Flight of Dragons (1982) Final Showdown

Ommadon vs. Sir Peter.
Magic vs. Logic.
Guess who wins.
One of my all-time favorite scenes from any movie I've ever seen. I've loved this part ever since I was a kid and I've only ever felt more inspired by it as I've gotten older.
Just felt like I needed to share this little piece of me with the world. :)

Peter's "incantations:"
"A body in motion tends to stay in motion." - Newton's First Law of Motion

"Protons have 1832 times the mass of electrons." - 30 years later, more precise measurements say 1836 http://www.google.com/search?q=mass%20of%20proton%20/%20mass%20of%20electron

"All light is bent or refracted as it goes from one medium to another, save in a direction perpendicular to the interface between the two mediums." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refraction

"...new species may result from the selective action of external conditions upon the variations from their specific type which individuals present...." - T. H. Huxley, to Darwin on Origin of Species

"Gravity varies as to the inverse square of the distance." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law#Gravitation

"The velocity of light is equal to the wavelength times the frequency of vibration." - This is actually true of anything that propagates as a wave as it's the definition of the phase velocity of the wave. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_velocity

"The geometrical properties of the space-time continuum are determined by the masses present in space and time." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

"Come algebra, anatomy, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, geometry, mathematics, meteorology, mineralogy, oceanography, paleontology, physics, psychology, sociology, trigonometry, and zoology!"

Flight of Dragons is (c) WB 1982

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• magic
• dragons
• science
• logic

[Zoeurfali]

Brings back great childhood memories.....thanks. I needed that.

[cogitosum666]

@Zoeurfali That's what it's here for :)

I loved this movie as a kid. --Strike that. I still love this movie.

[xMOSTYMANx]

This totally needs to be ponified.

[cogitosum666]

@xMOSTYMANx you're right it does n_n

now I need to learn how to do a pmv

[xMOSTYMANx]

@cogitosum666 Phew tell me about it. I should learn how myself. You a brony too I guess? *brohoof*

[cogitosum666]

@xMOSTYMANx absolutley! :D

it was seeing a whole buncha PMVs that got me interested in the first place. Maybe I oughta give something back...

[MaridAudranBudayeen]

@ganondorky When people talk of geocentrism and other such nonsense, they are forgetting about the fact that people at least as far back as 2000 years ago knew that the Earth was round, and that it revolved around the Sun (see Philolaus, Eratosthenes, Aristarchos, etc). We like to think that the ancients were dumb and that we're smart, but there's much knowledge that was lost when Alexandria was sacked, or when the Mongols destroyed Baghdad. Who knows how many centuries of advancement were lost?

[cogitosum666]

@ganondorky anyone who ever actually investigated the relative motions of the earth, sun, moon, and planets very rapidly came to the conclusion that the earth cannot be the center of the universe. Facts are what lead them to that conclusion: the fact that mars appears to move in retrograde on a predictable basis is a fact that supports the heliocentric model of the solar system. The fact that orbits around the sun are elliptical is a fact that can be discerned from mathematics and observation.

[MattFerrantino]

@DrossRotzank NOTE, lastly, that I said 'neither accept nor deny beliefs UNTIL MORE EVIDENCE COMES TO LIGHT'

I am sure that science is right about one thing: that IF you have sufficient evidence, a 'complete enough picture', so to speak, that you CAN prove and disprove things that you couldn't BEFORE you had that evidence. I think we don't yet have the tools to prove or disprove God, but that the tools are out there, waiting to be found.

[MattFerrantino]

@DrossRotzank And that little trick called 'uncertainty' is used by philosophers, scientists, and the religious. Some philosophers are neither scientific nor religious. Some religions are neither scientific nor philosophers. Some people have blind spots like that.

But it's not like the only people who ever talk about human ignorance are religious folk.

[MattFerrantino]

@DrossRotzank You are RIGHT to point out that my attempting to say 'but it's not the same' would be invalid- so I WON'T say that.

If you wanted to argue for Godzilla, you could do a bunch of nuclear tests and see if you can make one. I think you COULD make a giant lizard, but probably not one that breathes nuke-fire. You might end up with something like a T-Rex with leukemia.

When you brought up Gnomes and Elves, I remembered there are such things as human Dwarfs. just saying.

[MattFerrantino]

@DrossRotzank You love Science, and Science has dissproven Religious theories before (as in the case of geocentric models being replaced by heliocentric ones- the geocentric ideas started out as science but were given extra validity by the church because of their emphasis on human specialness. Scientists would have corrected themselves faster otherwise I think)

A favorite trick of myth-lovers is to say 'the magic creatures are hiding/extinct, but they still used to exist'. 

[MattFerrantino]

@DrossRotzank the definition of 'religious' is not 'ridiculous', so '(and therefore ridiculous)' is not a valid continuation. I will freely admit of many religious beliefs that ARE outmodded and ridiculous. Religion is the human understanding of the divine, as Science is the human understanding of nature.

Humans, being flawed, have come up with dumb ideas in both fields, but that doesn't change that there's real truth in nature and real truth in the divine.

[DrossRotzank]

@MattFerrantino if we concede the benefit of the doubt to every religious (and therefore, ridiculous) myth there is, then you can't disprove any nonsense I feel like stating as true, neither. Who's to say unicorns, gnomes and elves doesn't exist? Who says Godzilla doesn't actually exist somewhere?

Sure, you could be in denial and say "but it's not the same!", but deep down inside you know that little trick religious people love to use ("uncertainty") is full of it.

[jonhayashi1]

Thanks to Warner Brother Archive Collection I now have this movie on dvd(MOD) -R format! I'm glad my DVD-RAM/-R recorder is compatible with it! I say this movie is much better then the tedious, boring Last Unicorn and it has the qualities of Rankin Bass's versions of the Hobbit and Return of the King while being a fantasy loosly based on Dickenson's book! So they could make up their own story! You can see my fantasy hand drawn animated videos I made, THE MAGIC ARROWS, BALDER'S EGG on my channel!

[GreenBottlesOnly]

I loved this movie as a kid as well