Film Theory: LEGO Batman vs DC Batman - Who's The Strongest Batman?

Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory! Where today we accept the Lego challenge, no, not the one that ruins your feet, the one that ruins your childhood. Now, even though we're talking about movies created from simple toys, "You know the rules, this isn't a toy!" Uh, in a way it's... "No, it's actually a very sophisticated interlocking brick system." Well, even though we're talking about movies created from highly sophisticated interlocking brick systems, I'm not going to mince words just yet. I'm taking Lego out of the hypothetical magic movie and bringing it into the real world... of Batman... Which is a little strange, since Lego is real and Batman isn't, so uuuuh, let me clarify, I'm bringing the characters Lego fictitious ones that canonically exist in the real world, but it is a fictional real world, outside of their separate fictional reality and within Batman's reality-based fiction.

I think that makes sense. Anyway, even though we're several levels below Inception, our premise is surprisingly simple: Who's stronger? DC Batman or Lego Batman? Literally since the day I first saw The Lego Movie (which, if you haven't seen it, is fantastic and moving), I've been asking myself this question. And now, finally, with the release of The Lego Movie sequel, it gives me the perfect opportunity to finally answer this question that's been five years in the making, and I get it, I know you're thinking it's a stupid question to dedicate an episode to and Half a decade of waiting to cover.

Of course, IRL Batman will be stronger. He's a 200-pound man versus a three-gram Lego minifigure. But what I want to know is the strength of him in relation to the overall size of him. Lifting a 10-pound dumbbell is nothing for a normal human being, but it would be an incredible feat of strength for a small Lego minifigure. So we need to measure each of them in their respective universes. As our real-life Batman contender, I chose what I think is the best version of Batman that isn't made of pressed and molded plastic, the Nolan Batman from The Dark Knight trilogy.

Don't tweet at me, or tweet for that matter, at @MatPatGT. I would love to have you as a Twitter follower. I tweet very relatable things! So, we'll use his strength against Lego Batman in our big showdown today. Now, when it comes to measuring strength, there are many different ways to do it, so we'll look at two main factors: 1. How much force they exert and 2. How much damage they can withstand. Offense and defense. So let's start with a bang, or rather, kick! What are the best measures of Lego Batman's strength when he is at home, without the aid of his gadgets and with nothing more than his brute strength and his excellent reflexes? "I have incredible reflexes!" Yes, that's what I just said, Lego Batman.

And we see those reflexes at work when Alfred takes him by surprise and kicks him against the piano. A piano that is completely on the other side of the room. It's safe to say that he's not hiding anything right now, as he's acting purely on instinct, and I suppose it would be pretty difficult for Christian Bale to match the results of kicking someone the size of him up to half a giant. mansion hall. So it would seem that Lego Batman in this case would definitely be stronger than IRL Batman, but to be safe, let's do some numbers.

When it comes to calculating force, we can always rely on our good friend, Sir Isaac Newton and his second law of motion, which tells us that Force = Mass x Acceleration, or, for the loyal theorists who have been watching the show for a while, F=MA. The mass here is pretty simple, since Alfred is what moves, we need Alfred's mass. And he has the same mass as the identical minifigure of him in the real world: 2.98 grams. To calculate his acceleration, we need to use the information we see on the screen. Reviewing the

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frame by frame, Alfred is in the air for 17 frames.

Since the footage is 24 frames per second, that equates to a total broadcast time of 0.7083333 seconds. And the distance he travels in that amount of time across Batman's room appears to be 28 studs. A stud here refers not to Batman, *Careless Whisper* but to the bulge at the top of a Lego brick that allows it to interlock with other bricks. which is equivalent to 22.26 centimeters long. So, knowing the distance and time tells us that Alfred flies at a speed of 31.426 centimeters per second. So now that we have Alfred's travel speed, we can determine the acceleration at the moment of impact, and by moment, I really mean moment, because going back to our frame-by-frame footage, Batman's foot connects with his face. of Alfred literally during a painting. .

Just 0.04166 seconds (or 41.66 milliseconds). Lego Batman wasn't lying about his incredible reflexes. That means our acceleration ends up being a whopping 754.3 centimeters per second squared, or heck, forget about centimeters, that's big enough to measure in large units, that's 7.5434 meters per second squared. So, plugging all that back into our old F=MA equation, we can discover that Lego Batman's kick is delivering 0.02248 Newtons of force (or 0.0050537 pounds of force), which may seem like a small number, and It is, but remember, Lego Batman is a little guy. Which means it's a pretty impressive kick for someone his size and weight.

Which means that if we're going to make a fair comparison between the relative strengths of these two Batmans, we have to measure it in terms of their strength-to-weight ratio. How strong are they in relation to their weight or size? So Lego Batman's force-to-weight ratio when he performs this kick is 0.00505 pounds of force divided by 0.00657 pounds of weight for a force-to-weight ratio of 0.769. That's the equivalent of a 200-pound man kicking with 153.8 pounds of force. Is that really impressive? Well, to find out, let's compare him to Christian Bale-man. Now Christian Bale's Batman has a lot of solid kicks throughout the Dark Knight trilogy, but all of them are a little difficult to gauge based on pure strength alone.

There are too many variables and jump cuts in each of these fight scenes. That said, this simple scene in Dark Knight Rises where he breaks some bricks with a kick actually gives us something solid to work with. So how much force does it take to break some bricks? To get that information, we turned to astronaut Ronald McNair. Like many astronauts, Ronald McNair was an MIT-trained physicist. Unlike many astronauts, he also had a fifth-degree black belt in karate. Fortunately for us, those two interests intersected and in a demonstration of his brick breaking skills, he recorded the force with which the bricks broke when he exerted 675 pounds of force.

So, using Christian Bale's weight when he

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ed the Dark Knight trilogy of 210 pounds, we can determine that Batman's strength-to-weight ratio in real life is 3.214. More than 4 times stronger than Lego Batman, even when you talk relatively. In fact, I am very surprised by that result. I mean, look at the difference in those two kicks! So, just comparing the strength of his kick, it seems like Lego Batman loses to the great Christian Bale. And in this case he's not only losing to Batman but to most normal people. An average person is able to press his legs between 1.8 and 2.2 times his own body weight, which means Lego Batman has less than half the strength of a normal person.

Are you sure you're not skipping leg day, Batman? "Who never skips leg day? Batman!" But maybe this wasn't a fair comparison. Maybe the Lego characters' lack of knees stops them when they try to kick. So let's see how the two Batmen stack up against each other defensively. Of all the abuse we see Lego Batman suffer, probably the most savage blow comes in the opening action scene of The Lego Batman Movie, when the Joker manages to ram Batman head-on with his car. Once again, we need to calculate the force, which means getting mass and acceleration. Mass here is easy, the Joker drives his "Notorious Lowrider" Lego set number 70906-1, now available for $39.99 wherever Lego sets are sold.

In case you forgot, all the Lego movies are ultimately an attempt to sell plastic toys to kids. Having access to a real-world version of the Lego vehicle means we can easily find its mass of 0.63 kilograms or 1.38 pounds and yes, that includes the mass of the Joker driving inside. Oh, I love doing episodes where all this information just exists because there are real-life products! For acceleration, we followed a similar procedure to kicking, measuring distances and times using frame-by-frame calculations, and finally ended up with 4.6226 meters per second squared. Now that we have mass and acceleration, we can calculate that the force is 2.912 Newtons or 0.654 pounds.

Again, it seems like a small number, but this time, when we adjust it for Batman's weight, things change drastically. The ratio between the force he can sustain and his weight is 99.653! That's the equivalent of a 200-pound man receiving a blow of 19,930 pounds of force. And yet, here's Lego Batman just brushing it off. That Danish-made plastic is designed to last. So it's no surprise that a Lego superhero has the same kind of durability. Surprise surprise, plastic can withstand much more abuse than human tissue. Or if so, we would assume so, but to be sure, let's check back with our Dark Knight.

While Lego Batman has to deal with Joker and Sauron, and Godzilla and Voldemort, Nolan's Batman suffers defeat at the hands of a much more mundane villain. "Who else pushes you to overcome them like I do?" "Perdition!" "No he does not!" Oh, but he does! In the Dark Knight trilogy, there is only one villain who manages to defeat Batman in hand-to-hand combat, causing him injuries that take him months to recover from, and his name is not Joker! "I was wondering what would break first!" "Your spirit or your body!" After all these years, that voice still seems very strange to me!

Anyway, Batman's body breaks, but how much punishment is Batman's body really taking? You know the drill: F=MA Analyze the footage, find the change in velocity during the moment of impact, multiply it by Batman's canonical weight of 95 kilograms or 210 pounds, and boom, you've got it! The force. At the moment of impact, the deceleration of Batman's body is 7.46 meters per second squared, multiply this by his mass and you will find that the impact of Bane's spine shattering attack is 708 Newtons, or 159 pounds of force , which is not impressive, not impressive at all. in fact. It's not even enough to break your back.

Now that may seem strange at first, that we made a miscalculation at some point, but that's not really true. What it really tells us is that this scene was filmed practically, they use a real stunt actor instead of using CG to make the impact seem more brutal. And when you're filming real things, you don't want the actor to be subjected to forces that would really break his back. Bane may not be pulling punches in the fictional world of Batman, but apparently Bane actor Tom Hardy here in the real world is, probably for the better. So, to be a little more fair to the live-action version of Batman, we can probably compare his body to that of a typical human to get a more accurate estimate of how much damage he could take from a supervillain like Bane.

According to Ali Bydon, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, a spinal injury like the one we see in the movie would require about 3,000 Newtons of force or about 674.4 pounds of force. It's an impressive figure, to be sure, but it's a far cry from LEGO Batman's adjusted weight of 19,930 pounds of force, so we're tied 1-1. In terms of durability, the little plastic figures blow humanity out of the water, but when it comes to feats of kicking strength, the movable leg joints are apparently very useful. Except there's something else here. Something that clearly decides this battle of Batman fans once and for all.

You see, punches and kicks are not the best way to determine Lego Batman's real strength. He at his

strongest

is actually shown in something much more mundane and common in the Lego-verse: building. In the original Lego Movie, they make a big deal of the fact that certain people in the LEGO universe are master builders, making people like Batman, Emmet, and Unikitty part of this elite group. "Master Builders spend years training to clear their minds enough, and yet your mind is already so prodigiously empty that there's nothing in it to clear to begin with." And it's this creative ability to think outside the box, or without instructions, that makes Master Builders so powerful in the Lego universe.

Except maybe there's another quality that matters besides pure creativity. You see, atBeginning of the movie, when Emmet goes to work at the construction site, there seems to be a lot of workers and infrastructure to accomplish what should be relatively simple tasks, like connecting a 1x2 board to another board. Hammers, cranes, and hundreds of workers are involved in this process. And yet, later in the film, we see the master builders making things like this in seconds, with pieces much larger than themselves. It really takes a feat of super strength to put those LEGO creations together. How much super strength?

I'm glad you asked. Because we are working with Legos, a widely used consumer product, the data is available to us and according to a report that measures the force needed to build with Legos, the brick separation into just 2 2x2 bricks measures 5.2 pounds. That's more than a thousand times the force we calculated when Lego Batman kicked Alfred across the room. That means your strength-to-weight ratio suddenly skyrockets. It comes out to 791.48 which is the equivalent of our 200 pounds. Christian Bale exerting 158,295 pounds of force. Imagine some guy, or heck, Batman walking up to an adult male African elephant (the heaviest land animal on the planet) and just, you know, picking him up.

And then, coincidentally, he lifted 11 more. That's the equivalent of what Lego Batman does here every time he separates two Lego bricks. This means that Lego Batman not only handily beats our Nolan Batman, but he does so to an absurd degree. Lego Batman is not only one of the best-written and best-acted Batmans ever, but interestingly enough, he's also the most super-powered. Dear DC, now that the news is out that your extended universe needs another replacement for the Man in Black, I have a little guy who might be the missing piece you're looking for. But hey! Not everyone can have a caped vigilante with a heart of pure blackness to protect them in their daily lives, but you can get the best option with our sponsor of today's video, NordVPN.

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