With a single, well-reported article, Slate‘s Sharon Shetty has all but destroyed the credibility of Ken Scott‘s The Delivery Man (Touchstone/Disney, 11.22) and with it the credibility of Starbuck, Scott’s Canadian-made original. Shetty began with my 7.2 “Son of Starbuck” piece, in which I asked how many pints or quarts it would take for a single guy to father 535 children, and came up with some real-world answers that won’t put a smile on the faces of anyone behind this film (i.e., Scott or his star, Vince Vaughn, or the various attached Touchtone and Disney execs).
The bottom line is that it would be awfully damn hard as well as bureaucratically unlikely for one guy to father 535 kids via sperm bank donations as (a) Vaughn’s character would be required to ejaculate over 1,000 times into vials and (b) within the realm and regulations of sperm banks this level of delivery would take about seven years to accomplish.