Awesome Videos

George Lucas once said that the Star Wars movies were “designed as silent movies.” His approach was to let music and visuals drive the story. Danny Boyd from CinemaStix explores this concept and whether watching the films without dialogue makes them even more powerful. If you ask us, it’s John Williams’ masterful scores that truly elevated the franchise.

Half as Interesting simplifies the math behind the underhanded free throw, AKA the granny shot. Popularized by NBA legend Rick Barry, the shot makes players shoot significantly better in exchange for looking like they don’t know what they’re doing. Even the greatest of stat stuffers couldn’t bear to stick with it. It’s a fun reminder of human nature.

The cult classic The Room is best known for its stilted dialogue and scenery-chewing performance of actor/writer/director Tommy Wiseau. It turns out that if you chop up some of his choice words and sing them in the style of Prince, it gets much better. Nick Lutsko put this hilarious clip together a while back for Super Deluxe.

YouTuber bijru reminds us of the passage of time and just how influential the iPhone has been. Watch him take an entertaining look back at the crazy form factors of cellphones in the early to mid-2000s. There were lots of hinges, odd shapes, and janky attempts at features that we now take for granted, like gaming or simply web browsing.

The Journey track Don’t Stop Believin’ made its mark on the pop charts, as a baseball team anthem, and playing on the jukebox in the final moments of The Sopranos. Now, hear it like you’ve never heard it before. Musician Frank Tedesco switched it up and played the melody in a minor key, which always makes things darker and more dramatic.

There are kits you can buy that add colorful ambient lighting behind or around your TV. We’ve played with a few, but none of them have the pinpoint color matching of Chris Maher’s DIY setup. In this video, he shows how he built his edge-lit system using addressable LED light strips, a WLED light controller, and the insanely powerful SignalRGB control software.

DJ Cummerbund’s latest musical mashup pays tribute to three musical greats and a wrestling legend. The tune is a delicious bouillabaisse of sounds from Wham!, Amy Winehouse, ZZ Top, and Blink-182, resulting in the most upbeat song ever about a heavy subject. Bonus points to TonyZed68, the YouTube commenter who called her Amy Whamhouse.

Here’s one for the gearheads. Let’s Learn Something built one of the craziest engines ever. He started with ten 2-stroke engines – the kind found in mopeds – disassembled them, then welded together their blocks. He then cut the whole thing in half to insert a ridiculously long crankshaft to drive its pistons. The finished inline-10 engine is a sight to behold.

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT language model GPT-4o can respond to and with text, audio, images, and video. But perhaps more scarily amazing is that in Voice Mode – which allows it to respond using an AI-generated voice – it’s as snappy and natural-sounding as a human. GPT-4o is available even to free users, but using it in Voice Mode is limited to paid subscribers.

Red Bull skydivers Marco Fürst and Marco Waltenspiel arrived in London, England, in the most dramatic way. They jumped from a helicopter over the River Thames and headed right for the city’s iconic Tower Bridge. After flying through their target, they used the winds to increase altitude so they could open their parachutes and safely land on floating platforms.

Ships of all sizes need propellers to move through the water. Process X takes us on a tour of Japan’s Mikawa Propeller Co., Ltd., a factory that makes precision marine propellers by casting bronze in sand. After the melting and casting process, workers remove excess sand, painstakingly grind away excess metal, and polish propellers to a smooth finish.

Decorated with rainbows and unicorns, this wild-looking vehicle serves a practical purpose. CB Media takes a look at the tractors some farmers in Thailand use to harvest rice. These custom-built turbo-diesel machines ride on tank tracks, can turn on a dime, and keep their driver elevated above marshy rice fields. They’re not exactly environmentally friendly.

The best way to cut styrofoam is with a hot wire cutter. These tools usually have a single wire, but someone arranged a bunch of hot wires into a grid to produce a superbly satisfying video. Each time they set a sheet of styrofoam on top of the heated grid, it slides through like butter, creating dozens of foam cubes. We can only imagine the melted plastic fumes.

There’s a subgenre of country music that’s all about beer, dirt, trucks, and women. There I Ruined It created what he says is “what bro-country sounds like to people who don’t like bro-country.” The track, Got a Beer in My Beer, features a dog that drives a pickup while wearing cutoff jeans. We hope he’s not drinking that beer while driving.

There’s a real camera out there that’s the size of a grain of sand. But for this video, the guys from Corridor didn’t strap one of these technological marvels to a bee. Nope, they used a drone and their visual effects skills instead, giving us a fun bee’s-eye perspective on the world as the apian buzzes around. See how they made the clip in the Behind-the-scenes video.

We recently watched an educational film on what to do when you encounter people walking in the opposite direction on a sidewalk. This wacky CG-animated short posted by TecoMalu shows an alternative method that involves a horizontal booster pack that helps you quickly maneuver around other pedestrians.

If you spent any time on the Web in the early 2000s, you surely encountered some of those over-the-top song covers performed by Crazy Frog. Musician Luca Stricagnoli classes up the joint with a fingerstyle acoustic guitar medley of the Frog’s Eurodance remakes of Axel F, Popcorn, and Blue.

Prior to this video, the fastest recorded flight speed for a battery-R/C drone was 224 mph. Luke Bell and his dad, Mike, built a custom drone that set a new Guinness World Record of 298.47 mph and an unofficial top speed of 317 mph. But the feat wasn’t without its challenges, including multiple battery fires. Stick around til the end for some cinematic shots.

If you need to re-pave a street, you typically need to reduce lanes and redirect traffic around the construction site. Switzerland’s Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) shows us a modern method for resurfacing that directs traffic over the work zone by erecting a temporary bridge. The modular ASTRA flyover bridge can be driven into place to minimize setup time.

…is not the Big Wind because it isn’t a truck. This big boy is a T-34 tank that had its gun turret replaced with a contraption made of two MiG-21 fighter plane engines and six water nozzles. Its blasts of air and water helped put out the 1991 oil well fires in Kuwait, achieving in seconds what would otherwise take days to achieve. Real Engineering has the story.

Imagine, if you will, that Mother Nature focused her energy on a single location and hit it with all of her electrical fury. xkcd’s What If? takes on another hypothetical question, exploring what might happen if every lightning bolt struck a single spot on Earth and whether we could harvest the power from the mega-storm.

NightHawkInLight made the rare DIY video that’s so straightforward even kids can follow it. Even better, it’s about something that is actually useful in daily life. He figured out that a mixture of paraffin and mineral oil is a great waterproof coating for fabric. The hardest part is ironing the mixture into the fabric, but even that step is practically idiotproof.

(PG-13: Language) “Take a rolling pin. Dice it up. Put it into a bowl.” Videogamedunkey once again proves that humans hallucinate better than AI with this hilarious supercut of Gordon Ramsay rattling off cooking steps. If you miss the days when YouTube was random, and Vine still existed, inject this video into your veins.