Hello Internet!
Welcome to Film Theory!
Where today, we're taking the Lego challenge,
nope, not the one that ruins your feet, the one that ruins your childhood.
Now, even though we're talking about movies created from simple toys,
"You know the rules, this isn't a toy!"
Uh, it kind of is...
"No, actually it's a highly sophisticated interlocking brick system."
Fine, even though we're talking about movies created from highly sophisticated interlocking brick systems,
I'm still not gonna be pulling any punches.
I'm bringing Lego out of the hypothetical movie magic, and into the real world ...of Batman...
Which is kind of weird, since Lego is real and Batman isn't,
so uuuuh, let me clarify,
I'm bringing the fictional Lego characters who canonically exist in the real world,
but it's a fictional real world,
out of their separate fictional reality and into the reality based fiction of Batman.
I think that makes sense.
Regardless, despite us being several levels of Inception down,
Our premise is surprisingly simple:
Who is stronger?
DC Batman or Lego Batman?
Literally since the day that I first saw The Lego Movie,
(Which, if you haven't seen it, it's fantastic and heartwarming)
I have asked myself this question.
And now finally with The Lego Movie sequel coming out,
it gives me the perfect chance to finally answer this question five years in the making,
and I get it, I know that you're thinking this is a stupid question to dedicate an episode and half a decade of waiting to cover.
Of course IRL Batman is gonna be stronger.
He is a 200-pound-ish man versus a three gram Lego minifig.
But what I want to know is their strength relative to their overall size.
Lifting a 10 pound dumbbell is nothing to a regular human,
but it would be a feat of incredible strength for a tiny Lego minifigure.
So we need to measure each of them in their respective universes.
As our real-life Batman contender I've chosen what I think is the best version of Batman that isn't made of pressed and formed plastic,
the Nolan Batman from The Dark Knight trilogy.
Don't tweet at me, or do tweet at me actually, at @MatPatGT.
I'd love to have you as a Twitter follower.
I tweet very relatable things!
So, we'll be going with his strength versus Lego Batman in our big showdown today.
Now when it comes to measuring strength, there are a lot of different ways to do it,
so, we're gonna look at two main factors:
1. How much strength they exert,
and 2. How much damage they can take.
Offense and defense.
So let's start things off with a bang
-or rather, kick!
What are the best measures of Lego Batman strength comes when he's at home,
completely unaided by his gadgets,
and with nothing but his raw strength and excellent reflexes.
"I have incredible reflexes!"
Yeah, that's what I just said, Lego Batman.
And we see those reflexes at work when he's caught off guard by Alfred, and kicks him into the piano.
A piano that is completely across the room.
It's safe to say that he's not holding back anything in this moment,
since he's acting purely on instinct,
and I'm gonna assume it'd be pretty hard for Christian Bale to match the results
of kicking someone his own size halfway across a giant mansion's lounge.
So it would seem that Lego Batman in this instance would definitely be stronger than IRL Batman,
but to be sure, let's run some numbers.
When it comes to calculating strength, we can always rely on our good old buddy,
Sir Isaac Newton and his second law of motion,
which tells us that Force = Mass x Acceleration,
or, to loyal theorists who've been watching the show for a while,
F=MA.
Mass here is pretty straightforward,
since Alfred is the thing that's moving, we need the mass of Alfred.
And he has the same mass as his identical minifigure in the real world of 2.98 grams.
To figure out his acceleration, we need to use the information that we see on screen.
Going through the movie frame by frame,
Alfred is airborne for 17 frames.
Given that the footage is 24 frames per second, that works out to a total air time of 0.7083333 seconds.
And the distance he's traveling in that amount of time across Batman's room appears to be 28 studs,
A stud here not referring to Batman,
*Careless Whisper*
but the bump on top of a Lego brick that allows it to interlock with other bricks.
which works out to be 22.26 centimeters in length.
so knowing the distance and the time tells us that Alfred is flying at a velocity of 31.426 centimeters per second.
So now that we have Alfred's travel velocity we can determine the acceleration at the moment of impact,
and by moment, I really do mean moment because going back to our frame-by-frame footage,
Batman's foot connects with Alfred's face for literally one frame.
A mere 0.04166 seconds (or 41.66 milliseconds).
Lego Batman was not lying about his incredible reflexes
That means that our acceleration ends up being a whopping 754.3 Centimeters per second squared,
or heck, forget centimeters,
that's big enough to measure it in big boy units, that's 7.5434 Meters per second squared.
So plug in all that back into our good old F=MA equation,
We're able to find out that Lego Batman's kick is delivering 0.02248 Newtons of force,
(or 0.0050537 pounds of force)
that may seem like a small number, and it is, but remember, Lego Batman is a small guy.
Meaning that that's a pretty darn impressive kick for someone of his size and weight.
Which means that if we're gonna make a fair comparison between the relative strengths of these two Batmans,
we need to measure it in terms of their strength to weight ratio.
How strong are they relative to how heavy or big they are?
So Lego Batman's strength to weight ratio when he makes this kick is 0.00505 pounds of force
divided by 0.00657 pounds of weight for a strength weight ratio of 0.769.
That's the equivalent of a 200-pound man kicking with a 153.8 pounds of force.
Is that actually impressive?
Well to find out let's compare him to Christian Bale-man.
Now Christian Bale's Batman has plenty of solid kicks throughout the Dark Knight trilogy,
But all of them are a bit hard to measure based on pure strength alone.
There's just too many variables and jump cuts around each of these fight scenes.
That said, this simple scene in the Dark Knight Rises of him shattering some bricks with a kick
actually gives us something solid to work with.
So, how much strength does it take to break some bricks?
For that information, we turn to astronaut Ronald McNair.
Like a lot of astronauts Ronald McNair was an MIT trained physicist.
Unlike a lot of astronauts he was also a fifth degree black belt in karate.
Luckily for us, those two interests intersected and in one demonstration of his brick shattering strikes,
he actually had the force recorded the bricks broke when he exerted 675 pounds of force.
So, using the weight that Christian Bale was when he filmed the Dark Knight trilogy of 210 pounds,
We're able to determine that IRL Batman's strength to weight ratio is 3.214.
Over 4 times stronger than Lego Batman, even when you're talking in relative terms.
I am very surprised by that result actually.
I mean, look at the difference of those two kicks!
So, just comparing the strength of their kicks, it seems like Lego Batman loses out to big boy Christian Bale.
And he's not just losing to Batman but most normal people in this instance.
The average person is able to leg press 1.8 to 2.2 times their own body weight,
Meaning that Lego Batman is less than half the strength of a normal person.
You sure you're not skipping leg day there, Batman?
"Who never skips leg day? Batman!"
But maybe this wasn't a fair comparison.
Maybe the Lego characters' lack of knees holds them back when they try to kick.
So, let's see how the two Batmen stack up against each other defensively.
Of all the abuse we see Lego Batman take,
probably the most savage hit comes in The Lego Batman Movie's opening action scene,
when the Joker succeeds in ramming Batman head-on with his car.
Once again, we need to calculate force which means getting mass and acceleration.
Mass here is easy, the Joker is driving his "Notorious Lowrider" Lego set number 70906-1,
now available for $39.99 wherever Lego sets are sold.
Just in case you forgot that all the Lego movies are ultimately an attempt to sell plastic toys to kids.
Having access to a real-world version of the Lego vehicle means that we can easily find its mass
0.63 kilograms or 1.38 pounds and yes that does include the mass of the Joker who is driving inside.
Ah, I love doing episodes where all this information just exists because there are real-life products!
For acceleration, we followed a similar procedure to the kicks,
measuring distances and times using frame by frame calculations,
ultimately winding up with 4.6226 meters per second squared.
So now that we have mass and acceleration,
we can calculate force out to be 2.912 Newtons or 0.654 pounds.
Again, that looks like a small number,
but this time when we adjust it for Batman's weight, things change drastically.
The ratio of the force he's able to sustain versus his weight is 99.653!
That's the equivalent of a 200-pound man getting smacked with 19,930 pounds of force.
And yet here's Lego Batman just shrugging it off.
That Danish made plastic is built to last.
So, it's no surprise that a Lego superhero would have the same kind of durability.
Surprise surprise, plastic can take a lot more abuse than a human tissue.
Or if so we'd assume, but to know for sure, let's check back in with our Dark Knight.
while Lego Batman has to contend with Joker and Sauron, and Godzilla and Voldemort,
Nolan's Batman suffers defeat at the hands of a much more mundane villain.
"Who else drives you to one-up them the way that I do?"
"Bane!"
"No he doesn't!"
Oh, but yes he does!
In the Dark Knight trilogy, there's only one villain who succeeds in beating Batman in hand-to-hand combat,
by giving him injuries that take months to recover from,
and his name ain't Joker!
"I was wondering what would break first!"
"Your spirit, or your body!"
After all these years, that voice is still so weird to me!
Anyway, Batman's body does break,
but how much punishment is Batman's body actually taking?
You know the drill by now: F=MA
Analyze the footage find the change in velocity during the moment of impact,
multiply it by Batman's canonical weight of 95 kilograms or 210 pounds,
and boom, you got it! The force.
At the moment of impact Batman's body's deceleration is 7.46 meters per second squared,
multiply that by his mass and you find the impact of Bane's spine shattering attack to be
708 Newtons, or 159 pounds of force,
which is not impressive, not impressive at all actually.
It's not even enough to break a back.
Now that might seem weird at first, that we had a miscalculation somewhere along the line
But that's not actually true.
What it's really telling us is that this scene was filmed practically,
they use an actual stunt actor rather than using
CG to make the impact look more brutal.
And when you're filming stuff for real,
you don't want the actor to be subject to forces that would actually break their back.
Bane may not be pulling any punches in the fictional world of Batman,
But apparently Bane's actor Tom Hardy here in the real world does, probably for the best.
So to be a bit more fair to the live-action version of Batman,
we can probably compare his body to that of a typical human
to get a more accurate estimate for how much damage he could take from a supervillain like Bane.
According to Ali Bydon, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
a spinal injury like the one that we see in the movie would require about
3,000 Newtons of force or about 674.4 pounds of force
It's an impressive number to be sure,
but it's a far cry from LEGO Batman's weight adjusted 19,930 pounds of force,
So we're tied 1-1.
In terms of durability, small plastic figurines blow humanity out of the water,
but when it comes to feats of kicking strength, movable leg joints are apparently super useful.
Except, there's something else here.
Something that clearly decides this Batman buff boy battle once and for all.
You see, punches and kicks aren't the best way to determine Lego Batman's actual strength.
Him at his strongest is actually showcased in something much more mundane and commonplace in the Lego-verse: building.
In the original Lego movie,
they make a big big deal out of the fact that certain people in the LEGO universe are master builders,
making people like Batman, Emmet and Unikitty part of this elite group.
"Master builders spend years training themselves to clear their minds enough,
and yet, your mind is already so prodigiously empty that there is nothing in it to clear away in the first place."
And it's this creative ability to think outside the box,
or without instructions that make master builders so powerful in the Lego-verse.
Except, maybe there's another quality than just pure creativity that matters.
You see, at the start of the movie, when Emmet is going to work at the construction site,
it seems like there's a lot of workers and infrastructure to accomplish that should be relatively simple tasks,
like connecting a 1x2 plate to another plate.
Hammers, cranes, hundreds of workers are involved in this process.
And yet later on in the movie,
we see the master builders doing things like this in seconds,
with pieces that are much larger than themselves.
It really does take a feat of super strength to whip those LEGO creations together.
How much super strength? Glad you asked.
Because we're working with Legos, a widely used consumer product,
the data is available to us, and according to a report measuring strength required to build with Legos,
the brick separation on just 2 2x2 bricks measures out at 5.2 pounds.
That is over a thousand times the force that we calculated for when Lego Batman kicked Alfred across the room.
That means that his strength to weight ratio suddenly skyrockets.
It comes out to 791.48 that's the equivalent of our 200 pound Christian Bale exerting 158,295 pounds of force.
Just imagine some dude, or heck, Batman walking up to an adult male African bush elephant,
(the heaviest land animal on the planet)
and just, you know, lifting it up.
And then just casually lifting up 11 more.
That is the equivalent of what Lego Batman is doing here every time he pries apart two Lego bricks.
This means that not only does Lego Batman handily beat out our Nolan Batman, but he does so to an absurd degree.
Not only is the Lego Batman one of the best written and best performed Batmen in history,
but strangely enough, he's also the most super-powered.
Dear DC, now that the news has broken that your extended universe is in need of yet another replacement for the man in black,
I've got a little guy who just might be the missing piece you're looking for.
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