“Captain Disillusion,” who is sometimes known by his alter ego Alan Melikdjanian. (Image by Susan Gerbic, via Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Colors adjusted for INSIGHT.)
YouTube’s champion of video justice, Captain Disillusion (@CDisillusion on Twitter), has a new piece out this week (see below) deconstructing this compelling viral “Rush Hour” video created by filmmaker Fernando Livschitz.
As an independent skeptical activist, Captain Disillusion has long used his YouTube channel and filmmaking know-how to debunk one bit of viral video chicanery after another—from hostile penguins to preternaturally skilled ping pong to Haitian UFOs (a case I discussed myself in eSkeptic).
When the Captain took up his quirky persona and pixel-fighting mission way back in the storied yesteryear of 2007, it was already possible for artists to create seamlessly photorealistic visual effects scenes on an ordinary home computer, quickly and easily, using only a few hundred bucks worth of software. Since then, the veil of illusion has only gotten deeper and the pace of malarkey more frantic. Never have we needed our champion more!
Find out more about Captain Disillusion on his site, on Facebook, or (especially) on YouTube. Learn about his mild-mannered alter ego on Wikipedia.
And kids, in these dark days, his tagline remains one to live by:
“Remember—love with your heart. Use your head for everything else.”
You tell ’em, Captain!
I browsed through some of Captain Disillusion videos. Pretty interesting, and with some humor thrown in. Great stuff.
If Captain Disillusion didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.