You know, I really love the opening song of Tangled.
♪♪
IT IS GREAT!!!
But you know, I can't shake this feeling that I've heard it somewhere before...
♪♪
I can't be the only who hears the similarities between the opening of Tangeled and Pinball Wizard by The Who
Am I?
♪♪
I mean no wonder Disney has the catchiest songs out there!
They're stealing them from some of the catchiest songs out there!!
Apparently, ever since she's was a young girl
Rapunzel played that silver ball, between rounds of brushing, brushing, brushing her hair.
♪♪ Upbeat Intro ♪♪
Hello, Internet!
Welcome to FILM THEORY!
Where- Can we seriously stop for a moment and talk about the premise of Tangled for a second here?
When you think about it,
Rapunzel is one of those fairy tales that's only okay because it's been drilled into all of us since Preschool.
Imagine Rapunzel wasn't invented,
Wasn't a 200-year old fairy tale,
And then all of a sudden some Disney writer makes this pitch in the boardroom.
He's like,
"Guys, guys"
"I got this great new princess.
"She's a girl, who's gonna be isolated in a tower with no human contact for like, eighteen years"
"She'll be totally helpless, about real life, but she's gonna have this super power"
"Get this a really long hair. She'll just have like this great blonde hair,"
"And fully grown adult men are gonna climb it like a rope and creep into her tower at night."
"It's gonna be a great message for the kids!"
"After that, we'll do a movie about emoji and after that, fidget spinners."
The writer then gets slapped by everyone in the room, lambasted on Tumblr,
Publicly apologizes on Twitter, and Rapunzel ends up in the dust bin of Disney history with Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
But luckily the story of Rapunzel is a 200 year old fairy tale and instead,
Tangled is one of Disney's biggest hits from it's new golden age.
And it is beautiful!
And the chameleon is really funny,
And it's surprisingly heart warming,
And the music is really catchy, even though sure, some of the songs might sound very similar to other songs that
have happened in the past...
NO! Snap out of it MatPat
It is up to me to find another way of ruining this movie for you,
And that way, is through one big, and I mean massive head of hair.
That's right loyal theorist, watch out for split ends
Because today we're putting Rapunzel's goldie locks to the test
To find out how this kind of hair could possibly exist. And if it did,
Whether Rapunzel and her miraculous head of hair, would be able to do any of the stunts
That you see her do in the movies.
Now obviously I'm not touching the magic of her "healing hair"
Unless you believe in the restorative powers of Emma Watson's hair,
Like seventeen magazine apparently does.
Not even this show can explain something like that.
No I care about the real world.
What a real person, having a real head of hair like this would mean.
Could you actually use it as a ladder, a weapon, a rope, a hammock?
All the things you see her do in the movie,
COULD YOU DO IT?!
This has to be crazy. Right?
Well there's only one way to find out...
RESEARCH THE HECK OUT OF IT!!
Let's start with the most basic question,
How long is Rapunzel's hair?
According to the Center for Disease Control, the CDC, which apparently is hard at work studying all those deadly hair diseases
And not you know, spending their time saving the world from the zombie apocalypse.
Like you see them do it in Walking Dead.
Human hair grows about 1.25 centimeters, or about half and inch per month.
At that rate, after eighteen years of nonstop hair growth,
Rapunzel's hair would be right around 9 1/2 feet.
9 1/2 feet.
Ya hear that former Viner and now Instagram star, Lele Pons?
Something tells me you might be lying about never having cut your hair before.
Just like how you did about donating that freshly cut hair to Locks of Love.
But using false charity work to get yourself more social media followers aside,
If you did have 9 1/2 feet of hair, that would be great to donate to Locks of Love
Assuming that the hair is real. Lele Pons.
But it doesn't hold a candle to how long Rapunzel's hair is clearly shown to be in the movie.
Luckily, Kelly Ward, one of the animators who works specifically on Rapunzel's hair in Tangled
Revealed in an interview that Rapunzel's hair is canonically meant to be 70 feet long.
"Holy hairballs!"
That is longer than a bowling lane.
It is taller than the Hollywood sign.
It is almost twice as high as a telephone pole.
Hair growing at a normal rate would take you between a 140 and 170 years to get that long.
Meaning that either Rapunzel is wearing her age extremely well,
Or her hair grows at an impossibly fast rate.
To get hair that long in 18 years,
These luscious locks would of had to grow almost 4 inches a month.
So right off the bat, is it possible to grow?
No, but then again it is magic hair.
So it's fine to assume that it grows faster than normal.
And there are still tons of other questions that we can ask about this movie,
Like whether the hair would actually work, if somehow you got it to grow that fast.
Could you actually climb it like a rope?
Now that sounds like a good one.
Could you imagine, and rightly so, that someone climbing up your head of hair
Is a lot more pull than you're gonna get on your typical kindergarten playground.
Now when Rapunzel, Rapunzel let's down her long hair, she loops it over a hook.
Which turns her hair into a sort of, "pulley system".
And yes, sticklers later in the movie, when Flinn is climbing up Rapunzel's hair,
The hair isn't going through the hook, but it is still supported by the window sill.
So it's working in a very similar fashion.
Now that pulling sensation ain't gonna feel too good, but shockingly it's not gonna do any major damage to her either.
When I first saw these scenes I was totally like,
"Huh. Well that's gonna snap her neck."
But in order to fracture the cervical vertebrae- fancy talk for breaking your neck,
You need to experience over 3,000 newtons of force.
That's about 675 pounds of hair pulling.
Even without any kind of lever, Rapunzel could haul Prince Eugene up the side of the building, plus two of his closes buddies.
Pretty impressive. And in terms of Rapunzel's ability to withstand having people climb up it,
I'd say that this is a Myth confir-
Wrong show.
Uh- THEORY CONFIRMED!
Good save MatPat nobody noticed.
So when Rapunzel tosses her hair down, she ain't gonna be snappin' her neck like a KitKat.
Great news for her!
But that is far from the end of our fictional problems
Because even if Rapunzel has the neck strength to hold her hair and someone on it,
Is her hair rooted strongly enough into her scalp to handle those kinds of forces?
Or is she just gonna plucked bald like a Sunday chicken?
It seems logical that putting the full weight of an adult human being on a head of hair would rip all of that hair out-
I mean after all, how difficult is it to reach up on your head and pluck out a single hair?
Well, we know exactly how hard that is because people somewhere have studied that.
Seriously! It continuously astounds me how I'm able to find studies that measure these sorts of things.
Like I hear a lot of people say that Academia is under funded- and I'm sure that's gotta be true,
But based off of my google searches I could propose a study on
How many diet cokes I have to drink for the sweetener rush to turn me into a rabid squirrel.
And I would probably get funded for that research.
Not by diet coke they apparently hate me since they never wanna to talk.
Seriously I've had multiple people try to introduce me to diet coke and just- closed doors all the time.
And this point, I'm like diet coke's clingy ex-girlfriend.
*Sad noise*
Aaaanyway, the official study on hair pull outage estimates that the force to remove or,
"Epilate" a hair from the scalp of a healthy person to be about 21.2 grams of force.
That may not sound like a whole lot- and it isn't.
But when you're talking about a whole head of hair you have to multiply that force by all the hairs on her head
And spoiler alert! Rapunzel's gotta lotta hair.
If she's a typical blonde, she has about 150,000 follicles on her head-
I'll save you all the math but that'd mean she'd need 7,000 or 3.5 tons of force to yank out all those hairs at once.
In theory, she can suspend a pickup truck from her hair and it wouldn't pull all out.
That might be a bit of overkill but regardless it is patently clear that a scalp can support the weight of the human being.
If you think about it, it actually makes sense.
That's why it's actually common to see circus performers suspend themselves by their hair doing aerial tricks.
Okay that's pretty impressive, but I hear y'all callin' foul from the chat.
Foul!
Fowl!
You say, you sound a bit silly.
But you do have a point. There's still one weak link here that we haven't considered yet...
The hair itself.
Sure the body that's attached to the hair can keep it from getting ripped out, and can manage to hold itself upright,
But hair is just dead cells. I mean, you subject the hair to that much stress and it's gonna break apart, right?
WRONG!!!
If you thought your scalp was strong then you haven't met your hair.
The tensile strength of hair, meaning the amount of force it can withstand before being torn apart,
Is about half the strength of steel!
I mean sure it's not steel but that's still pretty darn good for something your body grows while you're sitting around in your couch's butt grove.
What's that strength mean for Rapunzel?
Well taking all together a full head of hair could support 12 tons. 24,000 pounds. 11,000 kilograms!
That doesn't mean can do something ridiculous like hang an elephant from a head of hair without the hair breaking.
It means you can hang TWO elephants with that hair without that head of hair breaking!
And we see her doing stuff like laying in her hair,
Tying people up,
Lassoing,
Swinging like Tarzan who she incidentally might be related to.
That is nothing! Her hair isn't even breaking a sweat!
A metaphorical sweat- literally that would be slimy and gross, and break the laws of biology cause hair shouldn't be sweating...
Though speaking of things that are slimy and gross, we are left with one other question.
One thing I just couldn't justify in this movie, it what condition her hair would be in after 18 years.
Cause here's the thing,
Sure Rapunzel says that she'll constantly brush,
♪ And brush and brush and brush, heeer hair ♪
But one thing that we can be pretty confident of is that she's not doing a whole lot of washing of that hair.
She may have herself the urge to Herbal, but not only would it take literal days for that hair to dry,
It would also be impossible to get enough water up to the tower and wash it in the pre-plumbing era of this movie.
So literally this is 18 years worth of hair dirt where most of her hair just drags across the floor.
I mean look!
Here she is literally sweeping dirt into her hair. Unfortunately this still doesn't disapprove the movie.
If anything, the fact that her hair retains it's natural oils from her scalp and isn't getting dried out by shampoo
Would likely make it even stronger. And the dust that's in it would give it the friction of massive dread lock making it harder to tear apart!
But before all you littler girls decide to stop washing your hair like Rapunzel,
There are a few downsides.
That crop of 18 year old unwashed hair would smell like curdled milk being strained through a gym sock.
She wouldn't need her frying pan or any other weapon in this film because the rancid odor of her own head would scare people away.
But again, that's just disgusting.
It doesn't change what her hair can actually do.
Sooooooooooo...
So does that mean all of Rapunzel's hair tricks are... plausible?
Oh man is this a Disney franchise where I'm gonna have to back down and admit it's just a great movie?
For a while it was definitely looking like it.
BUT.
Dear loyal theorist, you know, there's always a but.
Remember that animator that told us Rapunzel's hair was 70 feet long?
WELL! In the same interview she also disclosed the weight of this head of hair.
Proclaiming it's around 60 pounds.
And I double checked. The math works.
When I did my own calculations based on the number of hairs Rapunzel has,
The weight of hair per centimeter and the overall length,
I got that her hair weighs about 56 pounds or 25 kilograms.
Now. That sounds like it's a lot but if you gain 60 pounds, you're still fine.
Right?
And if you think about it, most the time a lot of Rapunzel's hair is just sitting on the ground.
So whenever Rapunzel's standing still, she's only going to be feeling about 10 pound of extra hair weight.
The problem comes when she wants to, you know, do literally any thing else.
Walk,
Dance,
Clean,
Paint,
Hit people with frying pans,
Sing Pinball Wizard,
Ride horses,
Essentially every single thing we see her do in this movie.
Whenever that happens she has to drag the full weight of her hair behind her.
60 pounds being dragged by her scalp everywhere, all the time.
Imagine if you strapped a 56 pound, 25 kilogram bowling ball straight to your hair.
And then you had to pull it along with your head alone all the time.
This would definitely make her a lot less mobile than we see in the movie,
But it would also mean that she's doing some big time damage to her head over time.
Through a condition called traction alopecia.
And no, this is not a made up thing.
It's not even me trying to stretch the research for a dramatic conclusion.
It is a real condition that affects all types of hair, in people all around the world,
Whenever hair is put under stress.
Cultures that use tight braids, twists, or buns
In Africa and Asia, have this happen to all the time.
But it's also common in the US.
Been trying out some cornrows lately?
Have you been rocking the hipster man-bun everyday?
HECK! Have to been wearing a tight bike helmet too much?
Any of these things means that your hair is constantly being pulled away from the scalp.
Certainly not enough to pull it out as we learned today,
But enough to straighten the hair at the follicle and that leads to a falling out over time.
And that's the sort of stress that Rapunzel's long hair is putting on itself.
60 pounds of pulling everytime she moves.
In reality, Rapunzel's hair would look very different than it does in the movie.
It looks here that she has the great head of hair,
But in reality, traction alopecia from 60 pounds of hair strain on her head
Everyday would slowly pull out more and more of her golden locks.
Leading her head a scaly, red, scalpy mess.
And worse yet, the hair she lost would be gone forever.
Because in many cases, traction alopecia is irreversible.
So once that hair comes out, it is gone for good.
So with the 18 years Rapunzel's been wondering when her life will begin,
She would of lost most of her own hair because of her own hair.
And with that image in our minds, I think we can safely say that we've covered Tangled.
I wonder what we can do with Up...
BUT HEY,
THAT'S JUST A THEORY.
A FILM THEORY!
AAAAAAND...
Cut.
Your hair.
CUT IT!!
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