Be a werewolf (don't be a vampire)

Back in high school a friend and I changed the words to the Dr. Pepper jingle to be all about werewolves. An American Werewolf in London had just come out starring David Naughton who was the Dr. Pepper Spokesman. For some reason it's been stuck in my head all morning. It went like this:

I've turned into a werewolf don't you know.
There's really no where safe you can go,
'Cause if you look around these days
There seems to be a lycanthropic craze!*

I'm a werewolf! He's a werewolf. She's a werewolf!
If you've been bitten maybe your a werewolf, too!
Be a werewolf (don't be a vampire)
Be a werewolf (don't be a vampire)

See, even back in the '80s vampires were lame.

*American Werewolf, The Howling and Wolfen all came out in 1981.

Up: Just how old are Carl and Muntz?

We don't really get any exact dates in Disney/Pixar's Up, but we can extrapolate enough information to determine approximate ages for Carl Fredricksen and Charles Muntz.

First, the dates. In the opening newsreel Charles Muntz's dirigible, The Spirt of Adventure, is described as "longer than 22 prohibition paddy wagons placed end-to-end." Prohibition was from 1920-1933. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say Up takes place from 1933 to 2009/present day.

Second, the ages. They don't mention Carl or Muntz's ages in the film, so we'll have to do a little detective work and some educated guessing. I think it's safe to assume that young Carl and Ellie are about the same age as the actors who voiced them. I can't find any info on Jeremy Leary, who voiced young Carl, but I learned that Elie Docter, who voiced young Ellie, was only seven at the time. Assuming Carl and Ellie the same age, they were seven in 1933, which makes present day Carl 83 years old. Charles Muntz is actually based on aviator Charles Lindberg. Lindberg was 31 in 1933, but only 25 when he made his famous transatlantic flight. Let's say Muntz was also 25 when he left for South America to give him the best chance of surviving to the end of the film. Even using numbers that give us the smallest window of time, that would still make Muntz 101 years old in the present day!

I don't know about you, but I just can't see how a 101-year-old could do all the things he did in this film. In fact, one of the helmets Muntz is knocking around in his blimp after the dinner scene should have been his own! Jack LaLanne was 93 when he died, so Carl's activity seems quite possible. But Muntz seems highly unlikely. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Up. One of my all time favorite movies. But when I think about the math it gives me a headache.

Beauty and The Beast - Shouldn't the Prince be in bed?

I have a problem when a movie gets its own timeline wrong. Well, not wrong, but definitely questionable. That's when my suspension of disbelief falls apart. I can't help it, I like math.

In Disney's Beauty and the Beast the filmmakers made references to time that just don't add up. The opening of the film explains that the Prince/Beast had to love and be loved in return by the time the enchanted rose stopped blooming on his 21st birthday. Later, during the song Be Our Guest, Lumiere sings "Ten years we've been rusting, needing so much more than dusting."

So, even though the opening sequence showed him looking just like he did at the end, the dialogue of the film indicates that when the Prince answered the door he was only ten years old. Which begs the question; why was an ten-year-old prince answering the door? There were (literally) dozens of servants. Surely, one of them must have been responsible for answering the door. And where are the King and Queen? And why do three people need that many servants? Downton Abbey only has about ten servants to take care of eight people.

What's most frustrating is that the problem could have easily been avoided by changing the word "Ten" to "For" in Be Our Guest. Even it you misheard and thought he said "Four" that would have made the Prince a more reasonable 17 years old.

That's all I got for now, but I might have other movie conundrums to decipher in the future.