Who else loves s’mores?
I’m gonna be honest, if it has s’mores in the name, I am gonna try it, even though
I know FULL WELL it probably will taste nothing like a s'more.
S'more ice cream? There.
S'more M&Ms? Got it.
S'moreos? Sign me up.
That’s why, when I see the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, all I want is the Giant
Hershey Bar Guy and the Oversized Graham Cracker Lad to show up.
That's when we’re having a party, my friends, that's when!
[Film Theory Theme Plays]
Hello internet, welcome to Film Theory, the show that asks questions about movies that
others are too afraid to ask…or have too much self-respect to ask.
But I’ll let YOU decide which one it is!
Man, in a summer crammed full with movies, there’s one that everyone is talking about:
Ghostbusters…but maybe not for the right reasons.
I mean the original 1984 version is an undisputed classic, holding down a 97% fresh rating on
Rotten Tomatoes.
But then fast forward to today, where the CGI-filled all-female reboot trailer is currently
the most disliked movie trailer in the history of YouTube.
Let me say that again: THE MOST DISLIKED trailer in the HISTORY of YouTube.
Really?
Really Internet?
THIS is so much worse than THIS?
"Are you going bald?"
"No, no, no, no, you're getting fatter, and your hair doesn't realize it needs to cover more face."
Hey I'm not judging, there is no accounting for taste—and I understand, the comedic
stylings of Adam Sandler are truly transcendent.
[Belches, then farts]
Comedy gold.
So the goal for today: make a video that you like at least slightly better than the Ghostbusters trailer.
Well, I'm already starting at an advantage, because this video focuses on the original
Ghostbusters, reminding you of that happier era when watching a baby get repeatedly put
into life-threatening situations was the epitome of entertainment.
Truly, when you think of the original movie yeah, sure, you had crossing streams and the
demonic David Bowie, THE most iconic image is none other than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
It’s a moment so brilliantly absurd it became an instant classic.
But while others were chortling away at Dan Akyroid’s childhood memories of roasting
marshmallows by the fire at Camp Waconda here’s where my theorist brain went to when I first
saw the scene… could I EAT that?
And sure, maybe there’s some FatPat talking there, but hey, it’s all in the name of science.
So, today I’m answering the question that’s been on nobody’s mind since 1984: How many
calories are in the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and what would it mean
if I were to actually eat him?
Now, for those of you who grew up not knowing “who you gonna call” here’s the skinny
on our chubbiest of bunnies: In the original Ghostbusters, the team takes on an ancient
Sumerian demon named Gozer who’s haunting New York City.
As you do, you know, the uzhe.
As part of the final showdown, Gozer demands that the heroes choose what will destroy them
and the rest of New York City.
While everyone else tries to keep their minds blank, our good buddy Dan Aykroyd accidentally
imagines "I tried to think of the most harmless thing,": The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
And you can’t really blame him, because images of Stay Puft are sprinkled throughout
the movie.
When we see the eggs in Dana’s apartment explode and cook on the counter, a bag of
Stay Puft marshmallows are there on the counter with the rest of the groceries, and later
in the film we see a big mural for Stay Puft Marshmallows on the side of a building.
With all those brand integrations, poor Ray didn’t stand a chance.
Subliminal advertising, guys!
You gotta put a #spon on those sorts of things, sellouts.
Anyway, the great big Mallow Blaster appears, Godzilla-style, and starts pounding upper
Manhattan into fluff.
Hilarity ensues.
So, let’s figure out just how much marshmallow action the kaiju Puff is packing.
To do this, we need to make some assumptions about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s contents.
Let’s just say that he’s made entirely of marshmallow; normally I’d say he’d
need some kind of musculo-skeletal system to maneuver, but seriously, he’s a giant
snack food manifested out of Dan Aykroyd’s subconscious and compelled by a demon of hell,
so we’re going to let the normal anatomy slide on this one.
Plus, when he erupts, there ain’t no viscera, just a bunch of marshmallow fluff, so I think
we’re safe.
Now, the first step in determining how much of a caloric punch Stay Puft packs is determining
just how large he is.
In the movie, they give us a hint: “Killed by a 100-foot marshmallow man.”
But can we get more exact?
ABSOLUTELY!
In the DVD extras for Ghostbusters, Mark Stetson, the model shop supervisor reveals that the
scaled size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was 112 and a half feet tall.
We can also compare that to the surrounding buildings to confirm that this is the right range.
So, for once, that made my life a bit easier, but from there the calculations start to get
a bit trickier.
Initially, I tried to determine the width of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man by looking
at his scale compared to other landmarks in the movie.
There’s a shot where the Ghostbusters are looking down at Stay Puft as he walks towards
them, and we can see that he is about the width from the sidewalk to the yellow center
lines on the street.
We know that this is about 50 feet, because the street Stay Puft is walking on is Central
Park West in New York.
According to an 1892 edition of the World Almanac, almost all avenues in New York City
are 100 feet wide, so Stay Puft is half that.
But we’re still missing depth and the movie doesn’t really show many good shots from
the side.
And more importantly, even if we’re right about Stay Puft being 50 feet wide at his
widest, how wide is his head compared to the rest of his body?
If you watch this series a lot, you’ll know that I would usually account for this sort
of thing using pixel measurements, but Stay Puft is full of unusual shapes and sizes.
So in this case I'm using another measurement that'll do a better job of taking Stay Puft
Marshmallow Man's irregular shape, and giving us workable numbers.
And that measurement is BMI.
The statistic of BMI was created in the 19th century and is mostly used to measure the
relative thickness or thinness of a population by measuring average weight across average height.
And for our purposes, it’s actually perfect because all it does is calculate a ratio of
height to width for a human-shaped object.
It doesn’t matter if the person is ripped, or overweight, or happens to be composed entirely of sugar.
And looking at the Marshmallow Man, he’s not just a bunch of cylindrical marshmallows
stacked together—he’s got folds and girth to them.
He’s much more human than he is purely geometric.
So knowing that, take a look at this chart of body shapes and their associated BMIs.
Stay Puft is round and has relatively thick limbs.
From a purely scientific perspective, Stay Puft’s shape indicates that he would have
a very high BMI.
And judging by the figures, a BMI of 40 is a good estimate, perhaps even a conservative one.
Hey, we will have NO candy shaming on this channel, okay?
But now that we have a height and a projected BMI for the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, we
can calculate how much he would weigh.
Or, more accurately, we can determine how much a human being his size would weigh, and
then go from there.
The formula for Body Mass Index states that BMI is equal to 703 times a person’s weight
in pounds divided by their height in inches squared.
Stay Puft’s height of 112.5 feet translates to 1,350 inches.
When we square the height, multiply the BMI of 40 by that number, and then divide the
result by 703, we have isolated weight, which comes out to 103,698 pounds.
But now before you rage in the comments, no, obviously he doesn’t weigh 103,000 pounds.
Like I said, that would be the weight of the Stay Puft Man…Man.
If the Stay Puft Marshmallow man were just a—a human of Marshmallow Man size.
You get it.
What we’re looking for the MARSHMALLOW Man.
So we need to convert his weight from this figure—what he would weigh as a human—to
what he would weigh as a marshmallow.
To do that, we need to know what the density of a human and a marshmallow actually are.
The density of human being does vary, but for heavier-set people it’s usually around
1.01 grams per milliliter.
Now we can adjust that weight of 103,698 pounds to its marshmallow equivalent by converting
human density to the density of a marshmallow, which is 0.21 grams per milliliter, about
a fifth the density of a human.
So, doing all the math, that means the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man actually weighs in at
21,561 pounds, or about 9,500 kilograms.
Which is actually surprisingly light for a building-crushing monster.
For perspective, that’s lighter than a typical school bus, so having him destroying buildings,
may be a bit of a stretch.
He’s still a giant marshmallow.
Even at such an enormous of a size, his squishy Stay Puft-ness would just puff off most well-made buildings.
But I hear you in the comments saying “Geez, MatPat, I came here because I want to eat
an ancient Sumerian demon, and not talk about school buses.”
And that’s valid, I totally understand your desire to eat an ancient Sumerian demon.
So now that we know how much he weighs, figuring out the number of calories he contains is
really no sweat.
For reference, I used the nutrition facts of Kraft’s Jet Puffed marshmallows because
something tells me they're not that different, which claim to have 100 calories for every
four marshmallows, or 30 grams, 20 grams of which is pure sugar.
When we convert the weight of Stay Puft in pounds to grams and multiply that by the number
of calories per gram, we get our whopping total: the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man comes
out to be 32.6 million calories.
Get ready to hit that Pilates class...a few hundred thousand times.
If you wanted to consume that many calories, you’d have to down about 228,000 cans of
Coca-Cola, or eat 2.7 million peanut M & Ms, or have 62,700 Big Mac meals from the Golden Arches.
Considering that the average human life is 27,375 days, you would practically have to
have the Big Mac meal three times a day, every day, for the rest of your life to get to that
level of caloric intake.
Which in turn, begs the question: What about burning it off?
Well, a good rule of thumb is that a typical person will burn 100 calories per mile walking.
So that would translate to you walking 326,000 miles to work off your Marshmallow Man binge.
And if that sounds like a lot, you don’t know the half of it!
The circumference of the Earth is just about 25,000 miles.
So you’d have to walk around the ENTIRE GLOBE 13 times to burn off that Sumerian Demon
you consumed.
Man, I knew I should have ordered off the lighter menu.
That Caesar Salad Titan was calling my name.
Considering the average caloric intake for a man is about 2000 a day, that’s nearly
44 YEARS worth of calories in a single serving.
Hungry?
Why wait?
Eat a Marshmallow Man, you'll be set for life.
And TALK ABOUT your sugar rushes.
One 100 foot tall marshmallow man is the equivalent of 6.52 millions grams of sugar.
That’s 7 American tons of sugar, the equivalent of an adult African elephant made entirely
of sugar.
It’s nearly 1.5 million Oreo cookies—single stuffed, which let’s be honest, is clearly
inferior to Double Stuft, so it’s actually 1,000,000 Double Stuft Oreos.
You may have seen the studies about how much humans have increased their sugar intake over
the course of our history.
It’s estimated to have risen 600% over the last 140 years.
We now consume 130 pounds or 60,000 grams of sugar each year, which admittedly is a lot.
But even with in the face of this huge increase in sugar intake, Stay Puft represents 108
years of constantly shoving sugar into your face.
So needless to say, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man does not seem to be part of a balanced diet.
But the big question of the day remains: could you eat him?
Technically, the answer is yes, but the fine print would say “But not for very long.”
And the problem is with the sugar.
Toxicologists believe that the lethal dose of sugar for a human being is about 15 grams
per kilogram of weight.
I say believe because these are estimates; apparently, it’s pretty hard to find test
subjects who are willing to eat sugar until they die, go figure.
Sometimes it feels like I come close though!
Sorry, that’s FatPat talking again.
For a 150 pound adult, that lethal dose would be between 2 and 2.5 pounds of sugar or about
1,000 grams, which, all things considered, isn’t all that much.
If you were committed to eating the beast, he would kill you 6,500 times over before
you were through.
Which means, in an ironic twist, the scariest thing about Stay Puft isn’t his physical
force—remember, he’s punching with less strength and density than a school bus—and
it isn’t crossing the streams, it’s his sugar content.
Forget getting stepped on, he would literally kill you before you gnawed his toe off.
But hey, that's just a theory.
A Film Theory, aaaaaand cut!
But before I sign off, do you want to win $50,000?
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