If only this had been around when the Pontiac Aztek was released and somebody had a chance to say how stupid it looked. Who knows how many senseless losses of respect could have been prevented?

But with the miracle of computers, product designers and marketers can tweak and polish to their heart's content with cheap keyboard monkey labor. Artists can crank out multiple iterations of a ThrustMaster dildo until it glistens in morning sunlight in that perfect way. And everybody is doing it -- including, we're sorry to say, IKEA.

IKEA
Et tu, Flurvenbergsen?

As you may have guessed, building an entire house so you can show off your furniture collection is expensive, even if that furniture is from IKEA. IKEA can now digitally render entire rooms to put in their catalogs, which is a vast improvement of their old method of breaking into homes and replacing all the cabinets while the owner was on vacation. Likewise, they can digitally render individual items, thus saving them the stress of having to assemble real IKEA furniture for a photo shoot.

Naturally, NASA responded by ... totally admitting it?

NASA has never really hidden that many of the photos released to the public are heavily processed. Take a look at this gorgeous picture of the Cat's Eye Nebula taken by the Hubble Telescope:

NASA
There was already a "Cat's Anus Nebula."

In reality, the light emitted by the nebula is almost entirely red and far too faint to be seen by the naked eye. Human eyes can only see a pathetically small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but despite our protests, most celestial objects don't give a shit if we can see them or not. To compensate, space cameras usually take a black and white picture of all the light they can see, and then, like a Southern country club, they filter out the colors they don't want.

In the case of Cat's Eye, scientists were interested in how much hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen is in the nebula (it seems NASA takes pictures for science and not just desktop wallpapers). Each element reflects a slightly different shade of red light, so they take a picture of each shade they're looking for, and then make one of them blue and the other one green. So yeah, we're sorry to tell you that the astounding picture of space that's the background for your Einstein misquote is in fact a giant fake.

If there's an animal you like, you can find a video of it doing things narrated by David Attenborough. While other kinds of documentaries usually have a specific angle or agenda to convey, nature documentaries simply want you to see this polar bear rip apart a baby seal. They're like the realest reality TV show.

Except they wouldn't be in this article if that was true. Turtle: The Incredible Journey is a 2009 documentary which follows a loggerhead turtle as she swims back to her birthplace to lay her eggs. It was marketed a nature documentary ... even though filmmakers revealed that they had staged several scenes by putting rescued sea turtles in front of a blue screen or flat-out creating CGI models. If this is "documentary," so is 101 Dalmatians.

Hannover House

Hannover House

Hannover House

Hannover House
This explains all the musical numbers.

And the tense scene where animals are caught in a net? All animatronics.

Robotechnology
Above: the expression when you find out you're a robot.

Even the BBC, which is the only reason you even know about that zombie ant fungus which keeps you awake at night, is not immune from "touching up" their documentaries. In Frozen Planet, there is a scene showing a polar bear giving birth to her cub. What the documentary fails to mention, however, is that this was happening in a Belgian zoo.

BBC
Nanook would be proud.

In another documentary, a chameleon and a weird-eyed species of insect are both shown to be living in a forest, when it was actually a BBC studio. While there's nothing wrong with filming things in captivity that are difficult or impossible to see in the wild, it should at least be presented as such. Attenborough himself has criticized the excessive use of CGI in documentaries, saying, "If you wanted to confuse the audience, you've got more ways than ever." Unless he's fake too, and they're trying to throw us off.

In The Other Woman, there's a scene in which Leslie Mann's Great Dane fulfills many people's fantasy of taking a dump in the middle of Cameron Diaz's apartment. Unfortunately, even Hollywood dogs aren't trained to squeeze out a picture perfect turd on command. But moviegoers paid top dollar to see this film, and they deserved nothing but the highest-quality shit. The result? Studios pay someone a small student loan's worth of money to pay someone else who went to art school to digitally sculpt the perfect poop.

20th Century Fox
That turd cost more than you made this month.

And it doesn't stop there! During a panel at Comic-Con, special effects coordinator Ian Hunter talked about a hitherto unnamed movie which had a scene where Satan pees in an alley (our research tells us it was Schwarzenegger's End Of Days).

filmschoolrejects.com

So when you're sitting there watching the Prince of Darkness taking a leak, remember that some poor production assistant most likely had to pee in front of a team of intently staring animators to get it right. Just for you.

Luckily for studio janitors, nowadays we can merely CG the blood and keep tweaking it until looks right. The Expendables 2, which had approximately 500,000 deaths, did not have a drop of fake blood anywhere -- it was all computer generated. Likewise, this Walking Dead supercut shows that sometimes, cleaving a skull in twain with a machete is best left to computers. This leaves porn as the most realistic medium in the realm of bodily fluids.

But the trickery doesn't stop there. Action movies now frequently use computers to tart up their gunfire. If you've ever fired a gun in real life, you've probably noticed that muzzle flashes don't look like they do in movies. That's because in real life, muzzle flashes are a bad thing. They give away your position and can temporarily blind you if you're shooting at night, which is why many military weapons are designed specifically to stop muzzle flash. But in movies, they have to look cool as shit.

In the olden days, movies used a special type of blank which would make the pretty fire shoot out of the gun, but since that's not always consistent and blanks are kinda dangerous anyway, many movies now rely on CG bursts of flame to get the job done. Not only that, but there are different kinds of muzzle flashes, depending on the kind of movie you're making. Something like The Avengers might use cartoonier, teardrop-shaped muzzle flashes ...

Marvel Studio
Now you know why he's half blind.

... while a gritty thriller like John Wick uses starburst-shaped flashes.

Summit Entertainment

Few things can convey thematic tone like digitized combustion.

And it's more than turning good weather into crappy weather; it can go the other way, too. In years past, cameras and film needed a lot of sunlight to shoot effectively, so they could usually only film on sunny days (why else would anyone move to California?). Today, digital cameras can shoot in much lower light, opening up your options if you want to make a movie, but don't want to deal with earthquakes or LA in general. A show like Game Of Thrones uses Northern Ireland's rolling green hills, but the UK's notoriously bleak weather would normally make it a tricky proposition. With wheelbarrows full of money, however, you can turn that dreary, cloudy day into a beautiful, sunny one:

HBO

HBO
And a previously bland, boobless scene can become a cavalcade of exposed breasts.