Film Theory: Ghostbusters - HOW MANY Calories is Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?

Who else loves s'mores? I'm going to be honest, if it has s'mores in the name, I will try it, even though I know COMPLETELY WELL that it probably won't taste like s'more at all. More ice cream? There. More M&Ms? I understand. S'moreos? Sign me up. That's why when I see Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, all I want is for the giant Hershey Bar Guy and the great Graham Cracker Lad to appear. That's when we throw a party, my friends, that's when! Hello Internet, welcome to Film Theory, the show that asks questions about movies that others are too afraid to ask... or have too much self-respect to ask.

But I'll let YOU decide which one it is! Man, in a summer full of movies, there's one that everyone is talking about: Ghostbusters... but maybe not for the right reasons. I mean, the original 1984 version is an undisputed classic and maintains a 97% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But then fast forward to the present day, where the CGI-filled all-female reboot trailer is currently my least favorite movie trailer in YouTube history. Let me say it again: THE MOST DISGUSTING trailer in the HISTORY of YouTube. Actually? Really Internet? THIS is much worse than THIS? "Are you going bald?" "No, no, no, no, you're getting fat and your hair doesn't realize it needs to cover more of your face." Hey, I'm not judging, there's no need to take taste into account, and I get it, Adam Sandler's comedic stylings are truly transcendent.

Comedy gold. So today's goal: make a video that you like at least a little more than the Ghostbusters trailer. Well, I'm already getting a head start, because this video focuses on the original Ghostbusters, reminding you of that happier time when watching a baby be repeatedly put in life-threatening situations was the epitome of entertainment. In truth, when you think about the original

film

, yes, sure, you had stream crossings and the demonic David Bowie, THE most iconic image is none other than Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It's such a brilliantly absurd moment that it became an instant classic . But while others laughed at Dan Akyroid's childhood memories of roasting

marshmallow

s by the fire at Camp Waconda, this is where my theoretical brain went when I first saw the scene...could I EAT that?

And sure, maybe there's some FatPat talking there, but hey, it's all in the name of science. So today I answer the question no one has been thinking about since 1984: How

many

calories

does Stay Puft Marshmallow Man have and what would it mean if I actually ate it? Now, for those of you who grew up not knowing "who you're going to call," here's the lowdown on our plumpest bunnies: In the original Ghostbusters, the team faces off against an ancient Sumerian demon named Gozer who stalks the city of New York. How you do it, you know, the uzhe.

As part of the final showdown, Gozer demands that the heroes choose what will destroy them and the rest of New York City. While everyone else is trying to keep their minds blank, our good friend Dan Aykroyd accidentally imagines "I Tried to Think of the Most Harmless Thing": The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And you can't really blame him, because throughout the movie images of Stay Puft appear. When we see the eggs in Dana's apartment explode and cook on the counter, there is a bag of Stay Puft

marshmallow

s on the counter with the rest of the purchase, and later in the

film

we see a large mural of Stay Puft marshmallows on the side. of a building.

With all those brand integrations, poor Ray didn't stand a chance. Subliminal advertising, guys! You have to put a #spon on that kind of thing, sold out. Anyway, the big Mallow Blaster shows up, Godzilla-style, and starts pummeling upper Manhattan into fluff. Produces hilarity. So let's find out how much marshmallow action the kaiju Puff has. To do this, we need to make some assumptions about the contents of Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Let's say it's made entirely of marshmallow; Normally I'd say it would need some sort of musculoskeletal system to maneuver, but seriously, it's a giant sandwich manifested in Dan Aykroyd's subconscious and forced by a demon from hell, so we'll let the normal anatomy slide on this one.

Plus, when it erupts, there's no viscera, just a bunch of marshmallow fluff, so I think we're safe. Now, the first step in determining how much heat energy Stay Puft contains is determining how big it is. In the movie they give us a clue: “Killed by a 100-foot marshmallow man.” But can we be more exact? ABSOLUTELY! In the Ghostbusters DVD extras, Mark Stetson, the model shop supervisor, reveals that the scaled size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was 112 and a half feet tall. We can also compare it to surrounding buildings to confirm that this is the correct range.

So, for once, that made my life a little easier, but from there the calculations start to get a little more complicated. Initially, I attempted to determine the width of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man by looking at its scale compared to other landmarks in the film. There's a shot where the Ghostbusters look at Stay Puft as he walks towards them, and we can see that he's about the width from the sidewalk to the yellow center lines of the street. We know it's about 50 feet, because the street Stay Puft is walking on is Central Park West in New York.

According to an 1892 edition of the World Almanac, almost all New York City avenues are 100 feet wide, so Stay Puft is half that. But we're still lacking depth and the film doesn't really show

many

good side shots. And more importantly, even if we're right that Stay Puft is 50 feet wide at its widest point, how wide is its head compared to the rest of its body? If you watch this series often, you'll know that I'd normally account for this sort of thing using pixel measurements, but Stay Puft is full of unusual shapes and sizes. So in this case I'm using another measure that will do a better job of taking the irregular shape of Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and giving us workable numbers.

And that measurement is BMI. The BMI statistic was created in the 19th century and is primarily used to measure the relative thickness or thinness of a population by measuring average weight based on average height. And for our purposes, it's actually perfect because all it does is calculate the ratio of the height to the width of a human-shaped object. It doesn't matter if the person is muscular, overweight or composed exclusively of sugar. And if you look at the Marshmallow Man, he's not just a pile of cylindrical marshmallows stacked up: he has folds and thickness. He is much more human than purely geometric.

Knowing that, take a look at this chart of body shapes and their associated BMIs. Stay Puft is round and has relatively thick limbs. From a purely scientific perspective, Stay Puft's shape indicates that he would have a very high BMI. And judging by the numbers, a BMI of 40 is a good estimate, perhaps even conservative. Hey, we will NOT do candy shaming on this channel, okay? But now that we have the height and projected BMI for Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, we can calculate how much he would weigh. Or, more accurately, we can determine how much a human being his size would weigh and go from there.

The body mass index formula states that BMI is equal to 703 times a person's weight in pounds divided by their height in inches squared. Stay Puft's height of 112.5 feet translates to 1,350 inches. When we square the height, multiply the BMI of 40 by that number, and then divide the result by 703, we have the isolated weight, which comes out to 103,698 pounds. But now, before you get mad at the comments, no, he obviously doesn't weigh 103,000 pounds. Like I said, that would be the weight of the Stay Puft Man…Man. If Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was just a—a human the size of Marshmallow Man.

You get it. What we are looking for for the MARSHMALLOW Man. So we need to convert his weight from this figure (what he would weigh as a human being) to what he would weigh as a marshmallow. To do that, we need to know what the density of a human and a marshmallow really is. The density of human beings varies, but for heavier people it is usually around 1.01 grams per milliliter. Now we can adjust that 103,698-pound weight to its marshmallow equivalent by converting human density to the density of a marshmallow, which is 0.21 grams per milliliter, about one-fifth the density of a human.

So, doing all the math, that means that Stay Puft Marshmallow Man actually weighs 21,561 pounds, or about 9,500 kilograms. Which is actually surprisingly light for a building-destroying monster. For perspective, it's lighter than a typical school bus, so having it destroy buildings may be a bit of a stretch. It's still a giant marshmallow. Even at such a huge size, its squishy Stay Puft-ness would simply highlight most well-made buildings. But I hear you in the comments saying, "Geez, MatPat, I came here because I want to eat an ancient Sumerian demon and not talk about school buses." And that's valid, I totally understand your desire to eat an ancient Sumerian demon.

So now that we know how much it weighs, calculating the number of

calories

it contains is not complicated at all. For reference, I used the nutrition facts for Kraft's Jet Puffed Marshmallows because something tells me they're not that different, claiming to have 100 calories for every four marshmallows, or 30 grams, 20 grams of which are pure sugar. When we convert Stay Puft's weight in pounds to grams and multiply it by the number of calories per gram, we get the whopping total: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man works out to 32.6 million calories. Get ready to go to that Pilates class...a few hundred thousand times.

If you wanted to consume that many calories, you would have to consume about 228,000 cans of Coca-Cola, or eat 2.7 million peanut M&Ms, or eat 62,700 Golden Arches Big Mac meals. Considering that the average human lifespan is 27,375 days, you would practically have to eat the Big Mac meal three times a day, every day, for the rest of your life to reach that level of caloric intake. Which in turn begs the question: What if we burned it? Well, a good rule of thumb is that a typical person will burn 100 calories for every mile they walk. So that would translate to you walking 326,000 miles to break free from your Marshmallow Man binge.

And if that sounds like a lot to you, you don't know the half of it! The circumference of the Earth is approximately 25,000 miles. Then you would have to walk around the ENTIRE WORLD 13 times to burn that Sumerian demon you consumed. Man, I knew I should have ordered from the lighter menu. That Caesar Salad Titan was calling my name. Considering that a man's average caloric intake is about 2,000 per day, that's almost 44 YEARS worth of calories in a single serving. Hungry? Why wait? Eat a Marshmallow Man and you'll be set for life. AND TALK ABOUT your sugar highs.

A 30 meter tall marshmallow man is equivalent to 6.52 million grams of sugar. That's 7 US tons of sugar, the equivalent of an adult African elephant made entirely of sugar. That's almost 1.5 million Oreo cookies; a single filling, which, let's be honest, is clearly inferior to Double Stuft, so it's actually 1,000,000 Double Stuft Oreos. You may have seen the studies on how much humans have increased their sugar consumption throughout our history. It is estimated that it has increased by 600% in the last 140 years. We currently consume 130 pounds or 60,000 grams of sugar a year, which is undoubtedly a lot. But even in the face of this huge increase in sugar intake, Stay Puft represents 108 years of constantly shoving sugar in your face.

Needless to say, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man doesn't seem to be part of a balanced diet. But the big question of the day remains: could you eat it? Technically, the answer is yes, but the fine print would say “But not for long.” And the problem is with sugar. Toxicologists believe that the lethal dose of sugar for a human being is about 15 grams per kilogram of weight. I say believe because they are estimates; Apparently, it's pretty hard to find test subjects who are willing to eat sugar until they die, go figure. Sometimes I feel like I'm getting close!

Sorry, it's FatPat speaking again. For a 150-pound adult, that lethal dose would be between 2 and 2.5 pounds of sugar or about 1,000 grams, which, all things considered, isn't much. If you committed to eating the beast, he would kill you 6,500 times before you were done. Which means, in an ironic twist, the scariest thing about Stay Puft isn't its physical strength (remember, it hits with less force and density than a school bus) and it's not crossing streams, it's its sugar content. . Forget about getting stepped on, he would literally kill you before you ripped off his toe. But hey, that's just a

theory

.

A film

theory

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