Danny MacAskill Lives Out Childhood Fantasies in Wonderful Red Bull Video

This seven-minute Red Bull video cements Scottish cyclist Danny MacAskill's standing as a badass brand spokes-man.

It took 68 weeks over a two-year period to shoot this mix of fantasy, memory and dazzling bicycle stunts. A former museum in Glasgow was transformed into a Land of the Giants-style version of MacAskill's childhood bedroom, cluttered with outsized rubber balls, playing cards, colored pencils, comic books, a Rubik's Cube, a Twister game, alphabet blocks, a race-car loop-de-loop track and even a toy-train-and-station set.

As arena-rock ("Runaway" by Houston) blares on the soundtrack, the YouTube star, who's notched 60 million views across his video catalog, performs a crazy array of jumps, turns, spins and landings among the kids' stuff scattered across the floor. In the best bit, he lands on a tank turret and rides down the cannon, only to have green plastic army men spring to life and make off with his bike.

All this fanciful action is taking place inside the mind of a pre-pubescent Danny MacAskill as the boy sits on the floor, surrounded by toys and games, devising wild stunts for an action-figure cyclist to perform. Playtime abruptly ends when his mother threatens to "shoot the boots off ye" if young Danny doesn't hurry down to tea. (The daredevil's real mom, Anne, makes a cute cameo.)

MacAskill wears a Red Bull helmet, but the brand's presence is never intrusive. Instead of just peddling image or product, the film scores as entertainment, and this pumps up its value as branded content. Of course, it doesn't scale the heights of Red Bull's Felix Baumgartner viral. It's similar to the marketer's Rube Goldberg clip, which also featured MacAskill, but I prefer this new video, part of his "Imaginate" series. It unabashedly celebrates creative play and suggests you just might be able to ride the dreams of youth and make them come true.

    

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