Quicksand: The Omnipresent Retro Television Danger

Story By @GIJoeRepairShop

Growing up in the South, we were taught at school how to identify all sorts of dangers in the woods. This mainly had to do with identifying venomous snakes. However, there was one danger that adults never seemed to mention: quicksand! From television and movies, it was obvious that quicksand would be a significant danger in our lives and something that adults had to learn how to deal with. Knowing how to escape from quicksand seemed like an important life skill.

In researching this article, I came across too many examples to list here of quicksand in pop culture. As you’d expect, Gillian’s Island was also an island filled with quicksand. In season one, The Skipper falls into a pit of quicksand and needs to be rescued. The Dukes of Hazzard also featured Daisy Duke falling into quicksand while wearing high heals. The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman each featured their main characters avoiding quicksand and also needing to escape from it. The Incredible Hulk was another television character who frequently encountered quicksand. Perfect Strangers even had Larry and Balki get stuck in quicksand.

If you’ve been to a GI Joe convention recently, you’ve probably heard Larry Hama’s famous story regarding the ending of issue 26 of Marvel’s “GI Joe: A Real American Hero.” By the end of the issue, Cobra Commander, Destro, the Baroness, and Zartan are all trapped in Florida Everglades quicksand, having been led there by Junkyard. Larry’s editor asked him how they got out of the quicksand. Larry told him that it didn’t matter. They’ll just be out by the start of the next issue. No one will care how they got out of the quicksand.

So, what exactly is quicksand? Quicksand is a water-saturated, soupy mixture of sand, silt, or clay that acts like a non-Newtonian fluid. This means that its viscosity changes when stressed. It typically forms near riverbanks, beaches, and marshes when underground water, or wave action, agitates the sand, reducing the friction between particles and making it unstable.

How difficult is it to actually escape from quicksand? As it turns out, it’s not very difficult. If you should find yourself comically, or dramatically, stuck in quicksand, the first step is to stop struggling. Lean back or lay flat to distribute your body weight. Because the quicksand is denser than water (and therefore denser than you), you should naturally float on the surface. Next, free your legs, then begin to slowly roll or crawl to solid ground.