Gree-- *loud bang* Cut. Alright, let's reset...No, you know what, just keep rolling, keep rolling, keep rolling. We'll fix it in post.
Hi kids, Captain Disillusion here. You know, as much as I love the movie business,
there's no business more superstitious and slow to change.
For the longest time, filmmaker Steven Spielberg refused to put his movies out on DVD because he didn't believe the DVD format would catch on.
And of course, the various urban legends surrounding the deaths of famous actors are always rampant.
But then there are the pointless, utterly ridiculous myths for which Captain Disillusion is forced to compromise his integrity,
bend copyright laws, and show (for educational purposes and within the bounds of the fair use clause) a clip from
the 1987 comedy "3 Men and a Baby."
*click*
Woman: "Oh, she's so lovely..."
Captain Disillusion (voiceover): It's an urban legend you may have heard of.
About halfway through the film, when Ted Danson's character's mother comes to see the baby and carries it across the room,
*spooky music* an ominous figure of a young boy can be seen standing in the window
The story is, of course, that a family that lived in the apartment previously had a young son who committed suicide,
and that the figure is his ghostly apparition.
It has even been claimed that, after this paranormal discovery, VHS
re-releases of the film had the scene cut out, out of respect for the grieving family.
There are only two problems with that story.
One, the interiors of the film are not shot in a grieving family's apartment, but in a soundstage in Toronto, Canada.
And two, as far as we know, there's no such thing as ghosts.
*glass shatters*
*upbeat music* Yes indeed, as already well explained by other sources, the figure is nothing more than a life-sized cutout of Danson's
character Jack wearing a tuxedo and a top hat. The sequence explaining the origins of the cutout was
"cut out" of the film, but for comparison, the cutout itself can be clearly seen in a later "scene."
It may be poor set decoration, but there's nothing supernatural about it.
The slightly smaller size of the cutout and the way the curtains partially disguise it
do make the figure look like a small boy, an illusion enhanced by the all-forgiving blurriness of VHS video.
The good news is that, as home video formats and web video sharing sites continue to improve in quality,
we can look forward to fewer intentional and unintentional paranormal hoax videos.
Oh, and uh, as for the claim that the scene with the anomaly was officially removed from the "3 Men and a Baby" video release,
well, it appears. That's not true either.
Come on.
A major Hollywood distribution company's not going to go into the trouble of intricately altering a feature film over some creepy anomaly.
They only do that to avoid sculpture copyright disputes,
or to posthumously censor a master director's work in order to avoid an NC-17 rating and achieve a higher theatrical gross.
Anyway, just remember: Beneath the glamour and mystique of even the most high-profile productions, it's just a bunch of guys filming another guy who's...
Dammit! Just...just keep rolling.
But now I'm afraid it's time for me to go, kids.
A couple of crew members on a web series set are about to get reprimanded for incompetence.
Remember, love with your heart, use your head for everything else.
Captain Disillus... ion...
Hey, where'd everybody go? Come on guys, come back!
Seriously.
