I just watched this show, “1000 Ways to Die.” I guess its been on since May of last year but I just saw it for the first time tonight. The show is kind of self-explanatory: It claims to show some extremely odd ways that people have really died. The question is, is this stuff for real?
Some of the ways of death include:
1. A man catching his friend on fire when lighting a fart. 2. A man killed by an MRI machine during a failed drug heist. (The man supposedly had a metal plate in his head and the magnetic field from the MRI pulled his head into the side of the machine hard enough to cause traumatic brain injury.) 3. Two guys tripping on some hallucinogen in the desert freak out and run (not in a car, but on foot) into cacti. The one guy gets a cactus spike through the eye which continues through the eye socket and into the brain.
I did a quick google search of some of these deaths to find nothing. Sure, the deaths sound somewhat plausible, but I can’t help but think that they are either highly embellished accounts of what really happened or just urban legends. What do you guys think?
The disclaimer at the beginning of each episode says that they’re real.
I mean, I’m not personally promising that they’re real, and you can’t trust everything on TV, but I would think that if they were only loosely based on real deaths, the couldn’t say that they’re real. They’d have to say something like “these are based on real events” or “the situations depicted herein are not real,” I think.
Sorry, I linked the wrong season. The disclaimer of season 2 is the one they still use. The season 1 disclaimer was only used for the two episodes of season 1.
The disclaimer they currently use is:
"WARNING: The deaths portrayed in this show are ***real*** and extremely graphic.
The names have been changed to protect the identities of the deceased.
Do not attempt to try ANY of the actions depicted.
YOU WILL DIE!"
They do seem to be somewhat pandering. I mean, nurses don’t wear what the nurse with the drug seeker wore. They wear scrubs.
My husband said they had one where a woman got breast implants on the cheap and then got on a plane. When the plane got to cruising altitude, the liquid in the breast implants expanded and the implants exploded. I think I would remember hearing on the news about a woman who died a bloody death on an airplane from exploding implants.
So, pretty much for the show, I’m either :rolleyes: or :dubious:.
I think they do pander in their portrayals of the events, but from what I gather, they events really did happen. They do change the names to protect the deceased and, as with most of the shows on Spike TV, the acting is a bit over the top. But it’s fun. (I was going to call it good, clean fun, but I’m not a liar…)
I saw this one too, I was trying to remember it for the list I made for the more ridiculous deaths shown. A little Mythbusters went a long way for this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVsXBnV0guw
They put some implants into a pressurized chamber and simulated atmospheric pressure at 35,000 ft (outside of the plane) and couldn’t get them to do much of anything. They even injected air into them and still nothing. They also used a regular balloon filled with air and some inflatable things for a bra. Still nothing on the implants. The balloon and inflatable thingies expanded some but didn’t blow. Needless to say, air pressure in the plane may be lower than normal, but nowhere near the air pressure at 35,000 ft outside of the plane (which would eventually kill a person obviously).
Even though the disclaimer says the deaths are real, I’m calling bullshit on this. Maybe some of the stuff is real, but I’m now willing to bet a lot of it is just urban legend. Nonetheless, it is good for a cheap thrill and some laughs.
Just recently some Brazilian (or was it Argentinian?) supermodel died after her recently installed butt-implants exploded–I don’t think the skin ruptured, but the liquid in the body wasn’t a good thing.
I think they must “embellish” the stories, changing various details about an incident while leaving the “cause” intact so that they can claim “the deaths are real”.
In particular, I saw an episode about a diver (naturally a buxom, bikini-clad, female one) who entered a decompression chamber following a deep dive. Somehow no one else was in attendance, and a maintenance man wandered along and opened the hatch, suddenly causing the chamber pressure to drop, and the diver to messily explode.
This is technically wrong on many, many levels: Chamber hatches open in, rather than out, such that pressure couldn’t drop that rapidly; If the pressure differential was that enormous, why didn’t she explode or otherwise die on her way to the chamber? Etc.
I believe this tale was, very loosely, inspired by the only incident I’ve been able to find involving decompression-caused human explosion – the Byford Dolphin Diving Bell Accident in 1983. If the degree of simplification and “sexing up” apparently applied here is any indication, the show’s definition of “true story” is so loose as to be nearly frictionless.
Based on a true story doesn’t always mean it’s a true story, especially on this show. It means there is a true story similar to the segments on the show, but the producers can take liberties and some parts are outright false, including in some cases whether the subject of the segment actually died. For example, in the exploding implants on the plane segment, the woman in reality had a ruptured implant and air entered it causing the implant to expand in high altitude. It did not explode, it was not noticeable without serious examination (even to doctors) and she did not die. Look up Irena D. for the true story. This show is based on a true story the same way that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is.
They did do one based on the death of famous Jack Daniels. Kicked his safe, got an infection in his toe, and eventually died from the infection. So some of them are real, even though they do play it up to make the person out to be as stupid acting/looking/sounding as possible which gets annoying.
Well, they’re not gonna get Daniel Day-Lewis or Dame Judy Dench to play the person who shook up their spouse’s beer for a lark and suffered a fatal scalp laceration from a pressure-launched bottle cap, so make allowances for the acting quality.
The show did enlighten me to the concept of paradoxical undressing in hypothermia victims, so I consider it at least partly educational, when it’s not going on about lethal injuries stemming from facial piercings and lingerie and whatnot.
I have gotten the the impression that the show mixes real stories, with embellished stories, with just plain bullpoopie.
One story that I had a huge :rolleyes: over was the one with the bellydancer being hung by the ceiling fan. We are expected to believe that a ceiling fan can not only generate enough force to pull an adult woman off her feet, but could hold her suspended without being ripped out of it’s mountings.
Still the show is rather amusing, and Ron Perlman does a great narration!
Well, if she was fairly petite and the guy who installed the fan did his job properly… maybe. What’s more implausible to me is that she couldn’t slip out of the scarf at her end. Just one fan-yank and it’s lights out.
