CARTOON LAWS OF PHYSICS
Cartoon Law I:
Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of it's
situation.
Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in
midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this
point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second takes over.
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Cartoon Law II:
Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes
suddenly.
Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, chartoon characters are
so absolute in ther momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsized boulder
retards their forward motion absolutely. Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden
termination of motion the Stooge's surcease.
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Cartoon Law III:
Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to
it's perimeter.
Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the specialty of
victims of direct-pressure explosions and reckless cowards who are so eager to
escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a
cookie-cutout perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes
this reaction.
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Cartoon Law IV:
The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal
to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty
flights to attempt to capture it unbroken.
Such an object is inevitably priceless, the attempt to catch it inevitably
unsuccessful.
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Cartoon Law V:
All principles of gravity are negated by fear.
Physical forces are sufficient in most bodies for a shock to propel them
directly away from the earth's surface. A spooky noise or an adversary's
signature sound will induce motion upward, usually to the cradle of a
chandlier, a treetop, or the crest of a flagpole. The feet of a character who
is running or the wheels of a speeding auto need never touch the ground,
especially when in flight.
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Cartoon Law VI:
As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once.
This is particularly true of tooth and claw fights, in which a character's
head may be glimpsed emerging from the cloud of altercation at several places
simultaneously. This effect is common as well among bodies that are spinning
or being throttled. A 'wacky' character has the option of self-replication
only at manic high speeds and may ricochet off walls to achieve the velocity
required.
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Cartoon Law VII:
Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel
entrances, others cannot.
This trompe l'oeil inconsistency has baffled generations, but at least it is
known that whoever paints an entrance on a wall's surface to trick an opponent
will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical space. The painter is
flattened against the wall when he attempts to follow into the painting. This
is ultimately the problem of art, not science.
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Cartoon Law VIII:
A violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.
Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might
comfortably afford. They can be decimated, spliced, splayed,
accordian-pleated, spindled or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed.
After a few seconds of blinking self-pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back,
or solidify.
Corollary: A cat will assume the shape of it's container.
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Cartoon Law IX:
Everything falls faster than an anvil.
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Cartoon Law X:
For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance.
This is the one law of animated cartoon motion that applies to the physical
world at large. For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a
duck.
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Cartoon Law Amendment A:
A sharp object will always propel a character upaward.
When poked (usually in the buttocks) with a sharp object (usually a pin) a
character will defy gravity by shooting straight up, with great velocity.
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Cartoon Law Amendment B:
The laws of object permanence are nullified for 'cool' characters.
Characters who are intended to be 'cool' can make previously non-existent
objects appear from behind their backs at will. For instance, the road runner
can materialize signs to express himself without speaking.
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Cartoon Law Amendent C:
Gravity is transmitted by slow moving waves of large wavelength.
Their operation can be witnessed by observing the behavior of a canine
suspended over a large vertical drop. It's feet will begin to fall first,
causing it's legs to stretch. As the wave reaches it's torso, that part will
begin to fall, causing the neck to stretch. As the head begins to fall,
tension is released and the canine will resume it's regular proportions until
such a time as it strikes the ground.
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Cartoon Law Amendment D:
Explosive weapons cannot cause fatal injuries. They merely turn characters
temporarily black and smoky.
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Cartoon Law Amendment E:
Dynamite is spontaneoulsy generated in "C-spaces" (spaces in which cartoon
laws hold).
This process is analagous to steady-state theories of the universe which
postulate that the tensions involved in maintaining a space would cause the
creation of hydrogen from nothing. Dynamite quanta are quite large (stick
sized) and unstable (lit). Such quanta are attracted to psychic forces
generated by feelings of distress in cool characters (see amendment B which may
be a special case of this law), who are able to use said quanta to their
advantage. One may imagine C-spaces where all matter and energy result from
primal masses of dynamite exploding. A big bang indeed.
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