Most successful people pay their dues by taking embarrassing and/or degrading jobs on their rise to the top (e.g., Brad Pitt dressed up as a chicken for El Pollo Loco restaurant), but most of the time, it isn’t caught on camera. Unfortunately for action star Vin Diesel, a video of one of his, shall we say, less illustrious gigs recently surfaced on YouTube, a video which the actor now probably wishes that he had the foresight to burn long ago.
In the video (embedded above), a muscled, leather-vest-clad Diesel enthusiastically pedals action figures from the ’90s so-bad-it’s-good animated TV series Street Sharks. The video was shot in 1994, long before franchise like The Fast and the Furious, The Chronicles of Riddick, and xXx made him a star. In fact, when this video was recorded, the actor had yet to land a single credited gig in Hollywood.
Jokes aside, though, we have to admit that Diesel is one heck of a salesman. Though his big break was years away at this point, his charisma and enthusiasm shines through and much of what made him one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors is on display in this video.
Here are a few of the highlights from this vintage gem:
0:08 — “Say hello to that round mound of pound, and his power-slam … very deadly.”
0:54 — “I’ve got something here with such fin-tastic detail it’s gonna blow you away … HAND SHARK!”
Fortunately, modern-day Diesel is working on some more prestigious/lucrative projects. In the next couple of years, Fans of the actor will be able to catch him in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (November 11, 2016), Fast 8 (April 14, 2017) and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage (2017).
Now please excuse us while we scour eBay for Street Sharks.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?