ELI5; Why was quicksand such a common film trope when it’s not a problem that people commonly run into in real life?
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The simplest answer is probably this: It’s cheap as hell as a special effect to show someone drowning in QUIIICKSAAAAAAANNND!
All you do is have an actor stand in the mud, then squat a bit. Much easier than a giant rubbery monster.
It is a literary “ticking clock”. It is a plot device that creates suspense and a sense of urgency by setting a time limit. So not only do they have to be rescued but they are in a race against time as well. It is one thing to rescue someone who got trapped in a room, it is another to rescue someone who is trapped in a room that is slowly filling up with water!
As a young child I always thought quicksand would be a bigger problem then it turned out to be.
For the same reason that people always slip on banana peels and you can’t have any noises at all when you’re cooking a soufflé.
Watched a horrifying video of a guy who wanted to demonstrate how to escape quick sand. It did not end well.
People tend to fear what they don’t understand. So, having someone suffer in a way that you have not or cannot experience can make thinking about or witnessing it all the more frightening.
I was listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History earlier. The episode series that covered WWI. There was a battle where either France or Britain (forget which) launched an offensive, and it ended up raining all but 3 days that month in an already swampy area. If troops veered from a safe path, they would slip pretty deep in the mud and get stuck. In WWI, offensives needed the troops to move fast before it turned into a stalemate/trench warfare and progress stalled. They didn’t have tanks yet and cavalry got slaughtered by machine guns, so infantry needed to move fast.
So people would slowly sink in the mud, and soldiers were ordered to keep moving forward and couldn’t stop to try to help someone out of the mud. Carlin called it quick sand. I’m not sure when the quicksand trope started, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the early 1900s and inspired by that battle to some extent.
Cartoons would latch on to things that were easy to animate, easy to express, and gave a clear plot device. Same as leaning a chair against a door to prevent someone from opening it. That doesn’t work, but it’s easy to animate.
Thoughts of being stuck in quicksand evokes fear. Movies and media love to stir up visceral responses in people. That’s how media knows it’s being effective.
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