Shawn Baston dropped by last week's comments to alert us to a new instance of characters talking about Booster Gold behind his back. In this case, May's Green Lantern #35, it was Kyle Rayner referencing a movie playing on Booster's public reputation as the Crusader of Capitalism:

words by Jeremy Adams, art by Ig Guara

Sleazy Don Darlington strikes me as the Roger Corman-type who makes low-budget films to capitalize on existing trends, so I doubt Booster Gold himself played any part in the making of "Booster's Quadrillion," which any Booster Gold fan already invested in key events from 1985 probably recognizes as a parody of the 16th highest grossing film of that year: Brewster's Millions staring Richard Pryor and John Candy.

Of course, all time travelers know that history is cyclical. The 1985 Brewster's Millions was a remake of a film by the same name from 1945, which was a remake of a film by the same name from 1935, which was a remake of a film by the same name from 1921, which was a remake of a film by the same name from 1914, which was based on a 1906 play of the same name adapted from a 1902 book of the same name by George Barr McCutcheon.

The premise of each adaptation is that young Brewster has to spend some amount of millions of dollars in a set amount of time in order to inherit a larger amount of millions of dollars. All tallied, across the five movies telling essentially the same story (and without adjusting for inflation), Brewster has to spend about thirty-five million ($35,000,000) to earn three hundred forty-eight million ($348,000,000).

That's a lot of money, but it's no quadrillion. A quadrillion is a staggeringly large number. If Brewster earns $348 million every five movies, he'd have to make 14,367,812 more movies to make one quadrillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000,000).

Before you get started, Brewster, a word of warning: You're going to run into a spot of bother after you've made the first 14,367 movies because by that time you will have already earned all the money in the world. So for movie 14,368, you're going to need to buy a printing press.

Of course, Booster Gold can access a quadrillion dollars because he is not limited to the present day, or really any restriction of time or space. Maybe the quadrillion he's after isn't even money but something more valuable: time. It's a good thing Booster's functionally immortal. It takes over 31,688,764 years to gather a quadrillion seconds.

The one thing Booster needs to know before he gets started is whether he needs a quadrillion units in American short scale or a quadrillion of the traditional British long scale. These days, most English-speaking countries use the short scale where a quadrillion has 15 zeroes, but a time-traveler like Booster could easily get confused since the English were counting to a quadrillion with 24 zeroes long before the United States existed. That's a difference of nine zeroes! A factor of a full billion! (Or, if you're using the long scale, a factor of one thousand million!) To put that in perspective, it would mean an additional 31,688,764,583,724,000 years of gathering seconds. Obviously, confusing the two would be a very big mistake. Better be sure, Booster.

Thanks for spotting that for us, Shawn.

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