Celebrating Season Two of The Boys with a Laser-Eyed Baby

In case you missed it, The Boys is a TV series from Amazon that aired last year and was pretty darn well received. The show is about superheroes, but these aren’t exactly the kind of superheroes that you would want protecting your city. One could even say that many of them are seriously bereft of morals and integrity. The true heroes of the show are non-super regular folks who are trying to stop the superheroes, and one of them uses a baby with laser eyes to kill people. Yes, that happened. To celebrate today’s premiere of The Boys season 2, YouTube Michael Reeves reproduced that laser-eyed baby.

Reeves’ project was, of course, sponsored by Amazon to get publicity for the premiere. But we’re totally okay with that when it results in a video this ridiculous. The idea was to recreate the scene from episode 5 of the first season of The Boys in which Butcher, portrayed by Karl Urban, comes across a super powered infant that is capable of shooting laser beams from its eyes. Butcher then uses that laser baby to literally cut some bad guy henchmen in half. It is a completely bonkers scene, and Reeves recreated it in an appropriately bonkers way.

The first step was to give a baby laser eyes. Reeves couldn’t get a real baby on such short notice, and had to settle for a doll. He then placed a pair of low-power laser diodes in the doll’s eyes. Those lasers are activated by an accelerometer in the doll’s head, so the user simply needs to shake the baby to fire the lasers. To do some damage to his friends, Reeves built some specialty squibs. “Squib” is the name for the special effects device that cause blood to explode from a person’s body when they’re “shot.” Those squibs are triggered using photoresistors, which detect the intense light coming from the baby’s laser eyes. The results are predictably spectacular, like a game of laser tag, but with far more blood than usual. Be sure to watch the video for more information, and check out The Boys if you haven’t already.