"that's kind of what happens when you're minding your own business and there's a group of frantic people shouting at you from the window of a diner. It startles you and you drop stuff."
—————————–
Agreed!

That was scary too because the birds used physics as a weapon. And anyway that's kind of what happens when you're minding your own business and there's a group of frantic people shouting at you from the window of a diner. It startles you and you drop stuff.
Donna is the only member of filmboards that nimda punished for wanting to leave.

Gasoline, like anything else needs air (which has oxygen) to burn. You could most likely throw a lit cigarette into a bucket of gasoline and have it go out. That is because there isn't enough air mixed with the gasoline to allow it burn. Dropping a lit match into a puddle of gasoline would most likely ignite it or more correctly the vapor coming from it as it evaporates. It's like a car's engine, the gasoline must be mixed with a certain amount of air to get it to burn. A car's engine literally runs on fuel vapor. That's the key to all this, getting the correct mixture of air and gasoline. If you watched Mythbusters when they have experimented with explosions of gasses, they point out that the mixture is critical.

Probably no definitely play it safe and assume the worst. Of all the falsehoods movies teach us, I shall continue to live as if a match will start. (stress LIVE) If we can believe that Melanie would personally deliver love birds in a little boat and that school kids wouldn't rebel if their teacher made them sing such a lousy song, then I can believe a match would ignite gasoline.

This message has been deleted.

you people waste a lot of space talking about things of little consequence

To all the plausibles critiquing this ridiculous point to the extent of nausea, there is a simple test to your theories. I suggest you try it!
In the frozen land of Nador they were forced to eat Robins minstrels. And there was much rejoicing.

You're an idiot, try it sometime.

When I saw a one-night "re-release" of The Birds a coupla of years ago at a movie theater, the other "creative license" issue was: once the man dropped the lit match and the gasoline exploded, on the soundtrack came one of those standard "KABOOM!" explosion sound effectsas if the victim hadn't just set himself on fire, but had somehow ignited dynamite at the same time.
But that didn't really matter, Hitchcock got his spectacular action effect of sight and sound.
Hey, 12 years later Steven Spielberg had a great white shark blow up "like an oil refinery"(the skeptical words of "Jaws" author Peter Benchley) on the basis of a bullet to a scuba tank in its mouth

It depends on the match usedhe lights one, lights the cigar, shakes it to put it out and drops it on the ground with gasoline.maybe the match wood was still glowing red which would be enough. Like someone said you would be crazy to try this out because it can happen.
what are you looking at..

This message has been deleted.

i thought that is was preety funny when the fire exploded i thought that that would not happen also. and i thought it was crazy when every thing exploded

i watched this myth busters about static electricity setting off a spark in gas vaper making ie explode. it worked. so yes the vaper is flamable and so then the gas should be as well. maybe they used lighter fluid it would light if a match hit it. ive lit fires with the stuff before and the match dose not go out or at least not right away.

Actually, that's not correct. The people in the restaurant were yelling at him trying to warn him, he was distracted by their yelling and the match burnt his fingers and he drop it.
My main problem with that scene isn't whether a match, lit or otherwise, could ignite the gasoline, it's how in the world that guy couldn't smell the gasoline river flowing under his feet to begin with when he got out of the car.
He got what he deserved for being so addicted to smoking cigars not to be aware of his surroundings.

He put the match out before he threw it to the ground. So I don't feel that just the heat dropping into cold gasoline stream would ignite and make the vehicle explode spontaneously. But since its a movie it needs to be dramatic.

i totally agree with your statement. even if that did happen, how did he not notice the river of gas flowing towards him? i think this shows how careless people were back then?

Howzabout slapping a hysterical person to calm them down? I saw this done in real life once and the "slappee" grew even more hysterical.
Or the way motor vehicles nearly always are ready to go as soon as the ignition key is turned? Of course, DOUBLE INDEMNITY played with this, when MacMurray and Stanwyck are trying to drive away after killing her hubby.
"May I bone your kipper, Mademoiselle?"

How long does it take gasoline vapors to spread? The guy with the cigar is standing around for several seconds while the people in the restaurant yell at him.
I recall Hitchcock defending TORN CURTAIN's scene where the hero and a female contact spend an almost laughable amount of time trying to kill an East German agent. Hitch said he wanted to show that it's not that easy to kill someone.

Would you stand in a big puddle of gasoline and strike a match and drop it to test your theory? I hope not.

i don't think you can see the vapor

Yeah "It's a more likely occurrence with a gasoline vapor, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the scene."

While the film appears to have a dropped match ignite liquid gasoline; there would be an amount of gasoline vapor near the ground above the liquid fuel and that would ignite and is actually more explosive than liquid gasoline.

Exactly. Smoking materials won't light gasoline. That's why the smoking areas in gas stations are placed around the pumps.

"Throwing a burning match or cigarette onto gasoline would in fact have no effect."
FALSE. 100% False. I know,as I threw a lit Marlboro cigarette on a stream of gas leaking from a cars gas tank in which the driver had no gas cover to his tank (1968 RoadRunner).
Scared the hell out of me as I watched the flame slowly catch up with the car.
Apparently the stream was interrupted before anything else happened. I stood there in horror along with 2 of my friends saying to me 'Oh man, you f'd up !!'. I imagined the car was going to explode like in the movies but thankfully it didn't'. Still, the gas was ignited, no doubt about, by my lit cigarette tossed onto the street.