Phil Edwards was a senior producer for the Vox video team.
Rachel Feltman highlighted this video by YouTuber Jake Roper investigating a crucial question: could Kool-Aid Man really break through a brick wall?
Key facts from the video include:
- Kool-Aid Man, if scaled to six feet — and making some assumptions about glass thickness — would weigh 5,800 pounds without being filled with liquid. With liquid, he’d weigh 11,000 pounds, the same as an elephant.
- The thickness of his glass exoskeleton would protect Kool-Aid Man and allow him to burst through a brick wall. The strength of the glass would also allow his legs to be thin yet durable.
- Assuming that Kool-Aid Man’s liquid is blood, he would lose about one third of his blood breaking through the wall, because it would slosh out of the exposed top of his pitcher. That would seriously debilitate his further attempts to party.
If we assume Kool-Aid Man contains 607.6 gallons of Kool-Aid — as Jake Roper calculates — we can make some other interesting conclusions:
- Each serving of traditional Kool-Aid contains 60 calories and produces 8 ounces of Kool-Aid. With 128 ounces in a gallon, that means Kool-Aid Man contains 583,296 calories. If you drank 2,000 calories of Kool-Aid Man every day, you’d need 291 days to completely drink his bodily fluids.
- We don’t know the exact type of Kool-Aid that made Kool-Aid Man, but Wal-Mart sells 19 ounces of Kool-Aid cherry drink mix for $2.50. Each container makes 32 servings, so if Kool-Aid Man were made using these containers, he’d cost about $760 to make (excluding glass).
- As large as Kool-Aid Man is, he still has relatively human proportions. If you were to empty his bodily fluids into an average Olympic-sized swimming pool, it would take 1086 Kool-Aid men before you could swim in Kool-Aid.
Kool-Aid Man remains a mysterious figure with an unclear past and future
Kool-Aid Man is, of course, the official spokes-pitcher for Kool-Aid drink (he is cherry-flavored). It is unclear whether he was born with Kool-Aid flavoring, or if he spent his formative years as a pitcher of water — and only later had Kool-Aid mixed inside him. At least one ad contends that he is made of water and can choose what flavor he becomes.
We also don’t know if Kool-Aid Man was created in a laboratory, has any other members of his species, or if he is a unique crossbreed between a pitcher of water and a party-friendly dude.
Richard Berg is typically credited as the original voice behind the world-famous “Oh Yeah!” cry of Kool-Aid Man, but Frank Simms became the iconic character later on.
