Film Theory: Tangled - Rapunzel's Hair is KILLING Itself!

You know, I really love the opening song of Tangled. ♪♪ IT'S GREAT!!! But you know, I can't shake the feeling that I've heard it before somewhere... ♪♪ I can't be the only one hearing the similarities between the opening of Tangeled and Pinball Wizard from The Who Am I? ♪♪ It's no wonder Disney has the catchiest songs ever! They are being robbed of some of the catchiest songs out there!! Apparently, ever since she was a child, Rapunzel played that silver ball, between rounds of brushing, brushing, brushing her

hair

. ♪♪ Optimistic Introduction ♪♪ Hello, Internet! Welcome to FILM THEORY! Where? Can we seriously stop for a moment and talk about the premise of Tangled for a second?

When you think about it, Rapunzel is one of those fairy tales that's only okay because it's been drilled into all of us since preschool. Imagine Rapunzel wasn't invented, it wasn't a 200-year-old fairy tale, and suddenly a Disney writer makes this proposal in the boardroom. He says, "Guys, guys." "I have this great new princess." "She is a girl, who will be isolated in a tower without human contact for about eighteen years." "She'll be totally helpless in real life. But she'll have this super power." "She gets really long

hair

. She'll just have this wonderful blonde hair," "And grown men will climb it like a rope and crawl up to her tower at night." "It will be a great message for children!" "After that, we'll make a movie about emojis and after that, fidget spinners." The writer then gets slapped by everyone in the room, criticized on Tumblr, publicly apologizes on Twitter, and Rapunzel ends up in the Disney story bin with Brer Rabbit. and Tar Baby.

But fortunately Rapunzel's story is a 200-year-old fairy tale and Tangled is one of Disney's biggest hits of its new golden age. And it is beautiful! And the chameleon is really funny, and he's surprisingly hearty. Warming, And the music is really catchy, although of course, some of the songs may sound very similar to other songs that have happened in the past... NO!, get out of there MatPat It's up to me to find another way to ruin this movie for you, and in that way, it is through a big, and I mean a huge head of hair. That's right, loyal theorist, watch out for split ends because today we're going to put Rapunzel's golden locks to the test to find out how this type of hair could possibly exist.

And if so, if Rapunzel and her miraculous hair would be able to do any of the stunts you see her do in the movies. Now, obviously, I'm not going to touch on his "healing hair" magic unless you believe in the restorative powers of Emma Watson's hair, as Seventeen magazine apparently does. Not even this program can explain something like that. No, I care about the real world. What it would mean for a real person to have real hair like this. Could you really use it as a ladder, weapon, rope, hammock? All the things you see her do in the movie, COULD YOU DO IT?!

This has to be crazy. Good? Well, there's only one way to find out... DO A LOT OF RESEARCH!! Let's start with the most basic question: How long is Rapunzel's hair? According to the Center for Disease Control, the CDC, which is apparently hard at work studying all those deadly hair diseases and, don't you know, dedicating their time to saving the world from the zombie apocalypse. Like you see them do it on Walking Dead. Human hair grows approximately 1.25 centimeters, or about half an inch per month. At that rate, after eighteen years of uninterrupted hair growth, Rapunzel's hair would measure about 9 1/2 feet. 9 1/2 feet.

Did you listen to that former Viner and now Instagram star, Lele Pons? Something tells me you might be lying about never having cut your hair before. Just like you did when you donated that freshly cut hair to Locks of Love. But aside from using fake charities to get more social media followers, if you had 9 1/2 feet of hair, it would be great to donate it to Locks of Love, assuming the hair is real. Lelé Pons. But it doesn't compare to how long Rapunzel's hair is clearly shown in the movie. Fortunately, Kelly Ward, one of the animators working specifically on Rapunzel's hair in Tangled, revealed in an interview that Rapunzel's hair canonically must be 70 feet long. "Holy furballs!" That's longer than a bowling lane.

It is taller than the Hollywood sign. It is almost twice as tall as a telephone pole. Hair growing at a normal rate would take between 140 and 170 years to reach that length. Which means either Rapunzel is coping with his age very well or his hair is growing at an incredibly fast rate. To have hair that long in 18 years, these luscious locks would have had to grow almost 4 inches per month. So, right off the bat, is it possible to grow? No, but of course, it's magical hair. Therefore, it is okay to assume that it is growing faster than normal.

And there are still plenty of other questions we can ask about this movie, like whether hair would really work, if you could somehow make it grow that fast. Could you really climb it like a rope? That sounds good. Do you imagine, and rightly so, that someone climbing through your hair is much more attractive than what you'll get on a typical kindergarten playground? Now, when Rapunzel lets down her long hair, she twists it into a clip. Which turns his hair into a kind of "pulley system." And yes, later in the movie, when Flinn climbs up Rapunzel's hair, the hair doesn't go over the hook, but it's still held up by the window sill.

So it's working in a very similar way. Now, that pulling sensation won't feel very good, but surprisingly it won't cause you any major damage either. When I first saw these scenes I thought, "Huh. Well, that's going to break his neck." But to fracture the cervical vertebrae (fancy word for breaking your neck), you need to experience more than 3,000 newtons of force. That's equivalent to about 675 pounds of hair pulling. Even without any leverage, Rapunzel could drag Prince Eugene over the side of the building, as well as two of his closest friends. Very impressive. And in terms of Rapunzel's ability to withstand people climbing, I would say this is a myth confirming an incorrect show.

Uh- THEORY CONFIRMED! Well, save MatPat, no one noticed. So when Rapunzel pulls her hair down, he won't snap his neck like a KitKat. Good news for her! But that's far from the end of our fictional problems. Because even if Rapunzel has the strength in her neck to hold his hair and someone on top of it, is her hair rooted enough in her scalp to withstand those kinds of forces? Or are they just going to make her bald as a Sunday chicken? It seems logical that putting the full weight of an adult human being on a head of hair would tear out all that hair.

I mean, after all, how hard is it to reach over your head and pluck out a single hair? Well, we know exactly how difficult that is because there are people somewhere who have studied it. Oh really! I am continually amazed at how I can find studies that measure these types of things. I hear a lot of people say that the academy is underfunded, and I'm sure that must be true, but based on my Google searches, I could propose a study on how many Diet Cokes do I have to drink to rush through the sweetener? . turn me into a rabid squirrel.

And I would probably receive funding for that research. Not for light cocaine, apparently they hate me because they never want to talk. Seriously, several people have tried to introduce me to diet coke and newly closed doors all the time. And at this point, I'm like Diet Coke's clingy ex-girlfriend. *Sad noise* Anyway, the official study on stopping hair pulling estimates that the force to remove or "pluck" one hair from the scalp of a healthy person is about 21.2 grams of force. It may not seem like much, and it is not. But when you're talking about an entire head of hair, you have to multiply that force by all the hairs on your head.

And spoiler alert! Rapunzel has a lot of hair. If she is a typical blonde, she has about 150,000 follicles on her head. I'll spare you all the math, but that would mean it would take 7,000 or 3.5 tons of force to pull out all those hairs at once. In

theory

, he can hang a truck by its hair and it won't come off completely. It may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it is still clearly clear that the scalp can support the weight of a human being. If you think about it, it actually makes sense. That's why it's common to see circus performers suspended by their hair doing aerial tricks.

Okay, that's pretty impressive, but I hear you saying fouls from the chat. Lack! Bird! You say you sound a little silly. But you're right. There is still one weak link that we haven't considered yet... The hair

itself

. Sure the body attached to the hair can prevent it from being pulled out and can stay upright, but hair is just dead cells. I mean, if you put your hair under that much tension it will break, right? MISTAKEN!!! If you thought your scalp was strong then you don't know your hair. The tensile strength of hair, that is, the amount of force it can withstand before breaking, is about half the strength of steel!

I mean, sure it's not steel, but it's still pretty good for something your body grows while sitting on the back of your couch. What does that strength mean to Rapunzel? Well, together, a full head of hair could support 12 tons. 24,000 pounds. 11,000 kilograms! That doesn't mean you can do something ridiculous like hang an elephant by a scalp without breaking your hair. It means you can hang TWO elephants with that hair without it breaking! And we see her doing things like lying on her hair, tying people up, lassoing, swinging around like Tarzan, who she might be related to by the way.

That's nothing! Her hair doesn't even sweat! A metaphorical sweat would literally be slimy and disgusting, and would violate the laws of biology because hair should not sweat... Although we are talking about slimy and disgusting things, we have another question left. One thing I couldn't justify in this movie is what condition her hair would be in after 18 years. Because here's the thing, Rapunzel sure says he'll constantly brush, ♪ and brush and brush and brush, all of his hair ♪ But one thing we can be pretty sure of is that he doesn't wash that hair much. She may feel the need to use Herbal herself, but not only would it take her literally days to dry that hair, but it would also be impossible to carry enough water to the tower and wash it in the pre-plumbing era of this movie.

So this literally equals 18 years of hair dirt where most of her hair just drags on the floor. I mean look! Here she is literally sweeping dirt out of her hair. Unfortunately this still doesn't disapprove of the movie. If anything, the fact that her hair retains the natural oils of the scalp and isn't dried out by shampoo would probably make it even stronger. And the dust in it would give it incredibly scary friction, making it harder to break! But before all you little girls decide to stop washing their hair like Rapunzel, there are some downsides. That mop of unwashed 18-year-old hair would smell like curdled milk strained through a gym sock.

She wouldn't need her frying pan or any of her other weapons in this movie because the rancid smell of her own head would scare people away. But again, that's just disgusting. It doesn't change what her hair can really do. Soooooo... So does that mean all of Rapunzel's hair tricks are... plausible? Oh man, is this a Disney franchise where I'm going to have to back off and admit it's just a great movie? For a while it definitely seemed that way. BUT. Dear loyal theorist, you know, there is always a but. Remember that animator who told us Rapunzel's hair was 70 feet long?

GOOD! In the same interview she also revealed the weight of this hair. Proclaiming that it weighs around 60 pounds. And I checked it twice. The math works. When I did my own calculations based on the number of hairs Rapunzel has, the weight of the hair per centimeter, and the total length, I came up with her hair weighing about 56 pounds or 25 kilograms. Now. It seems like a lot, but if you gain 60 pounds, you're still fine. Good? And if you think about it, most of the time a lot of Rapunzel's hair is just on the ground. So every time Rapunzel is still, she will only feel about 10 pounds of extra hair weight.

The problem arises when she wants to, you know, do literally anything else. She walks, dances, cleans, paints, hits people with frying pans, sings Pinball Wizard, rides horses, essentially everything we see her do in this movie. Whenever that happens, he has to drag the full weight of her hair behind her. 60 pounds dragged by her scalp at allparts, all the time. Imagine if you tied a 56-pound, 25-kilogram bowling ball directly to your hair. And then you had to drag it with just your head the whole time. This would definitely make her a lot less mobile than we see in the movie, but it would also mean that she's doing a lot of damage to her head over time.

Through a condition called traction alopecia. And no, this is not something made up. I'm not even the one trying to stretch the investigation to reach a dramatic conclusion. It is a real condition that affects all types of hair, in people all over the world, whenever the hair is under stress. In cultures that use tight braids, twists, or buns in Africa and Asia, this happens all the time. But it is also common in the United States. Have you been trying out some braids lately? Have you been rocking the hipster bun every day? HELL! Have you been wearing a tight-fitting bike helmet too much?

Any of these means that your hair is constantly being pulled out of your scalp. It's certainly not enough to pull it out as we learned today, but it is enough to straighten the hair in the follicle and that leads to hair loss over time. And that's the kind of stress that Rapunzel's long hair puts on

itself

. 60 pounds of traction every time you move. In reality, Rapunzel's hair would look very different from the movie. Here it looks like he has a big head of hair, but in reality, traction alopecia due to 60 pounds of hair tension on his head.

Every day he slowly plucked more and more of the golden locks from him. Bearing his head a scaly, red, scaly mess. And worse yet, the hair he lost would be gone forever. Because in many cases traction alopecia is irreversible. So once that hair comes out, it's gone forever. So, for the 18 years that Rapunzel has been wondering when he will begin his life, he would have lost most of his hair due to his own hair. And with that image in our minds, I think we can safely say we've covered Tangled. I wonder what we can do with Up...

BUT HEY, THAT'S JUST A THEORY. A FILM THEORY! AAAAAY... Cut. Your hair. CUT IT!! And also subscribe, we are VERY close to 5,000,000 million subscribers. Could you, yeah, you're sitting there listening to this video right now? Could you be subscriber number 5 million? Well, you could. Click that button. CLICK IT! Click on it several times. And if you want more Disney princess magic, click the box to your left to find out that Snow White wasn't saved by Prince Charming's kiss. But what will really save her? Well, you have to watch the video to find out. IT'S A GOOD ONE!

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