You know those parents who
took their young kids to see Deadpool,
then got super offended by how mature the movie was?
Can the opening to Deadpool 2
just be him delivering a PSA
on the movie rating system to all parents
who don't know better? Hahaha!
Now that would be incredible!
[Opening Theme Music]
Hello Internet!
Welcome To Film Theory! The show that's gonna get through
an entire Deadpool episode without
mentioning chimichangas once.
Oh wait. Does that count?
Crap, But if I can get serious here for a moment.
This year Bill and Melinda Gates...
Yes, those Gates, reached out to me.
Yes, that me,
to do a video about superpowers!
It's pretty awesome, right?
You see, every year the Gateses write a letter outlining their take on key global issues.
With this year's letter being called, "Two Superpowers We Wished We Had."
In the letter, they challenged the reader to imagine what their superpower for good would be.
The goal of the letter is to broaden awareness and get each of us involved
to help make a positive, lasting change in the world.
It's an incredibly noble cause and honestly I'm honored to be included as part of the campaign.
It's funny, but when I think of what I can do to try and make a positive
change in the world, I honestly think of these channels.
Because yeah, for as goofy and inane it might be to analyse the real world physics of Ant Man's suit
or the deadliness of a Bullet Bill,
I like to think it's giving you a bit of education along the way.
Maybe brightening your day.
And so no, It's not curing cancer or anything, but I'm never going to be the type to do that.
Instead I'd like to think that these videos make at least, some of your worlds just a little bit happier.
And teach some of you at least something new every week.
Or who knows, I might be living in a dream world.
Anyways, sappy stuff aside
As I was thinking about what superpower I'd want
I immediately thought:
I wanna be DEADPOOL !
(Sound of relief)
"I am very turned on right now."
Uhh! Not quite in that way.
I-I want his healing factor.
In the world of comic books, its a pretty common ability
that does exactly what it sounds like,
enhancing a persons ability to recover from wounds quickly.
There are tons of different variations of the healing factor ability across comic books.
But probably the two most iconic are Wolverine's and of course...
Deadpool's.
And this relationship is no coincidence.
Deadpool got his healing factor from a serum derived from Wolverine.
What, do they just have needles full of this stuff lying around?
Go into the ol' Walgreens, get my flu vaccine, and follow up with a healing factor chaser?
Great! Sign me up!
"Ughh, god you are hard to look at"
Oh, oh is that what happens?
Hmmm, well good thing my most my channels are voice over anyway.
[Ba-dum Tssss!]
Their regenerative ability gives them an incredibly strong resistance to chemicals and toxins
which is great for protecting against vats of acid and not so great for getting drunk.
It also boosts the immune system, rendering them pretty well protected against most diseases.
It even gives them resistance to Telepathic Control.
So no one's hopping into Deapool's head commanding him to dress as a girl,
he's just doing that all on his own.
The factor is so quick that it keeps the body's cells from growing old, halting aging almost completely.
In short, Deapool and Wolverine are both basically immortal.
Which begs the question.
How do you kill them?
How do you kill the unkillable?
If I'm gonna inject myself with healing factor, what do I need to look out for here?
Well, after doing the research, it looks like most sources have over-looked the factor's one huge weakness.
The fatal-flaw that makes it easy to take down these two characters.
Well 'most' sources have over-looked it anyway
and it's going to surprise you which one happens to be, the most accurate.
Now first, let me make it clear, that I know both characters have died before.
But honestly, it's tended to result from some pretty cheap means.
So I'm discounting all things that turn off or counter-act the healing factor.
That, quite frankly, is a cop-out from writers who wrote themselves into a corner
by making characters that were too powerful.
In my analysis today, we're finishing these guys off in a perfectly natural way
that doesn't require some magical anti-heal.
Additionally, we're not pulling a Dragon-Ball Z and talking about disintegrating every last cell.
Too easy as an explanation, and quite frankly, too difficult to actually execute.
I mean, in Uncanny X-men annual #11 Wolverine actually grows his entire body back from a single drop of blood.
That's pretty darn impressive.
Like to see that in the next X-men movie.
But, in all seriousness, that's assuming you're able to disintegrate him that fast.
Which in and of itself is a challenge.
I mean, in Venom #9 Wolverine is able to heal after a nuclear bomb destroys a village.
A nuclear bomb!
And if you think he just got lucky, well think again.
It happens another time in Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk.
Lightning may not strike twice, but apparently nuclear warheads do.
Look, the 'How to kill them' problem is so bad, that even Professor Charles Xavier doesn't know.
In his Xavier Protocols, which are basically his to do list for when a powerful Mutant becomes a threat to the world,
he makes a note to himself that reads thusly: 'Decapitation', and you'd think that this is a guy who'd know right?
I mean say what you want about his nonstop cries of agony in the animated series.
(Cries of pain)
The guy is smart.
A world leader in mutant abilities.
And yet for some superhealers like Wolvie and DP. Decapitation has also been disproven.
Man if you can't behead them and a bomb can't disintegrate them fast enough. What's gonna to do it?
Uhh, I don't know! Two alternate universe Earths smashing together?
Wow, what an oddly specific cosmic event I've just described there.
But uhh, yes, actually that'll do it.
A multi universe Earth crash is the exact reason why Deadpool is currently dead in the comics.
But again, I'm just a simple man with a totally average cosmic altering powers,
and I need something doesn't need to escalate that quickly.
Put those nuclear war heads away...
Put 'em away.
Nooo.
Good. Good.
Because the healing factor's weakness is much simpler than all of this.
Wolverine, and especially Deadpool, are vulnerable to every single one of you viewers watching right now and it all has to do with the brain.
Or more specifically, memories.
Because, sure these guys may be able to regenerate their whole body from a single drop of blood,
but one thing the factor can't regenerate is memory.
Let me explain.
You see first thing to understand about memory formation and why you can't regenerate memories is that memories aren't stored.
They're not physical things.
Neurons, the cells in the brain. Are physical things and healing factor is made to restore or replace damaged cells.
But neurons are not the same as memories and that's the problem here.
Memories are signals. A short term memory,
Say the last diet coke you drank, is a pattern of signals in your mind. #NotSponsored.
#JustAnAddict
So you drink a diet coke and the sensation you get from it trigger a signal in a specific neurons in your pre-frontal cortex.
The area that stores short term memory.
That signal starts of as an electric potential created by ions moving in and out of the cells at one end of the neuron.
That electrical signal then triggers a chemical signal.
Which is a physical transfer of ions from one neuron to another.
Physically transferring ions causes the electrical
signals in the next neuron to change.
Which is how the electrical and chemical
signal is carried across a lot of neurons.
In short, it's a chain reaction.
So how then, do these signals create memories?
Well, each of your memories has a specific chain reaction of signals
across a specific set of neurons.
Your diet coke signal started the first time
you cracked open a diet coke and felt it's cool, crisp, refreshing burn slide
down your throat.
When you took that first sip,
some of your taste neurons sent
a signal to some of your other taste neurons in a specific pattern as you thought:
"Mhmm."
"This is bubbly and habit forming."
The pattern of neurons firing for your
drinking diet coke memory is different from the pattern for your drinking
orange juice memory or, your tasting chocolate pattern.
It's specifically your diet coke pattern, and it gives you a specific memory of diet coke.
I-I swear this isn't sponsored. I just have a problem.
Now let me be clear.
All electrical signals going on between two individual neurons is basically the
same across the entirety of your brain.
What makes something a memory is the specific set of neurons that are
activated in association with a particular activity.
The brain has a hundred million neurons.
So if a few of them are involved in each memory.
The brain has the theoretical potential to store almost an infinite
number of memories based on how many combinations of neurons there are and
how many unique patterns of signals you can create.
In this way, the brain is an incredible storage system.
And how do these things get stored?
Well, when you experience something once,
a few of your neurons start a signal pattern.
When you think back to remember that experience
your brain is actually recreating
that same signal pattern again.
When you've only experienced something once, you can
only dimly recreate that pattern when you think about it
or it fades away pretty fast.
If you want to improve your recall of that experience
you have to reinforce it.
To do that, you have to experience it again.
So you drink a second diet coke.
Then another and before long you have an
emotional dependence.
#winning
Every time you repeat the activity you
trigger the same signal pattern over and over again
and your brain starts to
store that pattern in a long-term memory area,
The hippocampus.
The neurons get a little bit closer to each other and, when that
happens, the signal becomes stronger because chemicals don't have to travel that far.
The signals also become stronger and more frequent.
So over time those memories become ingrained
because the signal patterns have been used so much.
So then, why can't Wolverine or Deadpool just regenerate memories?
Quite frankly, it's because there's nothing to regenerate.
Based on what we've outlined, the memory isn't part of the neuron,
it's a pattern of signals between neurons.
It's a tricky concept so let me explain it this way.
When you learn about physics
you learn about electrical currents,
which is a movement of electrons.
You can think of memories in a lot the same way. In physics you can measure an electric
current, you can turn it on and off, etc.
But it's not a physical thing you can
hold in your hand.
The current runs through the wires and generates electricity.
But just because
you make a wire doesn't mean there is automatically a current running through it.
In humans, you can theoretically rebuild the neurons.
They're a lot like the wires running all through the brain.
But just having the neurons there doesn't mean
that the right electrical pattern will run through them.
Memories only happen when the specific neurons in your brain have already experienced something.
New cells don't come equipped with memories.
When you regenerate an arm, or a leg, or a creepy little baby hand, those are new body
parts and their function doesn't require you to have experienced something before.
But newly regenerated neurons are like baby neurons.
They're brand new, they're a blank slate!
Which is great because they're intact, but bad because
only neurons with experiences have memories.
New neurons have to start from scratch,
even if they're all in the right place.
To put it simply, our two super healers
can grow back the brain cells, sure, but not the brain's electrical patterns.
And as a result they're a blank shell, a husk.
A being without memories. Think about it! Sure, they may look like
Wolverine and Deadpool, but they won't act like them.
Without those neural connections they lose the elite fighting training and arrogant personalities that
make them, them.
It's something that, in my research, literally no one has addressed.
Well, almost no one, and that is the biggest irony of all.
In the movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine,
Yeah, we're talking about that one.
A movie, mind you, that is on practically every list of worst superhero movies of all time.
The villain Striker shoots Wolverine multiple times in the head with adamantium
bullets. Piercing his skull and destroying his brain.
His line as he does this?
"His brain may heal, but his memory won't grow back."
And of course,
this is exactly what happens.
His brain is destroyed and his memories go away.
Wolverine has amnesia. And remember, this is the movie so bad that it didn't give
Deadpool a mouth.
Deadpool, the Merc with a mouth! You had one job guys!
One!
Then they chose to make it look like Baraka from Mortal Kombat.
Because why not?
It's a movie so bad that they mistakenly think that wolves are the same as Wolverines!
They can't get that right, but somehow
they're the only one who's able to get the science right?!
I - I-I don't even know what to say! And here's the thing, Deadpool is even more
vulnerable than Wolverine was in this scene.
Logan's skeleton is coated with adamantium.
A fictional metal that's basically the hardest material ever created.
It took bullets made of the stuff to puncture his skull and damage his brain.
Which, again, is a huge oversight based on canon lore around adamantium...whatever!
This movie sucks!
Deadpool though, on the other hand, doesn't have that advantage.
Despite his incredible healing abilities, he still just has a normal human skeleton.
Just one well-placed bullet, hitting either the frontal cortex or hippocampus, would
knock out huge percentages of his memory.
Of course his healing abilities would kick in and his head would repair itself.
But it wouldn't have any of Wade Wilson's memories.
Or, any memories at all.
It would be completely empty.
Like wiping a hard drive.
Destroy the brain, and Wade Wilson as we know him ceases to be.
Kind of like a zombie.
I think Deadpool would appreciate that sort of reference.
In the end, I guess it just
goes to show
often times good science doesn't result in good movies.
But, hey! That's just a theory!
A film theory!
Aaand cut!
And before you go, a huge thank you once again to Bill and Melinda Gates
for reaching out to me to pontificate a bit about superheroes.
Now that I'm wrapping up this video, I recommend taking the next five minutes
to read their annual letter by clicking the link in the description.
If we're talking about real life superheroes,
then the Gateses are two people who definitely fall in that category.
Using their global influence to inspire others to make a positive difference in
the world around them.
So read the letter and get inspired to make your mark on the world.
Though you may not be the person who cures cancer or brings electricity to Central Africa.
Oddly specific reference I know but it's in the letter.
Remember that being a hero doesn't require something big.
You can be someone else's hero by just saying or
doing something small for someone else.
So go ahead today tell your parents that you love them.
Tell a co-worker you appreciate them.
Take some time to get to know the quiet kid who sits alone at lunch.
The world will be a better place for it one person at a time. And finally, enough
sappiness, but let me know in the comments if you could have one
superpower what would you want?
If you say flying, I don't blame you.
It's in my top three, along with healing factor,
and, I don't know, uh... the power of musical theater!
They shall call me...
Show Tunes Lad!
Or something.
Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go.
Crisp high five?
Crisp high five!