mike weber (5:22 AM on Thu Dec 17, 2009)

Interesting that the Muppets/Bergman article, in mentioning other Bergman parodies didn't mention the Oscar-nominated short, De Düva, which - aside from being laugh-out-loud funny - is Madeline Kahn's film debut.

As to the Verne/Wells comic - Verne pretty much made his science up, to - in any situation where his figures can be checked, he's likely wrong.

For instance - "From the Earth to the Moon" - if the "Columbiad" (the gun) were 3.5 miles long - and i don't even want to *think* about the ludicrous concept of pouring that much cast iron in place in a hole in the ground - the astronauts inside the projectile would experience an acceleration of nearly 1200 G for a full second, in order to achieve escape velocity of 7 miles/second... Assuming that the acceleration was constant, which it wouldn't be. (I see from Wikipedia that Verne's Columbiad was 900 ft long. Given that length, the projectile would traverse its length in .05 second, at an average velocity of 3.5 miles/sec - which looks like about 739,000 G. NOT survivable.)

And let's not even *consider* the Nautilus...