat and other techniques. So yes, it was like they wanted to pick straight pieces of wood, but then they also manipulated some heat and everything.
That's cool.
Yep. Arrowheads were made from various materials, such as iron, steel, or flint, depending on the availability of resources and whatever the area and everything you're in. Okay, so now let's discuss the shot itself.
For a moment, we have to take out the fact that Robin Hood is a fox and a fox lacks the dexterity to shoot a bow and arrow. Let alone a fox dressed up as a stork. Foxes can't grab a bow and arrow with their paws, let alone paws covered in feathers anyway.
All right, so the shot itself. To split an arrow with another arrow, the archer needs to hit the target precisely in the center. For the most part.
For a true Robin Hood to hit, it's pretty much gotta hit it and it has to be equal parts. This requires exceptional aim and consistency in releasing the arrow. Which, fun fact, I learned that a skilled archer in medieval times could shoot 10 to 13 arrows a minute.
Which is really quick. Accurately too. So the target size.
To make a shot more feasible, let's assume that the target arrow, so the target itself would have to be an arrow, because you're not shooting at a target.
The first time you are, the second time is the arrow.
Is the arrow. And back then, arrows were approximately 5 16ths of an inch. And this size is in line with the dimension of, like I said, medieval arrows back then.
However, during competition... Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, they're thin.
Is a pencil 5 16ths?
I feel like it's around that. Yeah, go ahead. For our calculations then, so you have multiple arrows that are exactly the same size, 5 16ths, 5 16ths.
And then like I said before, the bow itself then ended up being about 6 foot in length. Okay, so let's talk about distance introductory. This is where I started getting in way too deep.
So the distance between the archer and the target is a crucial part of the whole thing, of course. A longer distance makes the shot even more challenging due to the time that the arrow has to take to travel. You have to calculate all that and get used to it.
Start to get some wobble, I'm sure, the longer it...
Yep. So an arrow with a long bow from back then is estimated to have traveled at 170 feet per second. I was like, oh, this will be easy.
I'll just figure out the distance. No, not that simple because distances vary depending on the type of competition. And apparently what they showed in the movie wasn't necessarily how it used to play out.
So what you see them in the movie doing was like, was basically practice. For practicing, they used to shoot at mounds of dirt. And so again, being able to use a longbow, and there was a law that was actually passed.
Let me see, when was that passed? It was written in 1252 that said, all Englishmen between the ages of 15 and 60 had to equip themselves with bows and arrows. And then shortly after this, it became mandatory that everyone practice on Sundays and on holidays.
So that basically they were...
I feel like I've heard that before. I feel like I've heard this fact before. I don't know where or why, but I feel like I've heard it.
I probably had something.
And because it was basically a militia style, so everybody had to be ready to fight. And so they all had to practice. They all had to be good.
Yeah. But whenever they would practice, they would basically shoot into a mound of dirt. All right?
And those mounds of dirt were found all over the place for various reasons, with farming and all kinds of stuff. And so because they were around so much, they made easy targets. But in competitions, that's not what they did at all.
One popular form of competition that seems to be the most popular, what the movie seems to be based off of is called clout shooting. But this is done from around 180 yards away, which there is 180 yards. Like I was looking up all these forms online about these archers that have had the quote unquote Robin Hood arrow shots.
And they're doing it from 20, 30 yards. And that's on present day bows, which are super accurate.
Way more accurate.
Yeah, and very consistent. And being consistent is what's key because you have to have two arrows. You don't re-aim it every time.
It's having two arrows and basically knowing that you can fine-tune your bow and it's going to go where exactly you're going to aim it both times in a row. Back then, you didn't have that consistent. And so the people today are hitting it 20, maybe 30 yards out when they have their Robin Hood shots.
Back then competitions, you were 180 yards away, and you would shoot a white target that is on the ground, but lifted up at a slight angle, because you figure long bows, whenever you were preparing for war, yeah, you were shooting it high in the sky and it was making an arch because you wanted to hit the people very far away. However, clout shooting did not really happen until the 1600s. Now, Robin Hood timeframe, there are stories anywhere from the early 1200s to mid late ish 1300s is what I was saying.
Because it was during the Crusades.
Yes.
Because that's where King Richard is.
Yep. That, the clout shooting, which is what they depict in the movie, that would be the closest thing. Again, not until 1600s.
So the thing that would, the actual competition that they did back then more resembled what we view as like golf.
Yeah, I can see that.
So you stood anywhere, Well, not even that. So you stood anywhere from 130 to 300 plus yards from a target. The target was a wooden post.
And that wooden post was in like a force and it was kind of like hidden because that's how your enemies would be. And so like a golf course, you would aim, take fire. And if you hit the post, then you went to where the post is.
And from that post, you could see and would have to find your next target, shoot that target.
Oh my gosh, that's so cool. I want to play archery golf. That sounds way more fun.
Way more fun than this golf.
Although not while other people are shooting.
Well, so that's my point here. Okay, so let's just say, all right, that what I'm describing, like the archery golf thing, that is more accurate for that time frame. And there's actually documents and like they found basically like maps of these courses in England that were drawn up and lined out.
And that's how we know the distances because they were actually marked in everything. And I am sure during medieval times, someone shot their competitor on purpose. There's no way that didn't happen.
There's no way.
And that's because you're in the woods and people can't see what's happening.
Right? And even whenever they would practice, I was telling you about those dirt mounds, they would shoot. So typically they would get into pairs and they would shoot at opposite sides of it.
That's lunacy.
I mean, yeah, you're probably far enough. Back then, you were far enough away that you shouldn't. But still, man, still.
But there would have had to have been, I don't know, what's the wolf's name? The bad guy wolf in the...
The sheriff nodding him?
Yeah, the sheriff. He probably would have shot Robin Hood, you know what I mean? Out in the course.
Oh yeah.
All right. So the mathematical probability of hitting an exact center of a target with another arrow from what the competition would have been, which is that golf archery from 130 to 345 yards away, is well beyond one in a million, like way past. Now again, like I said, these guys did practice every Sunday, they were mandated to practice, and on holidays.
There was also later on where those clout shooting ones I was talking about was 18 inches in diameter. So you did have to be pretty good, because 18 inches from pretty, what did I say, 180 yards I think is what the men had to shoot from, because men versus women were, just like golf, were like at a different length. But still 18 inches in that diameter target aiming up, that's still pretty dang good.
But the accuracy of back then, being able to hit it from that far away, given the type of competition that Robin Hood would have actually participated in, is just, it's not going to happen. But again, because Robin Hood, the story of Robin Hood came about because he was a good archer and robbing the rich to help the poor. That just became synonymous with anybody who's doing that.
So the second movie and accuracy that I want to briefly hit on is Sir Hiss getting drunk in a barrel. All right, so snakes, like most reptiles, don't have the same capabilities to become intoxicated or drunk in the same way that mammals can. Now, for those of you who haven't seen it or don't remember, during, right after this archery tournament, they find out it's Robin Hood.
Chaos breaks loose. Little John runs up and shoves Sir Hiss in basically a big barrel of ale. And then later on, somebody lets him out and Sir Hiss is all drunk.
So snakes, reptiles don't get drunk the same way. Now that's not rolling out if snakes can get drunk. They just don't quite metabolize in the same way, because we all know snakes, reptiles, metabolize things very slowly, very differently.
Interesting.
Yeah, I did for this one. So mammals possess specific enzymes that help in us. I mean, we're mammals that allow us to break down and do it very quickly.
Whereas snakes, they don't do that. You figure snakes, you can feed them. Sir Hiss was like a, he was some kind of constrictor python of some sort.
So those guys can eat like once a year or more, and then they're fine. If you stick it in a big barrel, it's going to get some in its mouth, it's going to drink, it's whatever. Snakes don't typically do that.
Like they're going to soak in it, whatever, but he's not going to get drunk. But let's just say if he did, they're not going to metabolize it as quickly and as the same way. So it takes-
I think it would kill them.
And that's what I was going to say-
Because they're not metabolizing.
They're not metabolizing it. So most of the time, whenever snakes have gotten quote unquote drunk, people have seen it, but it's all because people in captivity have gotten their snakes drunk. Now we see in the wild, we see birds getting drunk, we see dolphins getting high, we see a lot of other mammals and birds getting drunk from fermented berries and things.
But there really hasn't been anything in the wild because snakes are carnivores.
Right, why would they be eating anything that's fermented?
So whenever snakes have done it, it's been in captivity from stupid snake owners that drink beer or whatever, leave it out, and then the snake gets into it, or who knows? So now in some cases that they have, you can see that they get disoriented and paired movement, but it's, man, they had to have been doing it, like drinking that alcohol or having it in their system for a while.
Yeah, I just am surprised it wouldn't kill them because they can't metabolize it as quickly. And so it would just overrun your... We're breaking it down.
That's why we're not poisoned by it. You would think that they would become poisoned because they're not breaking it down.
But again, it's not a natural thing to see. So the cases that people have, there were a surprisingly amount of Google searches of things that are saying like, hey, my snake drank some of my beer. Will it die?
Because they used to say, if you put...
I would worry about that.
Because there was a thing that went around forever. If you're bit by a snake, pour Listerine on it. Cause the alcohol and it freaks it out.
No, that's just pouring something on its face that it doesn't like.
And I've heard somebody tell me that if a snake bites, you stick a bottle of tequila in its mouth. It's the taste. Of course, it's going to freak out if any kind of liquid shoved in its mouth.
But also, okay, the chances of you getting bit by a snake... Let me just grab my bottle of tequila for my back pocket. You know what I mean?
It's right. It's somebody who's got a crazy person with their crazy captive yelling.
Cancer has get drunk that quickly. If you even look at the battle scene, I don't even think a mammal could get drunk that fast. You would have to be on ale, especially, because that alcohol content is not that high.
You would have to be in there chugging it to be able to, in the few minutes that it took for Sir Hiss to get drunk. Maybe it's just a really big lightweight. Anyway, getting a Robin Hood and then Sir Hiss getting drunk, those are my two very inaccuracies for Robin Hood.
Cool. My other one is actually, it almost would be the same time period as your movie, but I chose a different version of it. I did The Jungle Book for the 2016 version.
I knew you were going to do The Jungle Book.
I just wanted to see from my own research how much they got right versus wrong. I don't even really like The Jungle Book. In fact, as I was watching it, in particular, the 2016 version, and I appreciate their live action, but I don't appreciate it.
I just think Maggley's an annoying character.
No, really, me too.
The acting was very good.
Yeah.
It just, I'm like, but they actually, okay, because this is a much more recent movie, they got lots more right. There's a lot more fact checking happening these days. So basically every species in that movie is correct, but one, as far as yes, they come from that part of the world.
They call out some other things like, pangolins being endangered, honey's nature's ointment, the eye shine I thought was a nice touch, just like a cool little touch.
Man, I haven't seen that in so long.
I wouldn't think about. I've only seen it once. And so this was my second time.
But yeah, lots right. The locations. Okay, so at some point, Maugali says that he is from a particular region in India, the Sioni region, which is in central India.
But a lot of the species that we're seeing are Himalayan species, which would be in the north of India, which would be a heck of a trek for Maugali to make. And he does leave at some point. It's not portrayed as being that far.
There's a couple of other animal inaccuracies that I'm just gonna skip over. Okay, but a bigger one is the wolf council. Maugali's taken in by a wolf pack.
All right, I can see, absolutely see that potentially happening. There has been lots of, there have been actually several counts of feral children surviving out in the wild.
That one kid that was, what was it, French? That was like the crate that, yeah.
So I can see it. But at one point, if the wolves are having a council to determine whether they should kick Maugali out, is there such a thing as a wolf council? You're like, yes and no, okay?
Because wolves, social animal. We typically do think of wolves in the wrong way because forever people have told us that there's like an alpha male, an alpha female, and there's a super big pecking order. There's a hierarchy.
Okay, what we actually know now is it's not quite like that. Really, we should be thinking it in terms of the dominant mating pair, the subordinate mating pair, and then just the single people. It's not so like, you're above me and I'm above you.
But it is certainly not a democracy, not a council. But they do all have a role, and they all work together, but not a democracy. So no wolf councils.
There's another one that was interesting, which I couldn't find any legend. This is just purely from the book that Rudyard Kipling wrote, The Jungle Book, that these movies are based on. So in his book, he references that the elephants created the jungle.
The gouges from their tusks made the rivers run. They blew the leaves that fell. They made the mountains, the trees, the birds in the trees, but they didn't make man.
And so Bagheera is telling Maugali this as they meet elephants for the first time. And so obviously this sounds like a legend. And I guess it's just something that Rudyard Kipling made up, or maybe he heard while he was over there a long time ago.
But although, of course, we know that elephants don't create anything from nothing, or they don't create the jungle in that way, they are ecosystem engineers.
They are, yeah.
And so what I mean by this is that they do create and maintain habitat for countless other species. Beavers are ecosystem engineers. Certain large tortoises are ecosystem engineers.
They are shaping the land. So they didn't make the forest, but elephants do maintain the forest. There's lots of evidence backing this up.
They're trampling the undergrowth as they walk and they're keeping vegetation low. When they feed, they push over trees, which creates open spaces in the jungle and keeps it open and lets new species grow. It maintains biodiversity and the fallen trees create shelter for lots of different species.
As they walk around, they're pooping a lot. And in their scat is the seeds that they've eaten. They are seed dispersers all over the jungle.
And they play a major role in soil aeration and the nutrient cycle. So studies have demonstrated that the presence of elephants increases soil carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other essential elements. Everything about the elephants is just making the forest a better place.
The forest has evolved with the elephant. The elephant is helping that. Creating the jungle in a roundabout way, but not in the way that Bagheera is saying.
Okay, Shurkan kills Mowgli's father. Okay, not typical. Tigers do kill people though.
And not that I want to freak anybody out with statistics. But here I go. But I do think it's important that people do understand and respect big cats.
Oh gosh, yeah.
And of course, most of us should, and we don't have to live in the world, part of the world with tigers, but tigers kill 40 to 50 people annually. That's a lot of people. And overall, tiger deaths in the last decade have risen, probably because our human population has increased and their populations have increased and habitat loss.
And so we're bumping into tigers all the time now. So something, unfortunately, something's got to give. However, Shurkan is like this bloodthirsty, like he's got a serious chip on his shoulder and he's holding a grudge.
Is that something that tigers would do? Probably not. But there is a famous tiger known as the Champawat Tigress, who in the early 1900s is accused of killing over 400 people.
Geez, that sounds like he has a chip on his shoulder.
Yeah, that must have been Shurkan's mama because, oh my, 400 people. And again, early 1900s, could it have been multiple tigers and everyone's just like, it was that one.
I was just gonna say that. It's not like a folklore, yeah.
But in plenty of articles, they're like, yeah, it could have been.
Same way as like River Monsters, like when Jeremy Wade, he goes into those villages to talk to people about the various fish, they give it a name. It is the species that they're referring to, but they give it one name, even though it could live hundreds of years, they claim. You know what I mean?
Just the folklore behind it.
Chappawatt Tigris.
Something is Robin Hood, different individuals, but it's just the one reputation of Robin Hood.
Yeah, you never know. I thought another thing that seemed pretty unlikely was that the leopard doesn't kill the baby immediately after he finds it. But.
Bite-sized snack, yeah.
There are weird instances, in particular of leopards taking care of young prey animals. There was once a leopard that guarded a baby baboon for a while and another one who guarded a baby impala for a while. However, the one was certainly a female leopard.
I couldn't find the other one. That seems more like crazy mother hormones.
Yeah. Give me a baby and I'll take this one.
Yeah. Okay, one other one. The insane orangutan thing that is King Louie.
There's everything about him.
At first you're like, is this an orangutan? And then in his song, here at first, he himself is gigantopithecus, which I thought was a really interesting touch. Why Disney decided to call it a gigantopithecus?
Don't know, but gigantopithecus is an extinct species of ape that was closely related to an orangutan.
That's what I was going to say. Yeah, it was a species back, yeah.
Yeah, but skeletons were found in Asia, not India. So not the right part of the world.
India is Asia, but not in that area.
Not in that area of, yes, sorry. And then I think that they were found closer to where orangutans are now. Eastern Asia.
Yeah, Borneo, more islands.
Rather than like central. Gigantopithecus was 9.8 feet tall. Estimated, because honestly, the only thing they've ever found of gigantopithecus with its teeth.
Okay, yeah, this goes back to my whole beef with paleontologists and scientists making up stuff because they just, they found a few teeth and they're like, you know what? Or it could just have really freaking big teeth, guys. He doesn't have to be huge.
Maybe he just has big teeth.
Could have been 9.8 feet tall. King Louie in the movie, probably Gigantopithecus. Would it have been?
No, Gigantopithecus went extinct 350,000 years ago. So unless one of them was living in these ruins, I just don't understand why they made this choice.
Yeah, that's weird. Whenever you could have just said it was just a big ring.
Yeah, they're both just as unlikely as each other.
I mean, exotic animal trade gets out. Even back then, they were moving animals.
All right. What they definitely got wrong, the water truce. Okay, there is this whole thing in the movie about when the water truce rock is seen, everybody gets to go get a drink of water and nobody gets killed while at the watering hole.
Absolutely false. That's like a predator's whole thing. We are specifically going to wait at the watering hole so that we can eat.
Some people are like on Reddit are like, well, don't you think that like predators would know if they kill too many at the watering hole, then they would know that it would.
Okay, they don't know.
Even if they did know and resource managed, they still need to eat. The ones who ate at watering holes would be the ones who get to pass on their genes. Think about crocodiles.
They're literally in the watering hole. So not going to be like, all right, there's a drought guy, sorry, I'm not going to eat you. They're definitely going to eat you.
And they're going to have an easier time of it because the water is shallower. The water is true. Nope, not a thing.
A weird one that I just couldn't get over is the fact that Mowgli wears a loincloth. Of course they do because it's a Disney movie and they're not going to show a naked kid running around the jungle. Well, Mowgli's not going to be wearing a loincloth.
He's just going to be a naked kid running around.
He's going to be a naked kid running around the jungle. I don't care if he was found with pants on or not.
I forget, wasn't the feral kid in France, he was naked. But I mean, there was like all kinds of stuff messed up with that kid.
Oh yeah, language. Mowgli would never be able to speak. Like once you reach age two, if you don't learn to speak, you might never speak or something like that.
There's an age cut off. Maybe it's four. Something like that.
Okay, Ka, the snake. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Interesting choice.
Snake don't hypnotize people. All right. I guess there's the whole like, it seems like prey sometimes is hypnotized.
They know they're probably petrified, but they're not hypnotized. Ka literally makes Maugly see visions. Not a thing.
I promise you, if you look into a snake's eyes, you won't see visions unless you're on drugs.
Yeah. That's what I was saying. Unless you're on something, you might, but...
Yeah. And Ka is supposed to be, if it's the correct species, she's probably supposed to be a rock python, which comes from that area, has the same markings. But the record for a rock python is 14 and a half feet.
Ka's way bigger than that. It's not going to happen. No snake's going to get that big.
The whole... What is Baloo? What species is Baloo?
Because I feel like we're getting really conflicting messages in this movie. Bagheera calls Baloo a sloth bear. But I think it's because it's a joke, because he's lazy.
But sloth bears do come from India. But Baloo does not have the right markings for a sloth bear. He has top teeth in top incisors, which with sloth bears don't have top incisors.
What he looks like is a Himalayan brown bear. Himalayan brown bears also live in India. They look like him.
They would act like him. But Bagheera calls him a sloth bear. So like, is it a joke?
Is it just like they got the look wrong? But if he is a Himalayan brown bear, they do hibernate. So all of his referencing to hibernation is true.
Although they imply in the movie that bears in the jungle don't hibernate, which is true. Bears in jungles don't hibernate. Tropical bears don't have to.
But Himalayan brown bears that live in the northern parts of India do. Again, it totally depends on what species he is, whether or not he's hibernating. Let's see what else.
There's a couple of other things. All right, one last one. We'll just end it on the elephants.
The whole movie ends with Mowgli burning down the jungle. OK, great. I guess the tiger is dead.
Now everyone else is homeless.
Yeah, way to go, Mowgli.
Way to go, Mowgli. But that the elephants prevent this whole disaster because they dam up the river, flood the burning jungle, and everything is OK. I love elephants and they are so intelligent.
But I don't think there's any evidence of elephants being that altruistic or forward thinking. Like if the jungle is burning, the elephants are getting out of there. They're not firefighters.
They're not firefighters.
They'd be cool.
But no. Yeah, they would be running. They would be running.
Yeah, they would panic. OK, actually, the last thing is the incredible fight scenes that keep happening in this movie. Who's going to win in these fights?
You've got leopard versus tiger. You've got bear versus tiger. You've got wolves versus tiger.
You've got bear and leopard versus monkeys. There's so many fights in this movie.
Yeah, one after the other, yeah.
Here's my opinion and a few couple of facts about these fights. All right, monkey versus bear versus leopard fight. When Baloo and Big Ear are fighting the monkeys, this is just a numbers thing.
All right, sure, leopards and bears, epic. They'd kill a lot of monkeys, but hundreds of monkeys? They'd kill a lot of monkeys.
Yeah, because you're just overwhelmed at some point. Monkeys suck, and they're vicious.
It just takes a couple of eye gouges, I think, to end those fights. Also, preface this with none of these fights would even happen because these animals wouldn't fight. They would just avoid one another.
This isn't ever going to happen. All right, tigers versus wolves. One tiger versus one wolf, tiger wins every time.
Again, though, never would happen because the wolf would run away. Tiger versus wolf pack depends on how many. Again, a numbers thing, like a tiger is really good.
But a lot of wolves, I think, would be overwhelming. Tiger versus leopard, a fagira versus shirkan. That is correct.
Definitely shirkan would kick fagira's ass. Hands down. The size difference between those two animals, so a Bengal tiger, which is what shirkan surely is, a large male, 10 and a half feet long, 650 pounds.
Extreme. An Indian leopard male, which is what fagira is supposed to be, four foot eight in length, 154 pounds. That's like what I weigh, versus a 650 pound animal.
Tiger's winning. Then the interesting fight is Baloo versus shirkan. It is a pretty long fight, because definitely they would be fairly evenly matched.
So like I said, I just told you how big the Bengal tiger was. Ten and a half feet, 650 pounds. A Himalayan brown bear.
So if this is what I think Baloo is, a Himalayan brown bear, they are seven and a half feet long and 880 pounds.
Yeah, so not quite as long, but beefy.
But beefier. The bear has the size, but the tiger probably has the fight skills, because a tiger is a predator.
They actually take down elephants.
Their whole thing is to kill. Whereas a brown bear, they're omnivores. They're doing the easy thing.
In particular, Blue, who's all about the easy life. He's not going to be in shape. He's big, but he's not going to be agile and he's not going to know how to fight to kill.
I think Shere Khan would win, like he kind of did in the movie. But it would certainly be an interesting fight. And that's Jungle Book.
We've already had an episode about, could you fight that?
Could you fight that? Is it just animal vs. animal?
Alright, was that your last one then?
Yeah, people are probably like, I don't care how accurate they are.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed. We even ruined the movies.
They're still worth watching for the most part. The Emperor's New Groove that you gotta go see if you haven't.
The other ones are like, hey! Absolutely. Emperor's New Groove, if you haven't seen it, 10 out of 10, recommend for a ridiculousness of just funny lines.
Alright, hopefully you enjoyed. I'm sure we're gonna hit more movie ones in the future just because it is really easy to point out things that are wrong. But until then, we will talk to you guys next week.
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Cool. Talk to you all next week. Bye.