Watch a Tennis Racket Smash Jell-O in Super Slow-Mo

Jell-O is an American institution, something so endlessly fascinating that you just can’t stop playing with it.

The Jell-O marketing team is well aware of this. The brand had all but gone under in the 1990s, but with the introduction of Jigglers—which are, essentially, toys made of food—Jell-O turned the ship around.

Tapping into our collective desire to play with our food, a recent Jell-O advertisement showed a brick of green Jell-O being diced into tidy lime stripes by a swinging tennis racket. Was it real? Was it Photoshop? Does Jell-O really do that? The people needed to know.

Enter the Slo Mo Guys, two goofy Brits armed with a very, very expensive camera that they use to film slow-motion splashes, smashes, and explosions. The appeal of videos like “Rubber Bands vs. Watermelon” and “Football to the Face” are oddly compelling, and a slow-mo Jell-O (or "jelly," in Brit-speak) video is no different:

Jell-O is a wacky substance, neither liquid nor solid. When gelatin particles are mixed into water, the resulting blob is called a colloidal gel. The structure and flexibility of the gel make it both wobbly and resilient, which is why it’s possible to suspend banana slices in your Jell-O mold. (Before smashing it with a tennis racket, of course.)