Hollywood Acid/Headscratchers


 * It's counter intuitive that acids have the bad rap instead of bases. The article gives examples of acids in everyday life, but name one common base that isn't ammonia. ...You picked lye, didn't you? Bases are nasty: CsOH (caesium lye) > glass, to give one example.
 * Most people outside of chemistry don't really talk about bases a whole lot, but they've probably heard of stomach acid, battery acid, and acid rain, so it's natural to assume acids are more dangerous. And there are some acids that really are just horrible, like hydrofluoric acid. Probably the most well-known base is baking soda, which isn't dangerous at all.
 * "This is lye. the crucial ingredient...may I see your hand, please?" "And what's this?" "This...is a chemical burn."
 * There's also Hydrogen peroxide, which mostly brings to mind nothing more dangerous than hair bleach; household bleach (sodium hypochlorite), which people know is highly toxic but also know won't burn your face off; and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide/lye), which is exactly what it says on the tin. Bear in mind that people don't intuitively think of concentration being important - any given chemical is either poisonous or not, corrosive or not.
 * In my experience, most movies (Sci-Fi in particular), games and tv shows that have acid usually have someone declare that it will "eat through anything"... Except apparently the glass vial it's contained in.
 * Ah, that's because it's made of Applied Phlebotinum.
 * Also, glass is used for experiments because it's easy to sterilize, completely non-porous, and effectively non-reactive with EVERYTHING (chemically). So in real life, glass is applied phlebotinum... sort of.
 * Also, hyperbole.
 * Only thing that bugs me about this trope is that we don't have a picture. This is one of the easiest tropes to illustrate on the planet. Is it so hard to find a big vat of boiling green sludge?
 * It should be shown dissolving something, to differentiate it from earlier images on this or another page that just showed a big vat of boiling green sludge. If someone has access to a decent partially-dissolved Crocomire from Super Metroid (I can only find it either fully skeletonized or not skeletonized at all, and don't know if it is visible when partially dissolved) or a DVD of The Pagemaster (for Hyde's potion dissolving a hole in the floor), I would suggest those. Anyway, the reason there isn't currently a picture is because people find it difficult to obtain suitable images (I do include myself here) and may be too lazy to look something up (guilty in the past and probably future for this and other imageless pages, just not at the present). Sometimes that there was an image already but it wasn't a suitable descriptor (such as Just a Face And A Caption or green liquid that isn't doing anything to actually indicate its Hollywood Acidic properties).
 * How about the classic Mortal Kombat stage, post-fatality?
 * There's a simple explanation for this; Viewers are Morons, Hollywood is full of morons, or at least people who majored in theater, not chemistry. No one seems to question how that stuff manages to stay contained in a glass test tube while it can eat through steel, because it's a sickly absynthe liquid that just plain looks bad. Plus, "acid" in itself just seems to have a bit of an evil sound to it, doesn't it?