Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Have war films outlasted our actual wars? xkcd digs for an answer


Randall Munroe's What If?, one of the most popular new books of the year, scientifically guesstimates the answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Usually these involve pushing the laws of physics to their breaking point, but once in a while, they just deal with situations of absurd, immeasurable scale. After spending a lazy afternoon browsing the What If webs... er, doing research, we've found a scenario that's directly relevant to our collections: are the total running times of all World War II films longer than the war itself?

Using the massive amounts of tags and data accrued by IMDb – and some clever averaging to save time – Munroe estimates that there are about 300 days of World War II films and movies. That's only about a seventh as long as the war itself, but that's still a great ratio for a multi-year international conflict. Some smaller wars that lasted for only a few days have an edge, but no major conflict comes as close as World War II. It speaks volumes about our broader cultural fascination with one of the last wars that people still refer to as "great."

We don't have all 300 days worth of World War II films in our collection, but we recognize that war films are a popular and perennially relevant genre. To this end, we want to direct you to our war films Pinterest board, which contains over 200 movies ranging from Enemy at the Gates to Courage Under Fire. That's good for about a solid month of war films – still shorter than the Falklands War.

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