How Is Santa Real?? 6 Movies Where No One Notices Anything

They got a fucking kayak. Moving beyond the fact that no little kid wants a kayak, where do the parents think this thing came from? Do they brush this off as a gift from one of the kid's friends or something? Something they ordered on Amazon while they were drunk? Who do they think is buying their children water sport equipment, and why don't they care?

It gets weirder. In Elf, adults themselves apparently receive gifts from Santa. When Michael reads Santa's big list on-camera, it includes the names of adults ... like a day of pampering at a spa for this guy:

New Line Cinema "They used the joke I pitched about a hard biker guy wanting like a really girly gift? It's a Christmas miracle!" -- an assistant story editor on Elf

How was Santa going to give him that present? Does he sneak coupons into this guy's junk mail? Fake a sweepstakes win? That would never work -- he would absolutely think it was a police trick to bring him into custody.

Actually, why would a real Santa want to cover up his own existence at all? This one needs magic for his sleigh to run. He should be airing commercials about how real he is. Think how many charity organizations would pitch in to spread Santa awareness in a world in which magic is a real thing you can witness. It's as if everyone in a Christmas movie is willfully denying Santa's existence for no reason but to spite wonderment. And that's fine, but then why is nobody concerned when they and their children receive expensive, unmarked presents from a stranger?

New Line Cinema "Looks like another present for Cousin eBay!"

And another thing: Santa would have a massive, unignorable impact on the economy. Decent kayaks can cost hundreds of dollars, and a "spa day" for a man with that much hair in need of removal could run into the thousands. These are high-market items spread across every non-naughty household in the world. That's billions, maybe trillions of dollars of lost revenue. Wait ... is big business trying to cover up the existence of Santa Claus to protect profits? Is it possible Santa existed in our own universe all along, but Big Christmas killed him with corporate greed? Is that what you were trying to tell us, Will Ferrell and Tim Allen? We're sorry, Will Ferrell and Tim Allen!

Sure enough, throughout the movies, people largely treat Schwarzenegger's T-800 as a clown. In the first Terminator, Bill Paxton and his fellow '80s punks immediately try to mug him. He's the size of all three of them put together, crazy enough to go for a nude stroll at night, and very obviously not carrying anything of value. Why in the hell are they messing with him?

Tri-Star Pictures "Hey, wimp. Hand over the nipples and whatever you got in your penis."

Even if their gang was ten times that size, they'd cross the street to avoid this guy on the sidewalk. Then in Terminator 2, the first thing he does is walk into a biker bar -- again, fully nude -- and demand a man give him his clothes and motorcycle. It's a man two decades older than him with at least 25 percent more body fat, and he immediately puts a cigar out on his rippling bare chest. The social situation demanded some kind of manly display, but it was done with such pure confidence. Shouldn't he have been a little worried the gigantic man would retaliate? What life did this guy lead that made him think he was going to win that fight? This guy is huge and crazy -- an unbeatable combination in the bar fight scene.

Tri-Star Pictures "This is my way of sayin' foresight ain't my strong suit, naked fella."

These are not isolated examples! It's like that with every human the T-800 ever runs into. When this terrifying man in a metal-stud jacket asks a gun shop owner for a silly list of future guns, the guy disrespects him like he's an idiot teenager, not an unhinged lunatic surrounded by weapons and large enough to tear him in half.

Tri-Star Pictures "Whatcha see is what we got, okay?"

Trust us, mass shooters and terrorists were totally a thing in the 1980s. A giant, stern, somewhat confused man with a foreign accent demands thousands of dollars' worth of high-capacity weapons that he needs right now, and no red flags are raised? "So ... you some kinda East German hitman or somethin'? Not that it's any of my business or nothin'. Anyway, look forward to reading about this in the paper tomorrow!" Even the famous "I'll be back" line is used on a bored desk cop who blows him off without even glancing up from his paperwork.

Even if they don't know he's a time-traveling killdroid covered in flesh, why are so many people going out of their way to piss this obvious sociopath off? He's a gigantic beast with a slack expression and absolutely no pretense to social convention. It doesn't take an intimate knowledge of Skynet to know you should hold back your sass until you figure out how dangerous a giant nude stranger might be.

So let's say he manages to have a hundred spare counterfeit birth certificates lying around and has a good reason for retaking 12th grade 50 times. How is he going to hide his wealth? There are systems in place specifically to prevent people from doing that. And Edward resets his life by pretending to be his own heir and then bequeathing his fortune to himself. Wouldn't any author with a basic knowledge of estate law or human paperwork know how stupid that sounds? It would take so much work to fake that Edward might as well eat every estate lawyer in the world, buy a wig, and pretend he found a bag of money.

Summit Entertainment "It had a dollar sign on it and everything."

And again, even if he manufactures this unlikely stack of paperwork for an entire family line of people who never existed, he's still passing down the same mansion? Are his neighbors meant to think everyone in his family looks exactly the same, down to the same smoldering eyes and twinkling glitter skin? It seems like that might start some rumors about him being immortal, or at least coming from a line of plastic surgery addicts. Maybe even, and this is going to sound crazy, vampires?

So OK, say he forges an obscene amount of paperwork and devours everyone who asks questions about his bizarre living situation. How do werewolves and vampires manage to run around murdering each other, performing feats of superhuman strength, and sleeping with high schoolers without being noticed? Mopey Bella finds out right away, and she's not exactly a genius.

Summit Entertainment "*sniff* You're right. In fact, I've been talking into this TV remote for 45 minutes."

It's a similar dilemma to the Terminator example above. The local, state and federal governments' lack of belief in vampires doesn't mean shit. The convoluted paper trail, unexplained money, constant movement, and proximity to weird crimes suggests they're fugitives, spies, terrorists, or something even worse. Whether it's a cop, IRS agent, journalist, or nosy neighbor, somebody is going to rat their asses out eventually.

It's certainly true that there is a lot of outer space, and that our telescopes and probes can only scan narrow fields of it. But the asteroid in this movie is specifically described as being the size of Texas. That's less an asteroid and more a rogue moon lighting up the night sky. And the astronomers in the film are tipped off to it only when debris from its most recent collision starts tearing up their satellites. That's like not noticing an intruder until he's already made several sandwiches, built himself a home office, and convinced your wife to leave you.

Let's do some space math. The distance between Mars and Earth is anywhere between 140 and 250 million miles, depending on what time of the year it is. So if the Armageddon scientists noticed the asteroid as it rounded Mars at its greatest distance from Earth -- and it was still 18 days away -- the thing is moving at its fastest around 580,000 miles per hour. As we shrink the range, the slower the asteroid would conceivably be moving, since it would still take 18 days to arrive. So 580,000 mph is the fastest we could assume it's going. This seems like maybe too much space math, but we're building to a point.

Touchstone Pictures A real-time look at Cracked's calculator.

Considering Pluto is around 4.67 billion miles away, that means that massive asteroid has been in our solar system for something like 335 days, or nearly an entire year. What the hell were they looking at for a year, if not a 700-mile-wide rock (again, about a third of the size of our freaking moon) hurtling toward our planet? With this level of incompetence, it's no wonder they decided their best plan was to send a bunch of lunatic drill operators into space instead of astronauts.

The fact that this plan worked means that no one in the world of Back To The Future has any idea of how professional gambling works. Because generally, when someone starts winning suspiciously often, the casino doesn't let them keep playing. And if they hit every longshot bet they place, they get banned from gambling entirely, even if they're Ben Affleck. Bookies aren't required to take anyone's bets, and Biff is so famously lucky that there are literally newspaper headlines about it:

Universal Pictures "You got bumped again, Kruschev."

Yeah, nobody is going to assume "luck" here. They're going to assume massive, widespread corruption. Every winning boxer would be accused of throwing the fight. And even if they couldn't find evidence against him and still accepted a bet from the world's most famously never-wrong gambler, that would cause such a run on that horse, boxer, or competitive hot dog eater that the odds would flatten out. As soon as this guy who appears to have a working predictive algorithm bet on a winner, every gambler in the world would jump on the bandwagon for the easy money. By the time the event started, anyone Biff put money on would be the -15,000 favorite. A $1 million bet on Biff's horse would pay out about 17 cents.

Universal Pictures "Hey, wouldn't it be way more valuable to let me know about a few big bets, like Apple and Microsoft?"

And that's assuming his violent disruption of the timestream didn't turn all race horses to Nazi dinosaurs or something. No, forget all that. In Back To The Future, everyone is just like, "Hey, that unpleasant rapist sure is lucky! Good for him!"