Neil deGrasse Tyson Breaks Down Science and Fiction in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs Two

By Alex Foster

Dec. 30, 2014

When Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was released in 2009, it opened our eyes to a future of meteorology and food science that no one had thought possible.

Since then, thousands of the most promising students of our time have committed their careers to realizing the dream of spaghetti tornados. It is fair to say our generation of scientists is the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Generation.

So when prophetic writer Sony Pictures Animation returned with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs Two, your correspondent sat down in his dorm room with Neil deGrasse Tyson – the renowned astrophysicist and actor, known for his roles as “Penelope” in the documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and as “Drake” on deGrassi–to hear his thoughts on the science behind the meatballs.

On the film’s significance to modern science:

I do science stuff these days, and I’m just like, “Blah.” You know? But this! This movie reminds me why I spent my own college years in loveless wretchedness. Yeah, I know it’s sad, man… Haha… yeah… right – nothing a bowl and a half won’t fix. Man, you guys are the best. This room and a pizza and Cloudy with a Chance of freaking Meatballs Two is Pasteur’s real “torch which illuminates the world.”

On the film’s depiction of talking monkeys:

[Cough] Ha! That monkey is hilarious, dood. And that’s all real. No really, there’s a talking baboon in the NASA office… NASA director Charles Bolden! Boom! Fuck that guy!

On the feasibility of taco animals:

That’s stupid… Who has tacos?