THAT’S where I saw that. I had such a vivd memory of reading that theory and thought “No, it was more succinct than a thread…” Thanks, Pepper Mill!
Just now rewatching on TBS the season 12 Big Bangs Theories where they win the Nobel, after having the confrontation with the two guys who tried to steal it.
This just occurred to me: those two guys are the anti- or maybe Bizarro World Raj and Howard. One is a geeky, white guy who talks too much, and who’s chubby instead of skinny, and the other is an awkward Indian guy. The white guy is married, but his marriage is bad instead of good, and he actually loses his wife to the Indian guy, which was briefly Raj’s fantasy (getting Bernadette, that is), but she put the kibosh on it before it got very far. And, unlike Raj and Howard, whose lack of social skills people find off-putting, the other two guys manage to turn it into a shtik, and get on the talk show circuit. Also, the white guy IS in fact, really bad at his job, to the point of having cheated his way into it, which is what Sheldon always accused Howard of being, although it wasn’t actually true of Howard.
The traditional interpretation of the final scene of Titanic is that as Old Rose quietly passes away, the image of the sunken wreckage fades into a restored version of the ship and she is reunited with Jack, her true love, in the afterlife.
My theory is that Rose is actually in hell (presumably for hogging the piece of flotsam resulting in Jack’s death) where she will be forced to relive the worst day of her life over and over again for eternity.
Titanic: Endgame
This goes along with my theory; the idea that Muggles are helpless in the face of wizards and it’s the goodness of wizarding governance that protects them is in fact totally reversed. We are told tnhat only because we see the universe from the magical world perspective, and it’s a myth they’ve come to believe. In fact, by virtue of numbers and technology, the Muggles are infinitely more powerful, and their governments allow wizards their own little world purely out of a sense of liberal decency and pluralism, much the way India carefully protects the people of North Sentinel Island. The dark possibility is that in some less enlightened places, wizards were probably wiped out or are very badly treated, as they once were in, say, Dark Ages Europe.
Pursuant to that, I suspect the number of wizards naturally grows as a percentage of the population; as we see with Hermione Granger, a person can be born a wizard when they don’t have wizard parents. The reason they’re still a tiny minority is simply that historically, and even in some places to this day, they’re often oppressed and even murdered.
Dumbo, (animated)
The film opens with storks delivering babies. Dumbo’s mom is expecting and wants to name the baby after the father. We never see the father. He is called Jumbo, and she wants the child named Jumbo Jr.
There is group of female elephants all with her and once the baby is born they all thing the baby is very cute. Until he sneezes and his ears unfold and we see he has large ears and the other elephants are shocked. Scandalized! And from that moment on, they really don’t want the kid or his mom around. yadda yadda yadda, he learns to fly and makes a lot of money and everyone loves him.
Now take into account that there are basically two types of elephants in the world. Asian and African. The main difference is that Asian elephants have small ears and African elephants have big ones.
They see his big ears and are shocked.
What does that tell you about Dumbo?
In The Secret of NIMH, NIMH wasn’t the only organization doing intellect enhancing experiments on rats, nor were they the only ones who had trouble keeping the smart rats contained. One of these competitors was in France.
Twenty years later, a descendent of these escaped French NIMH rats opened a restaurant.
So, depending on the continuity,
- Was there also a NIMH competitor in Japan?
- Or was a certain transport carrying chemicals through NYC actually a NIMH transport?
Oh, it was absolutely a NIMH truck in NYC. Because that’s canonically meant to be the same truck that blinded Matt Murdock, which means Ratatouille takes place in the same universe as Avengers: End Game.
So, did half the rats in NYC get dusted, too, then?
I could live with that…
I imagine a scene where a pure blood Wizard, who never even considers Muggles at all, somehow gets stranded in the Muggle world. He wants to send a message home, but can’t find an owl. Some kid passing by offers her mobile. The idea that a device, a muggle device - can communicate anywhere in the world - instantaneously! two-way communications! - blows his little wizard mind.
Well, yes, but that’s not a fanwank extrapolation, that’s explicit in the movie - the snap eliminated half of all life in the universe, including animals.
And you’ve only got a 50% chance of living with it.
Actually, I take that back. The truck in NYC isn’t NIMH. In the original comic, the truck is from a company called TCRI, or Techno-Cosmic Research Institute, which is later revealed to be a front for a bunch of space aliens.
BUT!
Also, in the original comic, Splinter, the mutant rat that teaches the turtles ninjitsu, started off as the pet of a leader of a ninja clan. Splinter taught himself ninjitsu by watching his master train and copying his techniques. This was BEFORE he was exposed to the mutagen in New York. He was already human-level intelligent before that incident. So he’s a NIMH rat that somehow ended up in the hands of a ninja lord, that was later exposed to a mutagen that made him grow exponentially and gave him a humanoid body.
Yeah, that’s why I asked if NIMH had a competitor in Japan.
Oh, yeah. Duh.
And the remaining rats bred like, well, rats, and FIVE YEARS LATER NYC had more rats than it started with.
And then the resnap brought all the dusted ones back, making it even worse.
Outside of the dialog, the movie never made it clear whether animals got dusted, too. IIRC, none were ever shown.
I don’t think we saw any animals dusted, but the initial sign that the Un-Snap worked was hearing birds outside Avenger’s HQ then seeing them around a tree - in a courtyard that was empty before the Un-Snap.
Ah, I missed that.
Then the movie was even more reckless with the solution than we all thought. Bad enough your dusted wife comes back (and if you’re not one of the Avengers, with no explanation! POOF! There she is!) to meet your new wife and 4 kids, but your dog reappears and attacks your new dog, and now you have twice as many pigeons hovering in your back yard.
Life after Endgame is going to be complicated.
While we’re at it:
The rat in the van that freed Antman from the quantum realm? NIMH rat. He wasn’t there accidentally, he figured out that Scott was missing, tracked him down, and deliberately freed him. How’d he know about Antman? Maybe some ants told him. Which implies that ants also have human level intelligence separate from interactions with Antman.
Which brings in A Bug’s Life. And/or Antz, depending on your taste.
… and then all those dead bacteria in your gut comes back (remember the Great Shitting which occurred as mankind got rid of the waste product of 3 pounds of dead bacteria in our bodies?) to merge with all the bacteria already in there, making the Great Shitting seem like the prelude to a long, long, gastrointestinal opera.