[telephone service chime]
[female voice] I'm sorry, Captain Disillusion is not available.
[female voice] Please hold for...
Mister Flare, suckers!
I still don't have a body.
Filmmakers are a fragile bunch.
A mega-star angrily humiliates them for making an understandable mistake
while risking their lives to work 15-hour days on the set of his film
during a global crisis just a couple of times...
and they quit in protest like babies!
No wonder they're so touchy about their creations,
constantly trying to correct tiny details
with editing, sound design, and worst of all, visual effects.
How dare they?!
Not so long ago, if dolly tracks got into frame
in one of the most celebrated films in cinema history, you had to just leave it in.
And pray it still makes it into the Criterion Collection.
But then the '90s happened and everything changed.
A filmmaker could digitally shoot his own beloved creation
in its proverbial face with incessant CG alterations.
A studio could sanitize a perfectly innocent fetish party
in a director's posthumous work.
And a sculptor could scare Warner Brothers into
painstakingly replacing a pivotal piece of production design
throughout an entire movie just because it kinda looks like a near-exact copy
of a thing he once put on the door of a church.
These digital fixes are everywhere.
We're still finding them!
Comedy manufacturer, "Thhhomas" Tom... Ska... Ridge... well
was inexplicably watching Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1996 Christmas comedy
'Jingle All the Way' when he spotted this.
[TomSka] I'm sorry, but what is up with this green-screened man?
[TomSka] Who is he? Who him is?!
He was trying to be funny, but he's right!
This guy really was added into the shot after-the-fact.
As this legally-acquired high quality footage shows,
he's lit differently,
doesn't look in exactly the right place when the cop passes by,
and Anakin Skywalker's apparel is sloppily rotoscoped over him.
Why did it take 24 years for anyone to notice this?
It's not even listed on the film's IMDb page,
among its many, many goofs.
Goooooooofs!
More importantly, why was it done in the first place?
What is this popcorn phantom covering up?
Some folks say it might be a background actor who didn't sign a release
or an unlicensed brand logo on someone's shirt.
But those folks... are wrong!
If there's one thing Hollywood knows how to do,
it's get an ironclad release signed long before
anyone who stands a change of being on camera gets anywhere near it.
Have you ever seen a movie from any era
where someone's face had to be blurred out?
Do you think Sacha Baron Cohen would still be alive
if this was an unsolvable problem?
This is a multimillion-dollar action set piece, shot over the course of 3 weeks
on New York Street of the Universal Studios backlot.
With about fifteen hundred vetted background actors--
Hey, what the hell?!
Like most of you, the solution to this puzzle...
is basic.
You were too busy looking at the popcorn guy to notice...
well, everything else!
This shot is meant to be a wider angle of the one before.
It's the same exact piece of the street and the Christmas ball mascot is there
but literally every other person is different.
That's because this whole little insert scene
of Phil Hartman's character learning that Arnold is Turbo Man
and dragging his son Johnny away
was hurriedly shot as a pickup, probably on a different day.
I guess at some point, Brian Levant
felt that the cuckholding subplot of this children's movie
really needed an emotional coda.
They filled the area with a different group of extras and got the shots.
If only they'd known they couldn't get "Borat" back again during post.
[singing] Another one for the goofs...
In the original footage of the scene this little yank-out never happened
so Johnny is still standing there.
And that's who the green-screened popcorn guy is covering up.
There's Johnny's blue jeans.
There's his red plaid cap.
And there's all of him, just a couple of cuts later!
Mystery solved!
[audience cheers]
Please... please, don't call me a hero.
I'm just a lens flare who wants to make the world a slightly less stupid pla--
Jack Packard?!
That guy figured this out before me?!
Bu-buh...but he's just a minor figure on that YouTube channel
of renegade media critics who pretend not to be aware of my boss' amazing work.
I guess we're not so different.
I'm a minor figure on this channel.
And I have been looking for a new body to inhabit.
I could do worse...
A well-proportioned head,
nice protective lenses,
a retractable chin...
Maybe this was meant to be?
Nah! I don't think so.
In fact, don't talk to me or my bokeh ever again!
Peace!
[outro jingle]