Alright, so ever since I saw Tangled way back when, my mind has kind of been in a tizzy over a lot of things. Mostly, my love for said movie, Flynn Rider, and my desperate want to play Mother Gothel in any alternate productions of the movie.

But also: can frying pans really work the way they do in the movie?

I'm not one to usually harp upon factual things in movies, especially animated ones, but I figured it would be a ton of fun to figure out the mathematical (scientific? I'm not sure how to classify it, really) logical-ness behind fighting bad guys with kitchen appliances.

Now, if the average frying pan is, say, according to Wikipedia, 8-to-12-inches in diameter, and are made of cast iron. Using fancy mathematical stuffs and things, we can wager to guess that these pans are decently heavy. Turning to online stores, I looked at different pans, of the following weights:

4 lbs (Williams-Sonoma, 12 inches)
3.5 lbs (Amazon, 8 inches)

There weren't that many pans with weights listed, unfortunately, but I can wager to guess all average frying pans are around the 4 lbs. mark.

So that's 4 pounds of condensed force flying at someone - is it enough to knock them out? To Google we go!

An article from LiveScience states this: "A cubic inch of bone can in principle bear a load of 19,000 lbs. (8,626 kg) or more — roughly the weight of five standard pickup trucks — making it about four times as strong as concrete." So, us humans are pretty resilient - but what about the big ol' KO?

Another quote from LiveScience gives us something close to the answer. "A blow that gives the head enough spin to go from 0 to 43,000 rpm in just one second has a 25 percent chance of knocking a person unconscious."

LiveScience is talking about punching, so we have to account for the fact that you can do a lot more damage with a cast iron skillet versus a fist - the logical part of my brain says with that pan smacking someone, you probably have closer to a 50% chance of knocking someone unconscious.

So could Flynn and Rapunzel plausibly hit guards with that trusty pan and watch them fall like dominoes? No. Are they complete goners? Also no.

And there you have it, the math/science/word jumble behind the frying pan battles in Tangled!

Au revior!
-Queen Meredith