Movie Concepts You Won't Believe Exist In Real Life
Movies often portray apparently fantastic events like waterspouts depositing sharks in various cities or martial artists parrying bullets with their swords. As incredible and potentially implausible as they may sound, some of these events could actually happen. Even the seemingly most fantastic events are based on something real, at least to a degree. Some of Star Trek’s gadgets, for example, now exist in the real world; the smartphone is the spiritual descendant of the communicator. Similarly, we have technologies that respond to voice command, just like the officers and crew of the Enterprise. Here are some more examples of fantastic movie scenarios with real-world counterparts.
The Sharknado
The Sharknado movies, made by SyFy, follow the adventures of a married couple who constantly find themselves battling the titular sharknados, which are tornados carrying man-eating sharks. In the first movie, for example, a waterspout scoops up the sharks and dumps them, plus a convenient amount of seawater, in Los Angeles. According to Dr. Marcus Daniels of Kennesaw State University in Georgia, a sharknado could happen, in the sense that a sufficiently strong storm could scoop up a shark and dump it on land. The shark, however, probably wouldn’t survive the experience and certainly wouldn’t attack anybody. In March 2017, Cyclone Debbie struck the Queensland, Australia, and deposited a dead bull shark near Ayr.
The Joker's Nerve Toxin
Batman’s archenemy, The Joker, is usually portrayed as a psychopath with a warped sense of humor who sometimes styles himself the 'Clown Prince of Crime.' One of his most infamous weapons is happy gas, a lethal poison that causes individuals to die laughing. The victim laughs uncontrollably as they die, and their mouth is pulled into a hideous grin. According to Nerdist.com, Detective Comics #867 actually listed the ingredients of The Joker’s nerve toxin: strychnine, nitrous oxide, hydrogen-cyanide, MDMA, and methamphetamine. Strychnine causes lethal muscle spasms and is thus the component that causes the ghoulish grin. Hydrogen cyanide causes the victim to asphyxiate. Nitrous oxide, often called laughing gas, causes giddiness, euphoria, and uncontrollable laughter. Methamphetamine and MDMA, which is also called ecstasy, also induce euphoria.
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MI6's Spy Gadgets
MI6 is the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service, but most individuals know it as the employer of the fictional super-spy James Bond. In many of the movies, Q, the director of the MI6 research and development division, shows Bond the various gadgets he will be using on a given mission. Given that Dr. No came out in 1962, some of MI6’s spy gadgets may actually be obsolete by now, but others are still in development. Some gadgets, however, like various miniaturized cameras that can be built into sunglasses or rings, exist in the present day. Bond used a Cybershot camera phone in 2006’s Casino Royale, and Sony still sells them. Underwater cameras were shown in Thunderball and have since become a reality. Fingerprint and facial recognition scanners are now real, and law enforcement often uses the latter.
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Jack's Aging Disease
The 1996 movie Jack, starring Robin Williams, was about a boy who aged at four times the normal rate. Consequently, he looked like a forty-something man by the time he was ten years old. Aging disorders do exist, and the best known is progeria, a genetic disorder causing the patient to age up to ten times faster than normal. During childhood, the patient develops all of the physical characteristics of old age like wrinkled skin, baldness, and stooped posture, and also suffer from conditions like osteoporosis and heart disease. Most patients with progeria die in their teens, usually from a stroke or heart attack. Werner syndrome is a similar condition, but the patient doesn’t start showing symptoms until their late teens or early twenties.
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Deflecting Bullets With A Sword
Lots of martial arts movies portray their heroes and villains as being capable of superhuman feats like flying short distances or deflecting bullets with a sword. In the real world, elite martial artists can perform some impressive feats. Swordsman Isao Machii holds some Guinness Book of World Records for such feats as 'Fastest 1,000 Martial Arts Sword Cuts' and 'Fastest Tennis Ball (820 km/h) Cut By Sword.' In 2012, Machii again demonstrated his prowess by cutting a BB pellet in two with his katana. The traveling question was about the size of a pea and traveling at two hundred miles an hour. An assistant had fired the BB gun from approximately seventy feet away. Most individuals can’t even see such a small object traveling at that speed, which made Machii’s feat even more impressive.
