Videos

What will infantry robots look like? This parody video might be onto something…

(YouTube/Corridor)

For all its faults, YouTube has created an entire ecosystem of content creators that might have otherwise gone unnoticed (or been relegated to a few lines in movie credits), and you’d be hard pressed to find a better example than the Corridor Crew. With two hugely successful channels under their belt and billions of views accumulated over the years, this group of digital effects artists have made a name for themselves not only by creating engaging and realistic CGI battles and scenes, but more recently, with their parodies of the (sort of troubling) Boston Dynamics videos — in which real robot designers are shown smacking their terminator-like creations around with things like hockey sticks.

Here’s a compilation of all the times the real Boston Dynamics beat the crap out of their robots. You’ll probably see this same footage at our eventual robot trial, following the robot apocalypse.

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For all its faults, YouTube has created an entire ecosystem of content creators that might have otherwise gone unnoticed (or been relegated to a few lines in movie credits), and you’d be hard pressed to find a better example than the Corridor Crew. With two hugely successful channels under their belt and billions of views accumulated over the years, this group of digital effects artists have made a name for themselves not only by creating engaging and realistic CGI battles and scenes, but more recently, with their parodies of the (sort of troubling) Boston Dynamics videos — in which real robot designers are shown smacking their terminator-like creations around with things like hockey sticks.

Here’s a compilation of all the times the real Boston Dynamics beat the crap out of their robots. You’ll probably see this same footage at our eventual robot trial, following the robot apocalypse.

And here is the Corridor Crew’s first parody, showing the robots eventually getting sick of the abuse and turning on their handlers.

If you subscribe to their channels (not a plug, I just genuinely enjoy their work) the team at Corridor bring you through their filming process and often, show you how they pull off some of the incredible effects. You’d be surprised how often a seemingly inhuman creation of some sort is actually one of the CGI artists on the team named Clint wearing a motion capture suit and doing his very best to act like whatever he’s supposed to be. The combination of motion capture and CGI results in a pretty believable product — which is all the more amazing when you consider it’s on a free-to-watch YouTube channel, rather than in a high-budget blockbuster movie.

A few days ago, they released an all-new Boston Dynamics parody (which they call Bosstown Dynamics) that builds on where the last one left off. In this video, edited to look like a real Boston Dynamics release, a very realistic looking robot is undergoing firearms training while suffering the sort of hockey-stick laden abuse we’ve come to expect from the real Boston Dynamics. The video is, of course, meant as a comedy — but after watching footage of the real Boston Dynamics robots doing parkour and running around in the woods… it’s hard to watch this and not feel a little uncomfortable… like this is a “parody” this week, but could be real life soon. Especially considering their “fake” robot designs are heavily informed by the real robot designs of companies like Boston Dynamics.

Don’t worry for now though. Most of these killer robots are actually Clint in that motion capture suit I told you about. At least… this time.

About Alex Hollings View All Posts

Alex Hollings writes on a breadth of subjects with an emphasis on defense technology, foreign policy, and information warfare. He holds a master's degree in communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor's degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

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