Awesome Videos

When we were kids, we loved making little LEGO cars. Thanks to Travis Pastrana and the gang from Nitro Circus, we now have life-size LEGO race cars. As part of their Life Size Toys series, they assembled giant LEGO bricks atop go-karts and raced them around an indoor track until bricks started to fall off. At least they’re easy to snap back together.

Unless you score Business Class seats, it’s pretty hard to sleep on an airplane. That is, unless it’s this old Douglas DC-6 that’s been converted into a home. Tiny House Giant Journey visits with homeowners and flight trainers Jon and Stephanie, who turned the airplane into a 2 BR, 1 BA Airbnb with a kitchen, a wing deck, and a flight simulator in the cockpit.

Wheatus revisits their 2000 pop-punk hit Teenage Dirtbag with this special holiday edition. Christmas Dirtbag updates the lyrics to be about a kid who doesn’t think he’s getting any presents from Santa. Though, in the animated music video, it’s a dog who feels left out. From the EP Just a Dirtbag Christmas, which also includes a string quartet version.

The character Killjoy in Valorant has a nifty turret weapon. Mechanical engineer Danny Lum brought the weapon to life with a custom-built robot. At its heart is an OutofDarts Proton Pack hopper connected to a Jupiter blaster. He 3D printed a custom shell and built a motorized aiming system with an object-detection camera to shoot foam balls at human targets.

This interactive installation reminds us of the Master Control Program in TRON. But instead of displaying the face of some omniscient computer, the pixels of FLUX 2023 display images of whoever stands in front of its cameras. The 20-foot-tall display was created by Ksawery Kirklewski, with sound by Arkadiusz Krupiński and tech mgmt. by Jakub Kirklewski.

(PG-13) Evan Hallbeck’s short film is as tasteless as it is hilarious. It follows the story of three disgusting items that ended up in the sewer and tells their origin stories through a trio of live-action vignettes. You can pretty much guess where this is going from the thumbnail. Savannah Steiner is responsible for the gross-out animation.

We would say, “Don’t try this at home,” but most of us don’t have a cauldron of molten lava or a vat of acid lying around. Mark Rober’s video includes a series of experiments in which he and his pals tested the destructive abilities of lava, acid, and some wildcards. The video culminates in a challenge to see which could kill a car engine quicker.

Being a Sith Lord and a leader of a Galactic Empire is hard work. Like many of us, Darth Vader needs ways to help manage his stress. Auralnauts captured audio of one of Vader’s meditation sessions, which starts with some breathing exercises and then moves on to a series of Stuart Smalley-style affirmations. Kylo Ren could have used something like this.

Filmmaker Quek Shio Chuan is a master at video editing and compositing. In this clip, he shows off his dream bike build, which comes together piece by piece without tools – just his hands and some very precise editing using DaVinci Resolve Studio. He also shared the editing timeline.

Members of the Tesla Club Finland parked their cars and put on a synchronized light show using their vehicles’ headlights and taillights. In all, 687 of the electric vehicles were on hand, and automotive channel Harri Salo posted this aerial footage of the festivities. The light show was put together by Simon Pollock. Watch the ground view here. (Thanks, Olli!)

This wonderfully soothing video provides a close-up look at some of the teensy scale model submarines, boats, and ships floating in the water tanks at Miniatur Wunderland. If you’re ever fortunate enough to be in Hamburg, Germany, you must visit this incredible tiny world.

Take a look inside the Vincent Bach factory, where they handcraft premium brass instruments. In this video, you’ll see craftspeople transform stamped sheets of brass into a variety of precision trumpets for professional musicians. Along the way, you’ll learn about how a trumpet works, too.

Halloween may be over, but we would have loved to have this cast iron skeleton coin bank on display. TysyTube Restoration did a fantastic job cleaning up its rusty old bones. We love the creepy action as it tosses coins from its bony hand into its eyeball. If you like the idea, Design Toscano still sells a similar bank.

Inspired by how hummingbirds hover in flight, Works by Design wanted to see if he could build a flying machine that lifts off vertically and stays aloft by flapping its wings. It uses compressed gas for propulsion and a custom-built air motor to move its wings. It’s not an efficient method of flight, but it was cool to observe the engineering process.

DoodleChaos imagines what it might be like if Minecraft was a rhythm-matching game like Beat Saber or Guitar Hero. This crazy, mashed-up world is filled with fanciful voxel art characters and sees blocks and objects popping up for players to hit with their tools as they roll along the rails and fly through the air. The track is Fly Away by TheFatRat f/Anjulie.

Ahead of the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix, Oracle Red Bull Racing drivers Max Verstappen and Checo Perez challenged Scuderia Alpha Tauri teammates Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo to some desert racing in hovercrafts. While their fan-powered vehicles only make 26.5 horsepower, they look like the most fun you can have under 30 mph.

Gav and Dan of The Slow Mo Guys met up with Brett and Scott from How Ridiculous to see what kind of damage a bowling ball cannon can do. Their subject: ballistic gel heads filled with fake skulls. For something a little less gruesome, enjoy some bowling balls vs. trampolines.

Yippee-I-aye, Yippee-I-o… the Melodicka Bros. took the oft-covered western staple Ghost Riders in the Sky and transformed it into a synth-heavy cyberpunk jam. The track is accompanied by an appropriately neon-lit, smoke-filled music video that imagines a cybercowboy riding his steel horse to round up some cybercows.

We still don’t know if there’s extraterrestrial life out there, but if there is, there’s a chance that they won’t like us Earthlings and will want to get rid of us. Kurzgesagt takes the aliens’ side in this theoretical conflict and offers strategies to help them wipe out humanity forever. Though they assume our enemies are more technologically advanced than us.

As part of his home workstation revamp, Ideal Idea wanted a computer case like no other. The idea? Build a PC that doubles as a kinetic sculpture. He made the case from laser-cut wood panels and created two interchangeable faces. An Arduino and a stepper motor control the mechanisms. The ripple design with the hexagons is fantastic.

We’ve previously seen art that was made by cracking sheets of glass. Artist Uncle Liu uses a pointed hammer to create tiny chips in glass, creating pointilist portraits from the indentations. You can find more of his astounding glass artworks on his page on Chinese website Douyin.

Here’s a fun family project if you live somewhere the temperature stays below freezing for days on end. The ABC Allred Family shows us how easy it is to build your own backyard igloo from blocks of ice and a dash of food coloring for extra flair. You can make the ice bricks in aluminum foil trays and then cement them together with a mixture of snow and cold water.

Leo Moracchioli turned Britney Spears’ 2000 hit Oops!… I Did It Again into a shockingly good heavy metal track. Leo is at the top of his guitar game while wearing a blue bodysuit which seems like it would be a good canvas for applying visual effects. And for more unexpected Britney covers, check out Toxic on toothbrushes.