Web Video / The Slow Mo Guys

The Slow Mo Guys is a web series featuring ex-Top Gear slow-motion camera operator Gavin Free and ex-British Army explosives specialist Daniel Gruchy showing various scenes occurring in slow motion, filmed using a Phantom Flex camera that can shoot up to 10,000 FPS, the same one used for the slow motion scenes in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

Outside of their normal content, they have made 4 series productions for Youtube and TV:

• The Super Slow Slow, a Youtube Original series (2018)
• Planet Slow Mo, their second Youtube Original series (2019)
• The Slow Mo Guys VR, a VR miniseries for the Oculus Quest (2020)
• The Slow Mo Guys' Big Adventures, an Edutainment Show for Sky Kids (2022)

They are sometimes considered part of the Rooster Teeth family, owing to Gavin being an actual member, Dan appearing in their videos from time to time, and Rooster Teeth hosting some of their videos and merchandise on their website. However, Gavin has been very careful to keep the show independent, and has been seemingly distancing the two in recent years.

Their YouTube page is available here, and their Facebook page is available here. You can also follow both Gavin and Dan on Twitter.

These tropes look better in slow-motion!

• Affectionate Nickname: They both call each other "B" at any opportunity. It was an in-joke between them over people calling their friends "boy" that became each other's nickname for real.
• The Alleged Car: Dan couldn't even trade in his run-down car, so he has an excuse to try and destroy it with fireworks. He also kicks the passenger side mirror in frustration at it.
• Amusing Injuries: Filmed in slow motion, of course!
  • How Dan hurt his hand.
  • Not so funny when a glass paint bottle exploded and sent a little shard flying into Dan's finger. Don't worry, he got better.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Dan's grandfather in the butane rockets. "I heard various explosions earlier." was used in a challenge to write said phrase on the tablet, running Dan's garden, blindfolded and being pelted by exercise balls.
  • The series title comes from Richard Hammond's nickname for Gavin.
• BFG: Gavin was first to fire the Barrett M82 .50 BMG in the video featuring it, the video even gives a "Noise Warning" because the thing looks, sounds and acts more like a miniature tank gun than a rifle. He and Dan both struggle to hold it up and the magazine looks about as big as his face.
  Destin: It's bigger than I thought it would be.
  Gavin: It's very big.
  Dan: It's large.
• Big "YES!": Gavin's reaction to finally being able to film with Dan again at the end of "Diving into a Moving Swim Cap".
• Blatant Lies: From the FAQ video.
  Dan: "Do you guys play video games?"
  Gavin: No.
  Dan: No.
  [Starts pulling off all of the 360 controllers as they cover up the Spartan helmet]
  Gavin: Never.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Dan is usually on the receiving end of very painful shots from: Getting slapped in the face, receiving a football to the side of the head, getting hit with a champagne cork, finger in a mouse trap, punched in the stomach, burnt by boiling oil, burnt by hot popcorn butter, almost drowned with a water-filled condom on his head, choked on cinnamon, shot by a paintball gun in both legs, and shot with a Maverick.
  • It gets much more serious when he burned his hand and leg with boiling oil and got a piece of glass lodged in his finger.
  • One of the Super Slow Show shoots features a pair of ice sculptures of Dan and Gavin rigged to explode. First time round? Dan's the only one who blows up.
  • Gav isn't immune to this, he was shot more times by the Maverick, particularly in the bridge of the nose. And also cracked his back doing the Happy Gilmore swing.
• Call-Back: The original giant water balloon video has been referenced with other giant water balloons. The original featured Gavin jumping on one; later videos have Dan inside one (all but his head), being crushed by one while lying on a trampoline, being crushed by one while lying under a trampoline, and being completely submerged inside one.
• Colbert Bump: Episode eleven, part 2 of the Super Slow Show references and replicates the 11 Foot 8 bridge, a trailway trestle in North Carolina infamous for decapitating the trucks of ignorant drivers. A couple of hours after the video aired, the bridge's website crashed from the popularity.
• Comedic Sociopathy: The series pretty much runs on this.
• Covered in Gunge:
  • Their Former Youtube banner (and used for ads at the same time) had Gavin throwing blue paint at Dan. Also, anything that involves paint and explosions.
  • The Home Made Goop Cannon video made in association with Tide. Once again, it's Dan on the receiving end and Gavin enjoys it just a bit too much.
  • Becoming more and more used in videos. Much to Dan's reluctance.
  • Dan gets his revenge in the "Paint Pendulum" episode on The Super Slow Show. After getting hit by a giant balloon filled with paint, he convinces Gavin to get hit with one. After they decide to up the balloons to two, he beats Gavin in Rock–Paper–Scissors... forcing Gavin to get hit with them instead of him.
  • "Paint Blast Portrait" has both of them getting blasted by eight paint cannons.
• Cute Kitten:
  • Gav's cat, Lloyd, is very obedient to allow him to film her jumping down a tree and climbing up a fence when asked to. Of course, she tends to get in the way of some filming.
  • "Slow Mo Kittens" is just an excuse for Gavin to play with kittens.
  • Gavin's cats in general tend to interrupt him in videos filmed inside his home. Smee interrupted him filming "The Earth Inside a Macro Water Droplet" and even manages to open his office door while he was editing in one behind the scenes video. While he was filming "How A TV Works in Slow Motion", Columbo pops her head up behind him. During various points during his "10 Facts" video, all three cats wander onto his desk behind him, with him turning around to see Ziggy sitting on his scanner. In some sponsored sections, his cats can be seen interfering with his demonstrating of said sponsored products.
  • "Cat Sprinting and Pouncing" is all about footage of Smee, both as an adult and as a kitten.
• Digging to China: A Running Gag written by Gavin in the comments is that due to the pandemic, Dan had been digging a tunnel through the earth to reach Texas from the UK. Naturally, in "Diving into a Moving Swim Cap", he reappears by digging through the dirt.
• Don't Try This at Home:
  • Gavin claims he dislikes these disclaimers, so he rarely uses them. The few times when he does say it lets you know that that day's activity is probably stupid levels of dangerous.
  • For the Super Slow Show, each video does come with one, emphasizing that the activities were performed under strict safety supervision.
  • This ends up applying even more to the show itself; at one point in The Super Slow Show, after successfully filming Tony Hawk in slow mo, Dan has a go, and immediately fractures his wrist.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • Okay, model globe shattering kaboom but close enough.
  • Alternatively, a building-sized one born of the brilliant and utterly safe idea to toss a grenade at a large group of Exploding Barrels.
• Epic Fail:
  • It turns out 72 hours is not enough time to refrigerate a 6,000lb block of gelatin.
  • In order to rig a head-to-head car crash with nobody driving, the Super Slow Show crew run two cables from the back of a truck through a pair of pulleys on a concrete barrier to each car, so as the truck drives off, the cars are pulled towards each other equally. That's how it worked in theory. In practice, the concrete wasn't heavy enough, so the truck dragged it away as well and the cars ended up crashing into each other well out of frame.
  • In order to jump through tempered glass you need something to pre-break it, so for the Jumping Through Glass video they rig up a small charge to shatter the pane before Gavin jumped through. The first attempt doesn't work though so Gavin ends up Running into the Window much to their amusement.
• Eye Scream:
  • A very silly and harmless example when the Cuboid claimed he could taste tomato through his eye when one was thrown at him.
  • They shot a pig's eye with an airsoft pistol but it didn't look all that impressive, even in slow-mo. The solution? Blow up the watermelon the eyes were attached to.
• Fan Disservice: Invoked, they wanted to remove the female attention by filming flappy faces in slow-mo. As well as when Dan was forced to vomit milk.
• Fat and Skinny: Dan has always been a little bigger than Gav, though the difference has grown a bit over time. Dan admits to putting on weight since leaving the Army. In the "Det Cord Shockwave" episode, Dan calls himself fat and Gav skinny while comparing variations in the cord's explosive power.
• Foreshadowing: Since the Super Slow Show shoots are recorded Out of Order, particularly with each week's initial introduction having been recorded at the very end, the cast on Dan's wrist appears a few weeks before the bonus video in which he actually fractures it.
• Fun with Subtitles:
  • Whoever does the subtitles for them tends to crack jokes in parenthesis or brackets. Particularly in the 25 Airbag Rainbow Explosion video.
    [ed. note: They should be wearing masks]
    [That powder paint is not good for lungs]
    [plus, they will be colorfully sneezing for weeks now]
  • Gavin occasionally sneaks in some jokes when he captions select shots. As he put it on a shot of Dan holding some rebar in a suggestive position:
    [I know what you're thinking, you should be ashamed of yourself.]
• Groin Attack: The first attempt at filming fruit collisions - just Dan and Gavin throwing grapefruit at each other - was a total failure, as the only actual collision was made between one of Dan's grapefruits and Gavin's plums.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The literal example done just so Gavin would get shot first by a paint ball gun.
• How We Got Here: As a sponsored video for Tenet, "Filming at 1000fps in Reverse" opens with a clean shaven Gavin standing in the middle of a very messy area. The video then proceeds to show how it got that messy and how he shaved off his beard.
• Iconic Outfit: Their lab coats. Over time, the coats are increasingly stained and ripped up to the point where Dan's coat is basically a glorified rag with a sleeve. Naturally, they were given new coats for The Super Slow Show and Planet Slow Mo, but Dan's sleeve is still torn.
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • Considering that Dan is a former soldier in the British Army and has proper firearms training, this gets applied to Gavin when he successfully puts out a candle by shooting an airsoft pellet through the wick. This crosses over with A-Team Firing afterwards, as Dan points out the close grouping of holes in the fence from his shots, and Gavin's shots which are all over the place.
  • Dan isn't immune to this either - he successfully knocks the cork out of a champagne bottle with a sabre despite aiming to shatter the bottle completely, and manages to slice arrows from a bow mid-flight with a katana on the first try after anticipating a couple dozen attempts.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Well, Gavin isn't really a Jerkass so much as he just shows no empathy towards Dan after the latter got a bunch of mousetraps set off on his hands. Still, after the "150 Mousetrap Chain Reaction" video, where Dan set off the mousetraps by slamming his hands onto them (by Gavin's request), Gavin remarked that his heart rate had finally calmed down. After an incredulous reaction from Dan, Gavin points out that he was the one to set the mousetraps up, and Dan admits he has a point.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Dan first shoots Gavin in the shoulder with the NERF Maverick, saying he shoots like a woman before being shot directly in the bridge of the nose.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": During the Planet Slow Mo shoot they used a drone to fly the camera over the geyser, and Dan asked if the camera wasn't maybe a little bit too low. Then the geyser erupts and catches the drone and camera in its plume, knocking it slightly in the air and causing a little worry about whether the camera was okay after such a drenching. Fortunately it was fine.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Seriously, running through a fountain of diet coke in slow motion while set to some dramatic music.
• Mythology Gag: Prior to shooting arrows from a bow, Gavin turns to the camera and yells "MARK NUTT!" in slow motion.
• Noodle Incident: In the flamethrower video, Dan casually tells Gavin that it's not the first time he's received one in the mail.
• Overcrank: The whole point of the series.
• Painful Body Waxing: Being self-described "very hairy", they decided to use a home waxing kit on their thighs. Dan did it twice before Gavin tried on himself, with his scream of pain captured in slow motion.
• The Pig-Pen:
  • Dan's lab coat is perpetually messy, despite Gavin's claims that he washes their coats between every video. Understandable, considering all the crap that Dan goes through on a regular basis, but sometimes he's just inexplicably dirty.
  • Eventually, Dan was given a new, clean lab coat. It was however in a sponsored video for a cleaning product and Gavin immediately splattered it with ketchup, chocolate pudding, and mint chocolate chip ice cream.
  • He was given another new lab coat for the start of the Super Slow Show. Its sleeve was ripped off in the introduction video.
• Playing with Fire: Exploding lighters, fire vs. water, large petrol fire, the flaming hand trick, butane gas rocket, flint and steel, fire tennis, Molotov cocktails, and throwing fireballs from buckets of petrol.
  • Their glitter video nearly turned into this, when after several shoots the pair noticed a burning smell, and discovered in panic that glitter had gotten into their big spotlight and was melting. Smoke can be seen visibly rising on camera before they realize and turn it off.
• Precious Puppy: The boys film Jon Risinger's dog, Bella, happily running and jumping for treats. As Gavin put it:
  Gavin: No dogs were harmed in the making of this video. However, many treats were brutally murdered.
• Product Placement: Their sponsored videos.
  • By Lenovo, both for their thinkpads that withstand impact and water to be used on the I.S.S. and their tablets that also withstand impact and have a very durable, "gorilla" glass screen that was shot by paint balls. Best of all, you can play Angry Birds on it.
  • Captain Morgan Rum and Coke's Dr. Pepper Zero have been donated to the Slow Mo Guys for publicity reasons. Gavin and Dan freely admit they drank a lot of it prior to doing slow-mo work on them.
  • To promote Maltesers' recent launch in the US, the guys put Maltesers in a compressed air cannon and destroy things with them, up to and including another tub of Maltesers.
  • Oreos hired them to make a video on what people will do for the cookie. So Gavin put Dan on a treadmill running and falling into a pool of milk (well, cornstarch and water).
• Running Gag:
  • In the Super Slow Show, Dan constantly getting interrupted by slow mo shoots while he's trying to eat lunch.
  • Not so much a running gag but Dan's labcoat lost a sleeve very early on and thus a joke was made out of the sleeve of his new Super Slow Show coat getting its sleeve torn off immediately - Dan can never have a labcoat with two sleeves at this point, it'd just look wrong.
• Scenery Porn: The first episode of Planet Slow Mo is packed with gorgeous aerial shots of Icelandic geysers and waterfalls.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Dan notices that his lunch table is directly below a crane suspending hundreds of water balloons.
• Shout-Out:
  • Given that Gavin is from Rooster Teeth. No doubt he makes a reference to Minecraft with filming flint and steel in slow motion.
  • Then there are occasional Team Fortress 2 references when Dan dons a gas mask for protection.
  • Given that they were testing a tablet by Lenevo, it begs the question if you can play Angry Birds on it and the answer is: Yes.
  • Gavin's nickname to a golden revolver when showing underwater gunshots, which is the Revolver of Pimps.
• Soft Glass: Demonstrated in "Stunt Trouble, Part 4". Because Dan injured himself on a previous shoot, Gavin has to demonstrate going through stunt and tempered safety glass. The plastic stunt glass goes easily, but the real tempered safety glass needed two detonation attempts because the first resulted in him Running into the Window.
• Spell My Name With An S: "Slow Mo Guys" is sometimes spelled without the 'w' by people.
• Spent Shells Shower: They filmed each other firing an M4 on full-auto to show the bolt mechanism of the weapon, there are shells flying through the air in slow motion. Not as impressive as an M134 but still...
• Springtime for Hitler: When using the champagne saber to see who could get the cleanest cork removal along with Rhett & Link, Dan tries to intentionally botch it by striking the neck of the bottle directly rather than sliding the saber for the sake of the bottle shattering in slow motion. He pops the cork perfectly without so much as damaging the bottle.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Exploding lighters, firework rocket launcher, axe through an Axe/Lynx can, exploding melon, the butane rocket certainly looks like an explosion at normal speed, bottle bombs, five power plant cooling towers, paint cans/bottles, a fertility statue, cereal, LEGO's, the entire world (okay, a globe of the world) and larger paint bottles.
  • In the "Massive Explosive Chain Reaction" video, a number of separate explosions eventually end up with using avalanche explosives^note used to prematurely trigger avalanches that might otherwise be unpredictable which does serious damage to the supposedly bomb-proof shelter which the cameras were filming from.
• Stunned Silence: Linus Tech Tips' reaction was simply a wide-eyed stare and a quiet "Oh my God" when Gavin informs him that the custom server they're setting up might be at capacity in about 2-3 months.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Quoted word for word by Gav when he was about to jump on the giant water balloon.
• Very Special Episode: Despite being an entertainment show, a few of the videos like Inside a Camera at 10,000fps or How a TV Works in Slow Motion are primarily educational. They are also presented entirely by Gavin, cementing his status as a Ditzy Genius.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Dan and Gavin. The series runs on Comedic Sociopathy, but at the end of the day, they're really good friends since their days in secondary school.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: In slow motion from various Gross-Up Close-Up angles after attempting the cinnamon challenge.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside:
  • Their anniversary video showed every slow motion shot in real time which took around a couple of minutes even though all those videos were pretty much posted within a year and it takes quite awhile to watch each of them.
  • "What if Every Second Lasted an Hour?" ponders what time would be if a second was slowed down to an hour long. Gavin then posted the unedited slowed clip of him falling into a pool onto the second channel.
• Your Head Asplode: While rewatching flies being killed by a bug zapper in slo-mo, both Gavin and Dan are horrified to see the fly's head exploding from the electricity.

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