Godzilla Vs. Kong is out now, providing a new answer to the vexing question of who would win if a giant monkey and a giant lizard ever happened to find themselves in a situation where they needed to beat the hell out of each other. While our review makes clear that the movie thoroughly explores the fine details of this scenario with a 45-minute sequence that sees the beasts facing off in a “knock-down, drag-out, professional wrestling-style brawl,” we understand, too, that martial prowess is only the most obvious way to compare King Kong and Godzilla
As Mental Floss proves in an article published yesterday, it’s equally important to judge these monsters by other criteria—such as which one takes the bigger shits. Using statistics provided by Godzilla Vs. Kong promo materials and insight from primate, reptile, and amphibian experts, the article seriously evaluates this riddle to arrive at a scientifically sound conclusion.
Kong, we learn, is 337 feet tall and likely weighs about 4,226 tons at the time of the latest movie. Real gorillas also “produce very large volumes of feces”—roughly “a half-pound of fecal material” every few hours. Mental Floss calculates that Kong would take “five poops a day, each one weighing more than an Apache helicopter” (or 6.6 tons). Rather charmingly, we’re also told that gorillas “aren’t fussy about where” they take a load off or whether anyone’s watching while they do it.
The scientist asked to evaluate Godzilla’s shit compares the creature to Komodo dragons, which “consume big but infrequent meals and may eventually throw up the indigestible bits, like horns and hair, and poop out what’s left.” Their droppings also “looks a bit like bird poop” and, if we assume Godzilla is mostly eating sea creatures, the scientist thinks the King Of The Monsters would have “slimy and watery” feces that would be produced “while he’s submerged, resulting in a large oily slick.” At 393 feet tall and “99.6 tons”—a weight we can only guess is a typo of a more “reasonable” 9, 960 tons—one could assume Godzilla would win, but a last minute twist informs us that a giant lizard wouldn’t take as many dumps as a giant gorilla, even if the ones they did take were bigger and grosser. Thus, the winner, “if they have a day to do as much poop as they want,” is King Kong by a large, stinky margin.
We can’t help but parse this news through Guillermo del Toro’s hope that Pacific Rim’s kaiju could one day inhabit the same cinematic world as Kong and Godzilla. With these contestants in the ring, which fanciful skyscraper-sized beast would poop the biggest, most horrifying poops? And would humanity even be able to survive the colossal results of their battle? Let’s hope it never comes to that. Let’s hope that we, unlike Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Ishirō Serizawa, never need to watch a bunch of giant monsters squatting in a circle with no recourse other than to utter an awed, terrified, “Let them fight.”
[via Digg]
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