Tom Painter is Johnny Snow!

Who is Johnny Snow?

(Be sure to watch Dr. Horrible on Netflix or Youtube)

When Dr. Horrible was singing a song about his new Freeze Ray and how he will make time stand still, he sang this verse:

It’s not a death ray or an ice beam.  That’s all Johnny Snow!

The only other reference we have on Johnny Snow is when Dr. Horrible read his email from Johnny Snow calling him his nemesis and challenged him to a fight in the park.  Dr. Horrible derides him telling him that he isn’t his nemesis and sarcastically tells him that he does not have time to deal with every poser in a parka and how there are kids in the park.

I wondered for a long time who is this Johnny Snow guy?  Maybe some ice-themed super villain who armed himself with an ice beam and wears a parka like DC Comics villain Captain Cold?

Then one day as I was preparing a Jeopardy game show for our New Year’s party, I was looking for some trivia questions for the category ‘Frozen’ movie that my kids love and LO and BEHOLD, I stumbled across the following blurb:

Let it snow – in an effort to perfect Elsa’s icy magic, filmmakers called on Dr. Thomas Painter, a scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena known as “Dr. Snow” to learn about snowflakes from a molecular level, 80 percent of Earth’s fresh water is frozen in the form of ice or snow.  Snow is colorless and clear, but light reflected evenly on snowflake crystals gives its white appearance"

It hit me like a brick!  Dr. Horrible talks about how he got a Ph.D. in Horribleness and that got me thinking when I went to Graduate school about an weird evil looking fellow graduate student named Tom Painter who was working on…..YES…..a  Ph.D. in Snow Hydrology!

YES!  Johnny Snow is none other than my fellow Graduate student Tom Painter who later becomes Dr. Thomas Painter AKA Dr. Snow!

Dr Horrible and Dr. Johnny Snow (Thomas Painter)

It all adds up - the name 'Johnny' probably came from his fellow graduate student John Felkner'.  AND he had a evil junior sidekick named Tom 'Junior' Albright who is just like Dr. Horrible sidekick 'Moist'!

Now comes the scary part!   If you google and watch videos on Dr. Painter (AKA Dr. Snow), you’ll find a TEDx talk he gave on ‘Dark Snow and Climate Change’ and many scientific papers he wrote about how our snow runoff is melting at rapid rates along and diminishing the world’s fresh water supply

Who’s causing this and why?

I think it’s more than a coincidence and can only hypothesize that Dr. Snow working in his secret evil lair at Jet Propulsion Laboratory has this diabolical scheme in which he disintegrates our freshwater supply with some giant fricking laser beam or steals it and stockpile it somewhere which causes a rise in the price of water and a mega-fold increase in his stock of drinking water companies.  Or it could be the Dr. Snow has this grand nefarious scheme to impress Bad Horse, the leader of the Evil League of Evil to get membership into this exclusive organization.    This makes perfect sense in which Dr. Horrible, threatened by his arch-nemesis rival Dr. Snow for the seat on the Evil League of Evil, derisively put down Dr. Snow at every opportunity on his sing-along blog.

Bad Horse and the Evil League of Evil

We on earth are in for some serious trouble.  One day there will be no more snow and our kids will cry ‘Let it Snow’ to no avail unless we pay a hefty ransom.  Our only hope is to spread the word via blog (Gradb) and pray for Captain Hammer to return and save the day from Dr. Johnny Snow...who is none others than Dr. Thomas Painter!

Save us from Dr. Snow!