hehe, great Upservation karly, you make an excellent point.
ffdude- okay, I’ll check that out then.
karly- exactly. It just doesnt seem totally plausible to me. Then again, I guess it could be possible in the realm of this movie, since Carl [spoil]rigged up his house with all those balloons, and steering systems and whatnot in a single evening. At his age.[/spoil]
One more Muntz comment: I have the “Art of Up” book, and there is a quote from Pixar sculptor Greg Dykstra that says, “Muntz is a very old man in his nineties or early hundreds.” He goes on in the quote, however, to explain their original idea of [spoil]the “Fountain of Youth” story where Muntz was using Kevin’s eggs in some way to keep himself young, then we would eventually see him at his real age, which Dykstra describes as “an ancient horror, someone who should have been dead, but wasn’t.”
I get the feeling that the filmmakers originally had Muntz really really old, as part of the “Eternal Youth” plot, and the timeline from Young Muntz to Old Muntz made sense. Then, when they changed his story line, maybe they decided that he couldn’t be that old and still be climbing airships and swordfighting and so forth, so they backed off his age (about as far as they could without actually making him a kid).[/spoil] I still think they could have just said, yeah, he works out and eats right, and has an obsession to live for, and left it at that.
Now I have a NEW Upservation! About Alpha. I love his odd, overly-complex phrasing of things (“Why do I not have a surprised feeling?” is still one of my favorite lines), and I think I know why his phrasing is so different: [spoil]He’s German! I mean, I’m saying German because he’s a Doberman, but basically, English is not his first “thought language.” We know the collars can translate the dogs’ thoughts into different languages, but obviously the default is English so Muntz (and we) can understand them. Alpha’s non-English thoughts are being translated literally into a non-native language for him, so they are phrased awkwardly.[/spoil] I think way too hard about this stuff.
Wow, good one about Alpha, and I love how he words everything. I just thought he did that so he’d sound more condescending and important (and to contrast his screwed up collar so drastically). Then again, it could be both. 
I need to get a hold of that book! And [spoil]I had heard about that alternate storyline. I’m really glad they cut it, it’s a bit too out there.[/spoil]
The Art book is nice, I recommend it. I ordered mine from Amazon, along with another neat book: “Up: The Insider’s Guide” - this is one of these flat picture books that they’ve done for a bunch of the Pixar movies, with lots of stills, pages for each character with descriptions, fun facts, etc.