How did they drown the rats?. RATS CAN SWIM!!!. God this was crap beyond belief. I was given a bunch of late 80's era home recorded tapes and this was one of them. Perfect price.
----------------------------------------
Insert clever quote here
During the movie one of the men said that they were 150+ lbs. and thus weren't able to swim due to their weight ...
shareThat still doesn't make any sense!!!.
----------------------------------------
Insert clever quote here
Makes very much sense. They were defeated by the square-cube law as it applies to biomechanics.
If an animal were scaled up by a considerable amount, its muscular strength would be severely reduced since the cross section of its muscles would increase by the square of the scaling factor while their mass would increase by the cube of the scaling factor.
That means the rats would not be able to walk. They would, however, remain buoyant.
LOL I would think they wouldn't need to swim at that size. Couldn't they just walk across?
shareIf you get a baby to start swimming really early in life so by the time it's walking it's a competant swimmer..it won't sink like a stone when that same baby, now an adult, gets in the water!! It ludicrous to suggest that a creature that is a natural swimmer, like rats, will 'forget' how to swim and sink simply because it's now a huge size. A hippopotomus can swim very well..despite weighing upwards of a quarter of a ton! It doesn't matter how big you are or heavy..in water you become virtually weightless.
My biggest gripe with this film is the insistance of the makers to have the rats growling, snarling and at one point roaring like lions!!! I've kept rats as pets and they don't make anything like that noise...they ocassionally squeak.
Having said all that..this film is so poorly made it's hilarious. Can't believe they squeezed two sequels out of this.
The point that the filmmakers were trying to make, is that since the rats were now gigantic in size, and somewhat limited in intelligence, could not comprehend and compensate for their new weight. Therefore the rats, who were used to their previous, let's say 1.5 pound, weight and could swim easily, could not when all this extra weight was suddenly cast upon them.
Gallipoli, Gallipoli,
Gallipoli, Gallipoli,
Gallipoli, Gallipoli,
Gallipoli.....
It really isn't that far-fetched. Just because a rat can swim at its normal size doesn't mean it still could if it were huge. It's commonly noted that many insects would be unable even to support their own weight while standing, if they were greatly enlarged with no structural changes.
I eat god for breakfast.
There are many things to expect from a Bert I. Gordon movie, but good science is definitely not one of them. This is the guy who claimed that the human heart has only one cell! (in The Amazing Colossal Man). If oversized rats would drown in reality, that'd be a coincidence.
I have not read the original book (I'd love to, as I enjoy H.G. Wells a lot), so I don't know if the same thing happens there. However, to be fair, it wouldn't be the first case of drowned rats in popular fiction. There was "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" (and those were normal-sized rats).
There's no Santa Claus
I revisited this thread after a year and i'm very happy to find so many replies.
Thank you all.
----------------------------------------
Insert clever quote here
No, it doesn't make sense that giant rats would drown. Insects can't be scaled up because they have exoskeletons, because they breathe by diffusion rather than lungs, and because of the cube-square law (body weight increases in proportion to the cube of linear dimension, while surface area [and, roughly, strength] increase in proportion to the square -- which is why elephants can't jump, and why insects aren't hurt by falls that would kill larger animals). Giant rats would just be big mammals, like horses or dogs -- or hippopotamuses, as previously mentioned. In water, body size and body weight don't matter as much as density: if small rats float, big rats should also float.
Maybe the Food of the Gods not only made the organisms bigger, it also made them heavier than water. (No, wait: the giant insects could still fly, which just doesn't work any way you look at it.)
On the other hand: you saw the movie, and "giant rats drown" is the part that seemed implausible?
Maybe the Food of the Gods not only made the organisms bigger, it also made them heavier than water. (No, wait: the giant insects could still fly, which just doesn't work any way you look at it.)