Web Video / Michael Reeves

"Normally, I'd say something here like 'I used to love laser tag as a kid, but now it's gotten boring, and we gotta make it interesting again... with tasers.' That's bullshit. I just want to electrocute people."

"Tazer Tag"

Michael Reeves is a Filipino-American YouTube content creator, and possibly a real-life Mad Scientist. His videos mostly consist of him building robots or machines for utterly ridiculous purposes, often involving tasers, and then using them to mess with his friends.

Michael's first video, The Robot that Shines a Laser in your Eye, went viral in 2017, which led eventually to him dropping his software career and becoming YouTube's preeminent insane engineer. His creations include a gun that fires 3D-printed penises, a machine that picks tomatoes out of salads by stabbing them with an enormous metal spike, a cup that tases you if you can't drink fast enough, a Roomba that screams when it bumps into things, and many more.

In 2019, Michael joined a group of streamers and content creators known as OfflineTV and moved in with them, and starting in 2020 he's in a relationship with fellow member LilyPichu.

Michael's videos provide examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • While everyone sending him robot ideas usually pisses him off, every once in a while he will find one that makes him laugh or he thinks might actually be fun.
    Michael: (reading a comment) "A robot that tazes people's legs when you take a picture so that you're the tallest one in the picture." (Beat) ...That's fucking funny.
  • The subreddit r/wallstreetbets found it hilarious when they lost to a fish.
• Badass Bookworm: Michael's charity boxing bout during the 2022 Creator Clash against fellow content creator Graham Stephan showed his amazing physical prowess. After only a short amount of time training, the fruits of Michael's training was made apparent as he was dominant throughout the fight, landing more punches, hitting harder, and ultimately winning by TKO in the second round.
• Bait-and-Switch: His completed Trigger Me Elmo is first tested on Michael and his mom, correctly detects them as Asian, and makes various racist comments as intended. When he then tests it on photos of Mexican and African-American celebrities, it calmly says that it respects their cultures because Michael didn't feel comfortable having it say anything against races that weren't his.
• Black Comedy: All the time. His most famous creation is a Roomba that screams in pain.
• Crazy-Prepared: During the bit where the Lunch Club members (Ted Nivison, Slimecicle, Cscoop and Hugbox) were stealing from YouTubers, they stole several of Michael's Tasers and used them on him. Michael's response? Pull out a taser he just so happened to have on him and retaliate. It was later revealed that this part wasn't scripted at all and Michael went off the rails here.
• Ditzy Genius: Definitely. Michael is an incredibly skilled coder, but he uses his skills for the silliest and most useless purposes he can think of.
• The Dreaded: Played for Laughs; whenever Michael arrives to tell his friends he's made a new invention, they already know they're in for something bad.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: His April 10, 2023 upload titled "a boring video", it has nothing to do with robotics or engineering (unless you count trying to fix his truck from constantly overheating), it's just a vlog style video of him going to TwitchCon to give it a review, and even then most of the video is about him getting lost in the desert, during a dust storm, while playing with his new motorcycle.
• The Gadfly: Many of his videos consist of him subjecting his friends to whatever new invention he's come up with. The Taser Camera is probably the best example.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: During Michael's pitch to Launch House (a group of entrepreneurs) in "I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade Stocks" on his idea involving Fredrick's stock portfolio performance, he makes it clear in the video's editing that his statement that Fredrick outperformed the NASDAQ is true.
• N-Word Privileges: His "Trigger Me Elmo" doll, which is programmed to detect your race and insult you based on it, only insults you if you're white or Asian and compliments you otherwise. As Michael explains, since he's mixed Filipino-American, those are the only two he can get away with saying racist things about.
• Older Than They Look: Is constantly made fun of for the fact he looks around 12.
• Overly Pre-Prepared Gag: In "I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade Stocks", after realizing that his stock-trading method based on the random movements of a goldfish was actually successful, he decided to pitch his new technology to investors. For the sake of the gag, Michael genuinely went to an entrepreneurial meeting to give a presentation of his new startup — a "fish algorithm"-based stock trading program called "reef.ly" — in front of potential investors, who weren't in on the joke and didn't find anything amiss until it became clear that Michael was referring to a literal goldfish.
• Poster-Gallery Bedroom / Room Full of Crazy: Invoked. Michael wrote a Twitter bot so that his fans could order things to decorate his room with. They proceeded to fill it BTS merchandise, Ecchi images, Pickle Rick references, and other memes and general insanity. Michael knew this would happen, of course - and the resulting room is magnificently weird. Hilariously, he'd only end up living in that room for a couple months before signing with OfflineTV and moving out.
• Psycho Electro: Michael really likes his tasers and will find any excuse to implement them into his inventions.
• Superficial Suggestion Box: In "I Hate Your Robot Ideas", Michael illustrates his disdain for viewer suggestions of robot ideas by setting up a machine that automatically screencaps and prints their suggestion so it can be immediately pushed into a shredder.
• Take That!: The second act of "I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade Stocks" is basically this to the r/wallstreetsbet community for being beaten in stock portfolio performance by Fredrick the goldfish.
  • In his closing remarks, he makes a poke at Internet Historian by mentioning how despite a 11 month hiatus, Michael manages to release a video before he does.
• Take That, Audience!: Two of his videos have him go into his comment section to create his commenters' robot ideas. As he does this, he constantly berates the audience for the terrible ideas they give him, to the point of creating a machine that automatically prints them out just to shred them.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: This man made a robot with a piston-propelled spike that can go 50 miles per hour... for the purpose of removing tomatoes from a salad.

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