“No other specimen has shown your … adaptability …”
I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’m a sucker for a good, quality deepfake video — one where the entertainment value is by and large the purpose for it, mind you — and today I think I’m going to have to go ahead and crown a winner. The best one I’ve ever seen, to be more specific, and the one I’ve gotten a kick out of the most. I’m referring to the hilariously faked footage you can watch below, which inserts Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk into a reto clip from the Star Trek TV series.
Entertaining? Check. Impressive production? Check. Realistic-looking? Obviously, but you be the judge and just go ahead and cast your eyes a few inches above these words and settle on that image of Jeff Bezos’ face superimposed onto the giant, vein-y head of an alien. The clip even plays with the pop culture exaggeration of Bezos’ many habits and personality quirks, which makes it hardly any stretch at all to imagine him as the alien being he appears to be here, marvelling at the strange behavior of the human he sees standing before him. Alien Bezos can’t seem to get over the fact that the human (USS Enterprise Captain Christopher Pike) doesn’t appreciate the captivity the alien wants to place him in. Even though it’s “pleasant and benevolent.” Almost as if he’s grasping to understand why he won’t submit himself to membership in
The other thing that makes this clip so fun is that Jeff and Elon are both rivals of sorts — two billionaire businessmen, each currently funding his own space-focused startup (Blue Origin for Bezos, SpaceX for Elton). Bezos himself is also a pretty intense fan of Star Trek. He’s even gone so far as to name one of his many holding companies, Zefram LLC, in honor of the Star Trek character who created the warp drive.
In the clip above (which comes from the original Star Trek episode from back in 1965), the alien represented with Bezos’ face is part of a race that snatches Captain Pike and intends to use him to breed humans who can build a new society. The aliens eventually decide this is probably no good, since humans have an aversion to being captured. “You capture one of us, (you) threatened all of us,” Elon-as-Captain Pike warns. The whole thing is pretty entertaining, and at just a minute long it makes for a quick, enjoyable watch.
