A scientific inquiry into the number of s'mores the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man's body could create

If only Ray Stantz had thought of giant graham crackers and chocolate bars, too

By Reid McCarter  |  September 14, 2021 | 9:30pm
Film Features Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
A scientific inquiry into the number of s'mores the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man's body could create
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The delicious form of the destructor himself. Screenshot: Ghostbusters

When Gozer The Gozerian was defeated after taking the dread form of a towering Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the ancient god of destruction’s avatar exploded into a massive shower of melted sugary goop. Noting, as we did when watching Ghostbusters as kids, that the Marshmallow Man’s innards look pretty tasty, Mel Magazine has taken the logical step of asking a mathematician to calculate exactly how many s’mores these delectable monster-innards could create.

After establishing that, somehow, there wasn’t a clear answer to this pressing question available on the internet already, writer Brian VanHooker decided to bring his query to Nottingham Trent University mathematician James Hind. Working from the (Ghostbusters bonus features-provided) knowledge that the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man “is precisely 112.5 feet tall,” Hind was able to start in on a process that involved breaking the creature down into sections that allowed him to create a volumetric marshmallow model.

Through a bunch of elaborately calculated figures and graphs, Hind was able to determine that the Marshmallow Man “has a volume of 151,960.2 cubic feet.” After removing non-marshmallow bits from the equation (the Man’s “pupils, mouth, neckerchief, and certain parts of his hat”), the edible parts leave 151,772.2 cubic feet, or a weight of “just over 4.7 million pounds.”

VanHooker used some store-bought marshmallow math to convert all of this into the knowledge that Ray Stantz’s accidental creation “can make 300 million standard-sized marshmallows” or “a full 300 million s’mores!” With 150 million graham crackers and 75 million Hershey bars added into the mix, the article notes, one Stay Puft Marshmallow Man could provide almost everybody in the United States with a single s’more.

Now let’s hear about how much delicious green ectoplasm we could gulp down if Slimer burst into his oozy component parts, too.

[via Boing Boing]

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