The Kool-Aid man’s explosive antics have been unquestionably cool since he busted through his first wall in the 1970s. But could he possibly survive such a dramatic entrance?
Wouldn’t he shatter when hitting a brick wall? What about the Kool-Aid inside—wouldn’t it slosh out? And let’s not forget that, best-case scenario, he’d be left with brick and mortar floating about in his innards.
These important questions have been fueling comedians and baffling stoners for years. But now YouTube superstar Jake Roper of the science-minded vlog VSauce decided to leave conjecture behind. Vsauce did the science to figure out if a 6-foot-tall anthropomorphic pitcher could actually break through a brick wall, and if so, what would be left of him.
Check out the results in the clip below, or, if you’re not up for a 4-minute clip on physics in the fictional world of advertising, skip down to our summary.
So in short, the answer is: Yes, Kool-Aid man could, though he probably wouldn’t feel too great afterwards.
It turns out that scaling an ordinary pitcher up to six feet, then filling it with the correct amount of Kool-Aid would make Kool-Aid Man an 11,000-pound elephant-sized beast with glass at least 3.6 inches thick. Even a creature made of ordinary glass would be able to break through a brick wall at that size by getting up to a run, but we don’t actually know what kind of glass Kool-Aid Man is made from. Heck, he could be made from Pyrex.
Nonetheless, the video explores how laminated glass (the bullet-proof stuff) would help him survive the inevitable surface cracks from his wall-breaking feats, but it doesn’t cover fully tempered glass, heat-strengthened material or any of the many other glass varieties. Certainly, there’s a materials scientist out there who could, with enough zeal, create the proper thickness, tempering and coating combination that would let Kool-Aid man break through more than just one wall.
However, there’s still the matter of vital fluid loss and contamination from brick debris. All of which suggests that the safest route for our beloved behemoth would be to respect other people’s property and use the damn door. Of course, given that he’s the size of an elephant and weighs as much as two Dodge Durangos, he can probably do whatever he wants.
