From "Will they or won't they?" to "What does Chewbacca's dong look like?" all great pop culture requires a whiff of enigma. Inevitably, some of these questions will be left unanswered by the end of any story, but isn't it better that way? We don't need to know the solution to every single mystery posed by our favorite shows or movies, no matter how dumb or inconsequential, right?
Who are we kidding? OF COURSE we need to know all that crap! Luckily, there's always someone on the internet who has gone through insane lengths to answer all the questions the creators didn't want to (or simply couldn't) solve themselves. Questions like ...
In translating the Harry Potter books to the big screen a lot of material got cut, like Peeves the Poltergeist, Peter Pettigrew's passing, and Professor Poppy Pantaloon's pooping pointillistic pony. One thing that few people missed was the House Cup. The annual competition between the four Hogwarts houses as to how many points they could each accumulate by doing good deeds or generally being little nerds, with the winning house receiving a trophy.
Warner Bros
But for those of you who thought this delightful fantasy series needed more pointless arithmetic, the folks over at Pottermore crunched the numbers on the House Cup. That's how we know, for example, that the four houses received a cumulative total of 430 points in Chamber Of Secrets and lost ten. Meanwhile, no points are awarded in Goblet Of Fire and Deathly Hallows because, respectively, murder and wizard genocide don't set the mood for trophy-giving ceremonies.
When it comes to teachers, Professor Snape is obviously the biggest dick, taking a total of 287 points. The single biggest deduction, surprisingly, belongs to Professor McGonagall after she fines Harry, Hermione, and Neville 50 points each for wandering the school's corridors at night. On the other hand, the most generous teacher is Dumbledore, who gives 400 points to Harry and Ron for saving Ginny from the Basilisk -- an award which pretty much guarantees that students started throwing their fellows down there for easy points.
Predictably, Gryffindor has the most points on record by the end of the series (1000 given, 532 deducted), with the top-earning student being, uh, Ron? Wait, really? That guy? Well, time to re-release the books under more accurate titles, like Ron Weasley And The Whatever Bullshit He Was Doing While Harry Saved The World.
Among the many false expectations that Titanic gave '90s teenagers was the idea that having sex in the back of a car will always be sensuous and romantic, as opposed to concussions and painstaking human origami. Still, the scene where Jack and Rose get it on inside a Model T is an undeniable classic, and the second most worn-out part of any Titanic VHS tape.
Paramount Pictures
Since James Cameron wasn't directing a hardcore skin flick, though, the scene immediately cuts to the outside of the car, where we see Rose ineffectually grasp the glass of the window before slowly disappearing. This poses the question, "How the fuck were they fucking?"
Luckily, Jezebel decided to tackle such a question. They started by establishing that "the hand could not have swiped that rear window with that angle and that level of flushness if they are lying Rose bottom-Jack top." It was basically the Warren Commission, except they knew the number of shooters and were only missing the angle.
Paramount Pictures
So, were they doing it doggy-style? Probably not, judging by the fact that we can't see a silhouette of Leonardo DiCaprio chugging about like The Little Engine Who Could. Were they doing it missionary-style, as all sex was presumably done in that bygone era? Could be, but how would that have worked if Rose wasn't a double-jointed monster? In the end, it took Jezebel staffers taking photos of their hands and even one miming the scene in her bathtub ...
... to conclude that it WAS missionary. Rose was simply using the window to brace herself for the DiCapenis [Editor's Note: Surely there's a more efficient portmanteau?] that was about to enter her starboard bow. Come touchdown, she then slid back into sexual bliss and smeared her hand off the window and across his back. There, doesn't your life feel fuller now that you know that?
Reddit has some dark, disturbing corners, but if you dig deep enough, you'll find communities that don't suck or feel the need to keep reminding their members not to throw around racist epithets. Case in point, /r/theydidthemath -- a subreddit dedicated to crowdsourcing answers to the questions that you never knew needed explaining.
Does Eminem spit rhymes as fast as a machine gun can spit bullets? Yes, his rate of 600 syllables-per-minute makes him comparable to a 600 round-per-minute RPK.
How many people would you need to kill if you wanted to forge a sword using only iron derived from the blood of your fallen enemies? That would be 359, accounting for both the average amount of iron in a person's body and the average weight of a classic longsword. Oh, and it turns out that the Empire could have built two million Star Destroyers for the price of a single Death Star.
Their piece de resistance, however, is the answer given by one user to, "How much would it actually cost to produce a real life Truman Show?" What followed wasn't just an explanatory paragraph. It was a multipart document detailing everything that you'd need to run such a venture. Including the number of extras you'd have to hire, the full-sized town you'd need to build, the cost of constructing a gigantic space-visible dome, and most importantly, a stashpot of fancy berets for Ed Harris.
Paramount Pictures
The prognosis was that, yes, you could easily run this if you have a spare $3.5 billion per year. If you decided to run ads, however, it might even wind up being a profitable venture. Those figures might not hold up nowadays considering that you probably haven't seen a commercial since 2011, but it's enough to make us want to throw some kids in fake town jail and fire up Facebook Live.
Time for another quick-fire round! When ranked alongside the protagonists of Skyrim and Fallout, it turns out that one of the burliest characters in the history of video gaming is ... Steve from Minecraft? If you wanted to install googly eyes on the moon, they'd need to have a radius of 208.5 miles. A subway car of commuters glued to their smartphones is equivalent to the entire computing power of the world in 1991. It would take 340 pints of beer to get a whale drunk. In order to visit the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Parthenon, and the Forbidden City during the duration of "A Whole New World" Aladdin and Jasmine would have needed to fly at twice the speed of sound. We'd show you more, but we've wrecked your productivity enough as it is.
One of the most enduring mysteries surrounding Friends is how the ensemble was always able to get that prime sofa spot in Central Perk. We've already covered that, though, so here's another mystery: How much goddamn money does Joey owe Chandler? Throughout the course of the show, we see him beg, borrow, steal, squander, and lose more money than a reality show host running for office. And according to the Redditor who sat down and worked this shit out, it's either blackmail or a money laundering operation. We're guessing Joey once walked in on Chandler in a compromising situation, possibly involving the duck and/or chicken.
NBC
In a later episode, it's established that Chandler has been acting as Joey's sugar daddy for years, paying off all his living expenses. This includes rent for a sizable apartment in Greenwich Village -- which, as pointed out on the internet once or twice, ain't cheap. Specifically, it's around $3,500 a month multiplied by the time that they were living together, giving us a total of $63,000. Add in the cost of utilities, groceries, takeout, coffee, money for dates, and professional headshots, and the total explodes to $111,860. Don't forget, this is only Joey's half.
Of course, the show's shenanigans don't come cheap either. When Joey winds up allowing the apartment to be robbed of everything, he promises to foot the bill. That's another $5,500 for the best tech that the late '90s had to offer, alongside another $3,400 that Chandler offhandedly mentions to Joey for some unexplained expense (presumably a month's worth of condoms). This brings the final bill to an eye-watering $120,760.
NBC
Besides the fashion, the slang, and the presence of Jeremy "I'm Totally Not Brendan Fraser" London, the most '90s thing in Kevin Smith's Mallrats was the running gag about Willam. You know, the guy who keeps staring at a Magic Eye picture all day and still can't see the hidden sailboat.
Gramercy Pictures
Gramercy Pictures
Well, it turns out there's a very good reason for this. The picture doesn't contain a sailboat. And how do we know this? The magic of Photoshop and tireless determination. One fan was able to reverse-engineer the original image (which was screencapped from the movie) by copying and superimposing it over its duplicate, simulating the movement your eyes are supposed to make when you "relax" them. This way, he was able to discover what was really inside.
SlightlyMentholated via YouTube
It was some random shapes! So, wait, does this mean that every single character in this movie, from some little kid to Stan Lee, got together to fuck with Willam? That seems like a feasible explanation, except that Willam himself eventually sees the sailboat, too. We have no choice but to conclude that the characters in this Kevin Smith movie might have been stoned.
The tongue twister "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" (HMWCWCCWCCCW for short) is one of pop culture's most enduring mysteries, joining age-old classics like "Where's the beef?" and "Who keeps giving Adam Sandler work?" Or at least, it would be if it hadn't been solved so hard that there's actually two solutions, one for each definition of the word "chuck."
NBC
The first solution -- which uses the definition of "chuck" in reference to tossing or throwing something -- was worked out in the halcyon days of 1988 by Dick Thomas, a wildlife technician with the State Department of Environmental Conservation. After realizing that the woodchuck wasn't a mythological creature and could be studied, he decided to set up shop and determine how much dirt woodchucks move when they're building their colossal burrows. These aren't any ol' burrows we're talking about here. Woodchucks live in tunnels 25 to 30 feet long and six inches wide, giving them an average volume of 35 square feet (or a real state value of one million dollars in New York City).
From this, it was just a case of multiplying 35 square feet by the average weight of one square foot of soil (20 pounds), to give us the woodage that a woodchuck could chuck if they could chuck wood -- 700 pounds worth. The second solution interprets "chuck" as in "swallow." For two scientists, who probably had an interesting time explaining this to their grant administrators, there was only one real way of researching this -- feeding a group of woodchucks planks of wood and seeing how much, on average, they were able to work through in a day. Which comes out to 361 cubic centimeters.
Now that we've answered that question, discussed their living quarters, and examined their eating habits, let's settle the mystery you were really wondering about: What the fuck a woodchuck looks like.
At the end of Frankenstein, a group of angry villagers mob the local castle intent on torching everything, including the monster who lives there and the gentle inventor's daughter who ... wait, no, that's Beauty And The Beast. In Mary Shelley's book, Frankenstein's monster flees and grows increasingly intelligent, eventually yearning for the one thing every smart person longs for, doin' it. He even seeks Dr. Frankenstein and asks him to make him a wife.
Bernie Wrightson via Black Gate
Dr. Frankenstein considers it, but stops at the last minute after he realizes that this could foretell the end of humanity "as a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror." But suppose Dr. F had said, "Sure, I was trying to figure out what to do with these leftover vaginas anyway." How long would it take the monster's ugly grandkids to take over the world? These are the questions ecologists live for, apparently, so a bunch of them sat down and worked it out. The answer?
American Institute of Biological Sciences
Basically, we'd be fucking destroyed thanks to something called the principle of competitive exclusion -- the sad fact that two near-identical species can't share their resources (in this case, food) without one of those species genociding the other with their super-monster parts.
If the monsters had sired children, these bored ecologists reckoned, they would have started out at a disadvantage given our superior numbers. However, since they're practically unkillable and all, it wouldn't be long before the tables were turned. The fact that the monsters would have migrated to South America only helps their cause. They'd lose one or two to the occasional jaguar attack, but the sparse population would help them to easily overwhelm the continent and spread like a plague across the world, culminating in the global extinction of humanity by 6006.
Marvel Comics
So yeah, no matter how shitty our world is, you should wake up every morning peppy and galvanized, as you'll be long dead by the time The Great Frankenstein War/Sex-Off of 6006 rolls around.
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Adam Wears
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