You remember that dress that swept the internet a couple months ago?
I mean, what's the deal with that?
It's like: was it black? Was it gold? Pick a color and stick with it! Am I right?
*laughter*
and uh-uhm
What about that 90's show Seinfeld?
That started every episode with a stand-up bit. It's like: hello, we know you're a comedian but, this is a sitcom so get to the episode already! am I right?!
*Film Theory Introduction*
Hello internet! Welcome to Film Theory
Where sometimes we do episodes that aren't about "Game of Thrones"!
*Cheering*
So, maybe now you're breathing a sigh of relief because you're like "Finally Film Theory will will be covering a show I've actually seen.
Something that I can relate to!"
Well hate to break it to you, you youth of the nation because today we're talking about Seinfeld.
No this episode wasn't pulled from BuzzFeed's latest 90's nostalgia list.
27 Struggles that were all too real to 90's kids.
We're talking about the series that's widely considered to be the best sitcom of all time.
I know that top pat of 1995 loved it.
And now the series just had a recent resurgence over one specific episode that I just had to talk about.
A couple weeks ago one of the show's stars Jason Alexander
appeared on the Howard Stern show to talk about his character George Costanza
I would say that he's the unlovable one of the cast
but basically the whole show revolved around four people
who just did awful, awful things all the time.
Hilarious things,
but legitimately awful things
And yet you still like them.
It was pretty incredible, anyway at the top of season 7
George gets engaged to a woman named Susan.
It's a recurring plot throughout the season, but Jason Alexander revealed in the Howard Stern interview
that "Her sense of comedy was never able to mash with any of the show's regular cast members"
So as a way to fix the problem they killed her off.
In one of the most bizarre and memorable episodes of the series.
Susan dies in the season 7 finale. But it's not her death that's so bizarre.
It's the way in which she dies. It's not murder, it's not suicide, it's not even cancer
it's envelopes. Yes Susan dies by licking her own wedding invitation envelopes.
"Apparently the.. uh glue in the wedding invitations was uh toxic."
*sighs*
and the internet being the internet, this issue of course spawned countless medical web-forum debates
about whether stamp and envelope licking could actually kill you.
And for us it's a question too fun to pass up.
So in this episode of Film Theory my mouth is watering in anticipation of finding out whether a person can die
from licking too much envelope adhesive.
Get it, watering, it's a, it's a joke because it's about licking envelopes.
It's a stretch, let's move on.
To examine whether this plot has any sticking power -
Huh, I'm on fire today
- we need to take a closer look at the circumstances around Susan and the envelopes.
We don't ever get a close up of the envelope itself, or the adhesive that kills her.
But the show leaves us a couple clues that help us tear open this sticky situation.
- Don't worry, I'll stop, I'll behave myself -
Let's start with buying the invitations. George and Susan go to pick them up from a stationary store in Manhattan
where the sales clerk shows them their options. George immediately flips to the back where the cheapest
invitations are kept because, you know, guys just don't understand all the hoopla around a card that people
are just gonna throw out anyway.
Google Calendar invite maybe, customize the color or something, Whatever.
Anyway as we learn from the store clerk, the cheapest invitations, the one George happens to choose,
have been discontinued for quite some time.
"They haven't manufactured that one for a number of years."
"Why don't they make them anymore?"
"Well, for one thing, the glue isn't very adhesive"
So this scene actually tells us a lot. One, the envelopes are old.
This episode was produced in season 7 of Seinfeld which aired in 1995.
The store clerk says that the envelopes haven't been printed in several years.
Which leaves us a pretty open window as far as the envelope time-frame.
Two, The envelopes are cheap, and three. they're not very adhesive.
So let's start with the first piece of evidence, the old envelopes.
Believe it or not, the wide world of envelope adhesive sciences
well a thing that actually exists but even more than that is an area where
there have actually been
some interesting advances over the course of the last century
oh man, century. VR better watch out for that emerging envelope tech. Oh-o boy
anyway modern envelope adhesives have their roots in world war two packaging
and shipping where the US government needed adhesives that would resist
jolting and unsticking in bad weather and trips across the ocean
the majority of adhesives up to that point and still today actually are
solvent adhesives a solvent adhesive is usually made out of some kind of starch
like potato starch or flour
the idea is that when you get wet it gets sticky and as the water evaporates
around it it hardens
well in World War two they need something stronger more resilient their
answer was a synthetic resin called polyvinyl acetate or P.V.A.C, PVAC which is
actually derived from petroleum
but unlike the petroleum we used to make gasoline or vicks vapo-rub
PVAC is a glue. In World War two feedback adhesives were used because
they were super waterproof and could be used on almost anything after the war
PVA adhesive was rolled out commercially and started to be used in pretty much
everything from sealants to sticky labels on tin cans to envelope glue in
the late nineteen fifties manufacturers started to change the formulation of
polyvinyl acetate to remove its waterproofness but that seems weird
right
having watertight seals on envelopes and boxes seems like a really good idea
doesn't it? Well the primary reason for this change was that the waterproof version
was difficult to seal
I mean think about it if your adhesive is waterproof it also makes it resists
well, your tongue
in other words to get past the waterproof envelope glue
you would have to apply more spit to activate the adhesive and once you had
it sealed it would take a longer time to dry
going back to our evidence from the episode.
"It takes a lot of moisture to make them stick."
Doesn't stick well and needs a lot of moisture, seems like we're
getting our answer signed, sealed, and delivered.
-I'm sorry I just had to fit one more in- so now we have evidence for the
existence of old envelopes that are difficult to seal and required more
licks to stick but that doesn't mean they're poisonous right, /right/.
Well, polyvinyl acetate contains trace elements that you wouldn't want to spend an
afternoon
slurping up specifically heavy metals and one in particular
arsenic. Sound familiar? Arsenic is known as the king of poisons. /The/ most famous
and one of the most deadly poisons in the world. Inorganic arsenic was the
choice poison for royal assassination since before the Middle Ages
it's been implicated in Napoleon's death and was used in some of the first war
gases in world war two and one of its more recent victims?
Susan from Seinfeld. In the scene leading up to Susan's death we see her getting
tired of licking envelopes
then we see her appearing to get lightheaded kinda woozy and then she
collapses
it's not much to go on but it does align to the symptoms of arsenic poisoning
if say the poison were cyanide Susan would have started to feel an abrupt
shortness of breath because the poison directly targets respiratory function
for biological weapons like anthrax the poisoning isn't immediate and can take
days or even weeks to kill with arsenic though the first symptoms would be quick
and neurological dizziness, weakness, and delirium as we see Susan become more and
more sick over the course of the afternoon we notice her becoming visibly
more sluggish weaker, more tired until she just keels over the exact way
arsenic would kill a bride-to-be. Whoa-ho
wait wait wyominggirl2215 don't run to throw away all your envelopes and stamps
just yet PVACs today are considered non toxic which is good since it's in
school glues so you keep eating your paste weird preschooler in the corner
you do you, you do you
so does that mean we've debunked the show? Heck no
remember we're talking about PVACs put on envelopes from the nineteen fifties
you see /today/ the Food and Drug Administration or FDA is responsible for
regulating the amount of dangerous or nasty stuff that makes its way into
products we ingest and that includes adhesives that stick envelopes shut
But, back in the nineteen fifties the FDA didn't regulate non traditional food
items like stamps or envelopes
why would they they're the food and drug administration not the Food Drug and
adhesive administration
F.D.A.A doesn't have the same ring to it I guess
in fact the first regulations on these sorts of glues were, based on my research
either in 1968 or 1973 nearly 20 years later. The invitations we see Susan
licking would have been unregulated untested envelopes made at a time when
no limitations around arsenic levels existed in other words as she licked she
would slowly be ingesting decades-old arsenic until eventually dying
Sound unbelievable?
well it's not in the late eighteen nineties people were getting poisoned by
their wallpaper as hangers mixed arsenic into the wallpaper paste that tacky
floral print in the bedroom was literally killing them
so stuff like this isn't unheard of which means we have one final question
to answer
was there enough arsenic in the envelopes to actually kill Susan
well in the season 7 opener George estimates that Susan is 5 foot 3 inches
and about a hundred pounds that small stature mean she's going to be a lot
more susceptible to poisoning. I did the calculations and based on her height and
weight Susan would need to consume about 300 milligrams of arsenic to kill her and
so how many envelopes does she lick
well we hear repeatedly through the episode that they're looking at around
200 guests for the wedding
so let's assume worst case and say that each individual is getting their own
invitation that's 300 milligrams of arsenic spread across two hundred
invites or 1.5 milligrams of arsenic per envelope sound reasonable
well it's not quite frankly it's too much way too much
even with untested glues on the envelopes for every envelope the weight
of the adhesive strip applied to the flap is about 500 milligrams
at one point five milligrams that would mean arsenic would constitute about
pulling three percent of the glue
seems like a small enough number right well FDA safety standards are defined in
units of parts per million which in simplest terms means that for every
million pieces of glue
there can only be a certain number of pieces of arsenic right now the
acceptable amount of arsenic and lickable adhesives is set to three parts
per million and a typical formula only requires about 2 to work.
For Susan to have died of arsenic poisoning from licking 200 envelopes
that level would have to be three thousand parts per million 1,000 times
more than where it is today
and quite frankly that's too much. Let's just look at the anecdotal evidence
history has zero reported cases of this sort of thing happening
if the levels were ever truly that high brides-to-be would have been dropping
dead left and right back in the nifty fifties in fact even if we double the
acceptable amount of arsenic in today's envelopes
she would still have to lick a staggering three million envelopes in a
single afternoon
even if she were somehow able to fully lick an envelope every second three
million seconds is the equivalent of 34 days of straight envelope licking which
would no longer put her in the range of acute poisoning but would kill her from
dehydration in a fraction of that time
"These pretzels are making me thirsty" and okay I know what you're thinking
what about cutting her tongue I thought it too well that certainly does reduce
the number that you would need to lick but only down to a third leaving a
measly 1,000,000 envelopes to get through and honestly George Costanza
just doesn't have that many friends
so long story short for as brilliant as the seinfeld series was and as many
panicked webmd posts as this episode has inspired it simply isn't possible to be
poisoned by licking conventional envelopes
new old even with all the tongue paper cuts you want
so sorry Larry David it was a good try and it might have taken us 20 years to
get there but Film Theory has sealed this one up
yada yada yada no soup for you. But hey that's just a theory. /A Film Theory/
/And/... Cut
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am i right well you should subscribe anyway that said welcome back to the
super amazing end card tournament where we have a lot to catch you up on since
the channel launched don't worry I'll make it quick in our recent Fifty Shades
of Grey theory i was able to convince an overwhelming ninety-seven percent of you
that Christian Grey's tactics were indeed the same as cult indoctrination
strategies
then in Doctor Who part 1 your favorite villain winning by forty six percent of
the vote was the weeping angels in our first game of Thrones episode looking at
the secrets behind Jon Snow
Tyrion was the overall winner of your favorite character with fifty-seven
percent with Aria and Danny in a distant second and third each with about 20
and speaking of Game of Thrones with our second theory on the subject I was
almost able to convince most of you that my Jorah theory was correct but with
forty four percent the majority of you still think that Jon Snow will be the
one to slaughter the ice
zombies we'll see how that goes for you and finally the last two in our future
movies episode two thirds of you said that you were excited about watching
movies in 4d with one-third of you preferring the old-school lean back pop
corn munching experience and finally in our how to win a Best Actor Academy
Award episode
eighty percent of you showed the love to Leonardo DiCaprio giving him an honorary
nod for Best Actor. Got all that? Good
no new one this week cause that was a lot but in case you missed any of those
previous episodes here they are
if you ask me the fifty shades of grey one might be my favorite theory we've
done in a while
plus it's got cinemasins so extra win there now if you excuse me this end slate
has gotten too long and I've got a date with some dwarves
so i'll see you next time