Tragically bad novelization: Iron Man

On a whim, and with only a quarter, I picked up the novelization for the movie Iron Man, by Peter David.

It's a terrible book. Wikia has a rundown of the differences between the book and the movie, but as I read it I realized that David was working off a pre-production script and not the script as shot; scenes in the book are not in the movie, and the battle scenes are heavily revised.

But more than that, David is little more than a stenographer for that original script. When Alan Dean Foster was doing all of those novelizations in the 1980s, he at least reached into his characters and tried to figure out who they were and what they wanted. There's none of that in David's book. It captures none of the signficance of characterization seen in Robert Downey Jr's performance or in better-written novels like Adam Warren's Hypervelocity. David's settings are flat cardboard, perfunctorily described sets in which dialogue takes place. There is more thought about who Tony Stark is and what he does in a single issue of the comic book than there is in this entire novel.

We did the Mentos and Diet Coke thing!

So, the girls were thrilled to see if the Mentos and Diet Coke experiments worked as advertised. At first, they were just gonna drop the Mentos into the bottle, but I said we could make a geyser if we were careful to make a tiny hole in the cap, then find a way to suspend the Mentos above the Diet Coke.

Outdoors, I took out my drill and drilled holes in three Mentos and the cap. I threaded a small string through the holes in the Mentos, and poured out enough of the Diet Coke to have room while suspending the Mentos. After threading the string through the cap, I screwed it back on and said, "Ready?"

"Yeah!"

I let go of the string. For a 20oz bottle and three Mentos, we got a geyser nine feet high. Which is pretty cool, and I can verify that it's a valid experiment. The girls want to try it with 2 liters next time. I can probably rig up a paper clip trigger so one of the girls could do the release herself.