Awesome Backward

So you’re driving down a road in your Jeep when a wild rhinoceros comes out of nowhere. You could try to go around the beast, but you’d risk an impact. Based on this video, the better move is to back away as fast as possible. We’re equally impressed with the driver’s skill and the speed at which such a heavy animal can move.

Because of drivetrain limitations, the fastest reverse drive was just 53 mph. Thanks to electric motors, that record has been smashed. The Rimac Nevera hit a reverse speed of 275.75 km/h or 171.34 mph. Since the Nevera’s drivetrain has no gears, it is capable of moving backward or forward at crazy speeds. It’s the icing on the cake after the Nevera broke 23 other records.

Musician Joel James has a unique talent – he’s able to perform songs backward so they sound like the original when played back in reverse. It’s a simple concept, executed brilliantly by Joel. See if you can guess these songs before he hits rewind.

Formula 1 drivers are used to zooming around race tracks at speeds over 200mph – but that’s in forward gear. In this video from Red Bull Racing, F1 drivers Max Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda challenged each other in a race where they had to stay in reverse the whole time while navigating obstacles.

Inspired by a vehicle in the 1960s action show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Tom Scott wanted to test whether it is feasible to drive a vehicle forwards via a video screen while facing backwards. The folks at Sparkmate helped put together a rig that let Tom test the idea using a custom go kart steered by a video game controller.

On the UK game show Taskmasters, contestants were asked to record videos of them performing an activity that would make them look much more talented when played in reverse. We can’t decide if the guy pulling the van or the Tree Wizard was our favorite. Just one question: How long until there’s a US remake of this show?

Kuma Films is known for photographing people as they show off their various talents. Often, the footage is captured in slow-motion, so for fun, they decided to run some of the footage in reverse, resulting in a surreal and captivating compilation of backwards scenes.

Do you think you could recognize familiar video game theme songs played backwards? Musician Stemage’s digital album Retrogression: Vol 1, features rock versions of classic themes, played in reverse. Songs like Sorb Oriam Repus (Super Mario Bros), and Sirtet (Tetris) sound surprisingly good, and vaguely familiar.

The Magnetic Games channel presents a fantastically satisfying video in which they play back the destruction of various magnetic sculptures in reverse. Put your headphones on, and the audio just makes it that much more entertaining.

There’s a saying we like to use when something is already past the point of no return: “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” But if we lived in Mark Hacks‘ backwards world, not only would that be possible, we could unbreak eggs, unpeel oranges, and objects would roll uphill.

If staging a backwards running event wasn’t strange enough, check out this video of the action played in reverse, which make the whole thing even more surreal and amusing. They look like badly animated NPCs in a video game.

In celebration of May-tallica, Rob Scallon performed this trippy rendition of Enter Sandman, playing the whole song backwards, including the vocals, then reversing the video. Here’s the forward version.