A scene in Die Hard just made sense to me and I'm impressed.

SPOILERS obviously.

So there's that amazing scene in Die Hard where the guys with the rocket launcher are pounding on the AFV the LAPD has and Mcclane drops the improvised explosive down the elevator shaft to blow them up.

This always seemed a bit nonsensical to me and as I'm sitting here rewatching the movie with my family I just figured it out.

So the setup he has is a wheelie chair as the base, the C4 on top, several detonators plugged into it, and then the monitor (tied to the chair with its cable). What has always confused me is that the C4 needs the detonators to go off, but the detonators themselves won't just pop from being dropped on the floor, they NEED electricity to go off...but where does that electricity come from?

The recently unplugged monitor!

CRT monitors have/had a reputation of being dangerous because if you broke the screen (particularly after the screen had been on for some time) there was the risk that the capacitors/elements within would discharge in a possibly lethal shock (though the risk of lethality is a bit exaggerated I'm told).

As a result, if you assume the cable actually kept the monitor attached to the chair with the C4 sandwiched between, when the whole thing smashes into the elevator the screen breaks...shocking the detonator cables pressed up against it, setting them and thus the C4 off!

Regardless of if this actually would happen in real life, the logic behind it is a bit more thought through than you might expect from an action movie!

Yippee ki yay and Merry Christmas!

Submitted December 25, 2018 at 01:50PM by Mazon_Del http://bit.ly/2AezU5r