We have some good news and some bad news for anyone hoping to shine a giant spotlight into the night sky in order to attract the attention of a stringy-haired, mascara-smeared Robert Pattinson. First, the bad news: The engineers behind YouTube channel Hacksmith Industries have determined that a real-life Bat Signal wouldn’t work all that well. Second, the good news: Those same engineers managed to build a new version of the device that actually does what it’s meant to.
“Not a chance in hell,” Hacksmith’s James says about the Bat Signal’s portrayal in film and comics, before stating that projectors just can’t actually light up the night sky in the way that they’re shown doing through decades of Batman media. “It simply would never, ever work.”
After going through the reasons why a giant spotlight with a bat symbol stuck to its center doesn’t actually function the way we think it would—mostly because the symbol won’t show up when placed right in front of the light’s source—the team get to work on a version of the crime-fighting beacon that might manage to actually help save some people from unexpected Joker attacks.
There are a lot of complicated explanations about how light behaves and plenty of footage of the machine’s construction along the way, but the Hacksmith engineers eventually figure out how to turn a comic book invention into a working device. Once built, they test it out by showing it off to others in their workshop, mount it to a truck to see how well it performs outside in the night sky, then take it out to shine in front of a movie theater.
In the end, they accomplish their goal and give all of us a bit of hope in the process. We leave the video reassured that if we’re ever facing down a mugging and need Batman to show up and help, summoning him is as simple as getting a bunch of committed engineers together to work really hard on a complicated project for a while.
[via Nerdist]
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