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I have never loved Tom Hanks more than watching him butcher this 2009 CES keynote intro

I have never loved Tom Hanks more than watching him butcher this 2009 CES keynote intro

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Do they give Oscars for CES intros?

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It’s June 25th, and we here at The Verge have already begun getting CES emails in preparation for the best time of the year. (To be clear, that time of year is in January.) Which actually doesn’t matter, because we start thinking about hotels as early as February and start planning some time in March and probably have some kind of a pre-finalized plan of attack by August so there is no time of year when we’re not thinking about this insane weeklong tech Super Bowl.

Anyway, all this is to say, CES is coming. And what better way to get excited than to relive CES 10 years ago when Tom Hanks delivered what may be the best keynote introduction in CES history? It all resurfaced over the weekend when Talk Film Society editor-in-chief Marcelo Pico tweeted a snippet of the keynote, which got picked up by AV Club.

In the clip, Tom Hanks starts by making fun of tech keynote presenters, prancing back and forth aggressively around the stage, speaking in varying octaves. He then goes into the full speech that was prewritten for him (but not previously read by Hanks before he took the stage), laughing through the absurdity of whatever the Sony marketing team came up with. Spoiler alert: it includes about 100 mentions of the word “Sony.”

You really do get it all: Hanks nearly fumbling a line about a Sony e-reader as a Kindle, pausing to silently admit he doesn’t actually use a Sony computer (or a Sony anything, really), playfully jabbing Sony CEO Howard Stringer when he finally comes onstage about forcing him to do these types of appearances contractually. Hanks even stays on for a demo of some wonky augmented reality glasses that are clearly terrible and only exist to solve the problem of wanting to watch a Tom Hanks movie in low resolution while the real-life Tom Hanks is standing right in front of you. (Sony has since abandoned its smart glasses project in favor of projector-based AR.)

The video is 12-ish minutes long, but it’s genuinely worth every second. But if you need a TLDR, just know this: Tom Hanks is a savage. Also, I want to buy a pair of shitty Sony AR glasses now.