The 'Potion Seller' guy is still making videos, and it's glorious

There are few millennials who can utter the words "Potion Seller" without bursting into giggles.

"Potion Seller" is a 3 minute, 8 second video depicting an unnamed knight's determined quest to obtain the eponymous Potion Seller's strongest potion. Published in 2011, the short depicts the knight, played by Justin Kuritzkes, continually getting rebuffed by the Potion Seller, also played by Kuritzkes. He pulls off playing drastically different characters with the help of a distorting Photo Booth filter.

Good news: The guy behind the viral video is still making similarly wacky content with the help of the Photo Booth filter.

In the original, when he leans back, he is the valiant knight, going into battle and desperate for the strongest potions. When he leans forward, he's the parsimonious Potion Seller, who is thoroughly convinced his strongest potions -- strong enough to kill a dragon -- are too strong for the weak traveler.

"I discovered that by accident, that if I shifted my face, it would create a different character," Kuritzkes said over video chat. (Unfortunately, the interview did not feature any filters.) "I liked it because I'm not really the kinda guy who just does voices or something, in my normal life. But when I could see my mouth being morphed, it made my doing a voice a lot easier because it felt like I wasn't doing it."

Kuritzkes was surprised when the video went viral "a year or two" after he originally posted it. As a senior in college working on his thesis, he'd make similar videos late at night when he "couldn't work anymore."

"I was really just making them for my friends and posting them on friends' Facebook pages," he said.

The video, he notes, is not a reference to a specific Elder Scrolls game, but the result of a sleep-deprived thesis-driven need for comic relief. Kuritzkes had just started recording when his roommate walked in on him saying "Hello, Potion Seller."

"I wasn't gonna stop the tape because I was committed to it," he laughed. "But I couldn't hold it together because my roommate was watching me do this, and he was 10 feet away so he couldn't see what the image actually looked like. So to him, I'm just rocking back and forth like a crazy person in front of my desk."

On the verge of tears from holding back laughter, the knight and the Potion Seller duke it out: The knight insists that he needs his strongest potion for battle, and the Potion Seller insists that his strongest potions are "only for the strongest beings."

Kuritzkes' "Potion Seller" quietly made its rounds through his friends, lifting their spirits while they trudged through their last year of school. Two years after he graduated, somebody posted the forgotten video on Reddit, and it blew up.

In the past seven years, "Potion Seller" has garnered more the four million views, a subreddit, fan art, and a slew of remixes. Though Vine came and went, snippets of "Potion Seller" are still featured in compilations. The video is forever cemented into the foundation of internet inside jokes.

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I first watched "Potion Seller" when one of my many older, and therefore cooler, cousins showed it to me. During late college nights, when my friends and I were too drunk to go to sleep and too tired to continue the night, we'd pile onto dingy common room couches and laugh to "Potion Seller" together. On a lazy Sunday afternoon recently, I realized that "Potion Seller" is only one of many videos that Kuritzkes has on his channel, and that he's still posting absurd sketches using Photo Booth.

Kuritzkes is a playwright, novelist and R&B artist, but he finds making the videos "very comforting."

"I like the idea of having this thing online ... that ruins any chance I have of having a coherent, respectable narrative as an artist," he explained.

Calling his actual published work "very serious," Kuritzkes likes that his portfolio of one-man sketches prevents him from ever becoming too pretentious. He admits that he's already been recognized for "Potion Seller" by both professional actors he's worked with and teenage fans who stumbled across his video.

"It really keeps me in check, if I'm ever trying to take myself seriously in any way," he said. "Or if I'm ever buying into my own bullshit about the serious work I'm doing."

His reputation as the guy behind the bizarre Photo Booth videos isn't something he shies away from; the cover of his debut album is a pixelated black and white screenshot from another video.

Although he's never incorporated the characters from his videos in his plays or novel, Kuritzkes says his writing process is similar to recording a Photo Booth sketch: He comes up with a character and makes them start talking.

"That person talks for as long as I can stand to hear them talk, until I want somebody to interrupt them," Kuritzkes said. "And for me, the videos are like these improvised monologues."

Unfortunately, that means "Potion Seller" probably won't be adapted into an epic trilogy. But a trove of Kuritzkes' hilarious rants are still on his channel.