That time Jacques Cousteau DYNAMITED A WHOLE FRICKIN REEF

Today Cracked has a pretty fantastic article entitled “The 5 Most Horrifyingly Wasteful Film Shoots,” which I would highly encourage you all to read. In the meantime, I’ll just be piggybacking on the one entry about the clip from Jacques Cousteau’s 1956 film The Silent World, because it kind of blew my mind. Apparently, the marine biologists Cousteau was filming at the time wanted to “take a census” of the marine life on a coral reef, and in order to accomplish this, they performed a highly-specialized, scientific procedure known as “blowing it the f*ck up and then counting the bodies.”

The dramatic echo effect on the explosion combined with the lingering shot of the dead fish floating to the surface seems positively David Lynchian.

Cousteau supposedly learned the error of his ways later on, but I bet we’d all be surprised to learn how much scientific study actually started with just this kind of backyard redneck “HEY Y’ALL WATCH THIS!” ‘experiment.’

Can I f*ck it? …No? Hmm. Well can I eat it? …Sorta. Okay. Hmm. Ooh! I know! I’ll blow the shit out of it! -a brief history of human observation.

UPDATE: If the video seems slightly different than my description, it’s because the original got taken down and this version is a little different.

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