Myhthbusters (posted 2023-09-23)
20 years ago today, the TV show Mythbusters aired its first regular episode on the Discovery Channel, after three earlier pilot episodes. And soon after, I had found a new favorite TV show.
What Mythbusters did between 2003 and 2016 was investigate whether (urban) myths, viral videos, movie stunts and idioms had some truth to them or not. The usual outcomes were: confirmed (results replicated without issue), plausible (results replicated but possibly some liberties taken) and busted (results could not be reasonably duplicated). If a myth was busted, they would often see what it took to replicate the results, going to extremes as needed.
I think the first episode I saw was "penny drop". That was the seventh episode, with the main myth being that a penny (one cent coin) dropped from the Empire State Building would kill you if it hit you down on the street. The big question here was how fast a penny would be traveling after being dropped from the iconic skyscraper.
At this point, we only had the two main hosts, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. Adam had built a rig with a tube with holes in it and air being blown in from the bottom with the airspeed in the tube going down with increasing height from 100 km/h to about 60 km/h. As the pennies stayed in the tube, their terminal velocity must match a speed between those two numbers.
With the always exuberant Adam annoyed by the usually stoic Jamie:
Jamie:
Works for me.
Adam:
This is excited Jamie? This is a world first going out on television that we showed exactly how fast a penny goes. No math, no ideas, no timing off a building, we got it right here in the lab.
Jamie:
It's great. Good job.
Turns out those falling pennies aren't lethal. Adam and Jamie both have one fired at their hand with no damage, and...
Adam:
Come on, shoot me in the ass, come on. I can take it.
The interaction between the hosts was what made Mythbusters so funny.
That dynamic wouldn't change very much over the following almost decade and a half. For most of the run of the show, the "build team" consisting of Grant Imahara, Kari Byron and Tony Belleci would usually bust separate myths, but sometimes the main and secondary hosts would team up.
They really caught lighning in a bottle here. The interactions between the hosts were almost always fun, and as experienced builders with some notion of the scientific method, the Mythbusters weren't completely lost when it came to attacking myths, but they were also not so knowledgeable that they could predict the results very well in advance.
A few more quotes:
Adam:
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Jamie:
I love it when common materials are dangerous.
Narrator Robert Lee:
This thing that looks like a maximum security bird house, is actually the vital fulcrum.
Adam, about to go through a carwash with Jamie on the roof of his car:
As long as we're testing methods for removing unwanted pests from the outside of your car, we couldn't finish this without going through the carwash.
Tory:
It's not the prettiest thing but I think it's going to work.Kari:
That’s what they said when they hired me.
Great stuff.