Because we did not yet have one (the chief justifcation for so many of my purchases), this weekend Margaret and I picked up a copy of Ghostbusters, the high-larious 1984 film starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. We and Shawn watched it Saturday night. The film has held up extraordinarily well (far better than, say, Caddyshack); aside from the music—which wasn’t any great shakes when the film was new, but really hasn’t stood the test of time (all those hard-stereo-panned syntho tom-toms!) it was as good a flick to watch today as it was when it was released.

This weekend, however, watching it with an older and perhaps more critical eye, I picked up on something I had not the first time ’round. In the second half of the film, Aykroyd, Ramis and co-star Ernie Hudson are standing around in the basement of the Ghostbusters’ headquarters. Ramis’ character is expressing concern regarding the recent upswing in business for the company. He holds up a Twinkie:

RAMIS: Well, let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. According to this morning’s sample it would be a Twinkie…[considers]…35 feet long weighing approximately six hundred pounds.

AYKROYD: [Chokes on cigarette smoke, coughs]

HUDSON: That’s a big Twinkie.

RAMIS: [Takes bite out of Twinkie]

Great scene. However, the projected weight of six hundred pounds struck everyone watching that evening as sorely understated. Since I am the only one in this bunch to ever actually come in contact with a Twinkie, I took it upon myself to obtain a sample for analysis.

As you can see above and below, a Twinkie measures approximately 4 inches in length, 1.5 inches in width and 1.25 inches in height.

Since a pack of two has a net weight of 3 ounces, one may deduce that a single Twinkie weighs 1.5 ounces.

If Ramis’ theoretical Twinkie was 35 feet in length, it was proportionately 105 times the size of a standard-issue Twinkie. This would make it 420 inches long, 157.5 inches wide and 131.25 inches tall, with a volume of 8,682,187.5 cubic inches. Divided by the 7.5 cubic inches in a regular Twinkie, this would make the theoretical Twinkie some 1,157,625 (105 cubed) times larger in volume.

1.5 ounces multiplied by 1,157,625 is 1,736,437.5 ounces. Divide that by 16 and you get 108,525.34 pounds.

Now that is a big motherfucking Twinkie.

(Many thanks to Margaret for providing a second opinion—and calculation.)