7 Hilarious Ways Reality Would Ruin Famous Movie Scenes

6 The Little Mermaid Would be a Screaming, Blubbery Monster

The Little Mermaid was Disney's attempt to take a classic story full of murder and sadness, and turn it into a romantic tale about a young woman altering her DNA to be with a dude. Wait. Really? Did Prince Trust Fund even once offer to grow gills to go live underwater with her?

And while Ariel -- the titular undersea creature with big blue eyes, shell bra, and flowing red locks -- has become iconic, that's probably not how she should actually look. Ariel lives in a deep underwater kingdom, far beyond the reach of even James Cameron. But it's cold down there. Based on what we know about other marine mammals, the only way mermaids could survive would be to have lots of blubber, hair, or both. These mammals would also have short appendages to reduce blood flow, meaning Ariel would quite literally be a hairy or obese mermaid with stubby arms, perhaps resembling something not unlike a demented walrus-potato-wig.

5 A Real Jurassic Park Would Be Full Of Bears And Woolly Mammoths

What child didn't watch the original Jurassic Park and dream about visiting a dinosaur sanctuary full of T-rexes, velociraptors, and glistening, bare-chested mathematicians?

And to a kid, the premise even seemed pretty sciency. As that double helix cartoon explained, you simply need to extract DNA from mosquitoes in amber, clone dinosaurs with it, and build a poorly secured park around them. Why couldn't there be a real Jurassic Park? Well, there could be, but there'd be some problems.

It turns out that the science behind Jurassic Park has a few flaws. For one thing, any prehistoric mosquitoes would probably have feasted on more than one species of dinosaur, leading to a park full of Cronenbergian dino-pastiches rather than proper dinosaurs. Secondly, DNA wouldn't last long enough for us to clone dinosaurs.

So what prehistoric animals could we resurrect and stuff inside a theme park? Well, scientists are apparently close to being able to clone a woolly mammoth. And if a hirsute elephant doesn't sound too exciting, ancient DNA expert Beth Shapiro has also suggested the prehistoric short-faced bear could be feasibly cloned. So that's ... rad?

4 A Mad Max Apocalypse Would Be Sorta Nice After A While

We're all familiar with the Mad Max series, the story of a widowed cop in a world that keeps falling apart while he mysteriously gets younger. In its universe, the earth has suffered a full-on nuclear apocalypse. Leaving behind only a smattering of people, punked-out cars, and the power-balladry of Tina Turner.

The latest entry in the franchise, Fury Road, portrays this post-apocalyptic world as a vast, sun-drenched desert where people have to fight for a taste of whatever water gets vomited out of Mount Skullface each day.

But this vision of what the earth would look like after a nuclear holocaust is way off. For one thing, the soot released in the stratosphere by a nuclear war would turn the goddamned skies black. Less Mad Max movie, more Evanescence music video. Eventually, the sky would clear, but even that process would take "around 30 years." But in Fury Road, Max is still as fresh-faced as ever.

3 Spider-Man's Web-Shooters Would be Shockingly Unwieldy

While the Tobey Maguire-era of films modified Spider-Man's powers to include ejaculating webs from his wrists, thus furthering its rather icky metaphorical underpinnings, the comics and more recent movies show that Peter Parker actually crafted mechanical web-shooters -- devices on his wrist that contain what is essentially super-strong silly string, allowing him to swing from building to building.

But how could Spider-Man keep canisters of a such an amazingly strong material coiled around his wrist like one of Johnny Depp's dumb bracelets? What would that look like in real life? Even the toy version appears to be about as convenient as strapping a mag light to your wrist.

Worse is the problem of ammo. Wired did some math and figured out how big Spidey's web-shooters would have to be if he had about 50 uses of his web-shooters. It turned out to be about the equivalent of strapping eight or nine soft drink cans to your wrist. So not exactly the sleek, skin-tight devices of the comic.

2 Warp Speed Could Create Freaking Ghost Ships

Warp engines are the faster-than-light travel devices used in the Star Trek franchise, powered by, well, let's shorthand them as "magic crystals." Forgiving the fact that the source of this scientific advancement is the same thing new age druids prescribe for serious illnesses, there's another issue around warp speed that would make the Trek universe look even wackier than usual: ghost ships.

A paper by a physicist at Michigan Technological University theorized that if a spaceship left earth, traveled at five times the speed of light to a planet around ten light-years away and then returned, a whole bunch of ghost images of that ship would appear, even years apart. Now, this isn't entirely outside of the Trek canon -- Captain Picard once used a sudden burst of warp speed to create just such a ghost ship to confuse his enemies. This, of course, became known as the " Picard Maneuver."

According to The Physics Of Star Trek, this phenomenon would make the universe an "interesting and barely navigable one, full of ghost images of objects that long ago arrived where they were going." Somehow the writers never got around to explaining which crystal the Federation used to stop that problem.

Related: The 5 Craziest War Stories (All Happened on the Same Ship)

1 Harry Potter's Wizard World Would Be A Feces-Smeared Mess

Who among us hasn't dreamt of living in Harry Potter's secret Wizarding World? What's that? Healthy, well-adjusted people? What are you even doing here? Go away.