I absolutely loved mythbusters, but honestly I think it ran it's course. They were kind of running out of things to test towards the end.
Also search for Streamlined Mythbusters - they're fan-edits that remove fluff (lots of fluff in the later seasons) and rearranges the shows so each myth is played straight through before going to the next myth in the episode; instead of showing pieces of 3 different myths at a time bouncing between them.
I've tried to rewatch the shows but the TV format mostly just kills it for me now. Thanks that sounds perfect for modern audiences tastes.
I feel like there were tons of movie related options had they gone back that direction. Easily a whole season's worth of action hero stunts they could break down.
Just one episode could be on Commando. Schwarzenegger ripping the seat out of a car, or killing a guy with a thrown saw blade, or impaling another guy with a thrown pipe. Would be interesting to have seen them figure out the actual force requirements.
Or carrying a tree on his shoulder. Arnold had to bust that one himself; the filmmakers thought that he could do it for real but Schwarzenegger insisted that he wasn't that strong and had them make a prop for him instead.
They could do years on Sci Fi tech, bringing down to what’s real, what’s possible. Didn’t they do a light saber at one point?
I’m watching the series Salvation and it is full of “advanced tech” that resembles reality somewhat. Imagine Mythbusters building the biggest rail gun they can, demonstrating both its potential and how it fails, and maybe even do a tour of military rail gun prototypes, then concluding with how much more the one in the show would have to be, and all the places it just wouldn’t work
The movie ones are the most boring.
the only reason they ran out of ideas back then is because social media wasn't as big yet.
in the world of TikTok they'd never run out.
Mythbysters walked so Ann Reardon could run
I agree. And it's not like they didn't try to do new shows after the original Mythbusters ended.
A lot of the success also came down to the likability of the hosts, and how the show was presented.
The white rabbit project was a good show. Though it was a bit bitter sweet because I was watching it in 2020 and hadn't finished when Grant died. I wonder what kind of experiments he got up to in the afterlife.
They also missed a chance to educate the public about real science that uses blinded measurements and statistical analysis. Those tools aren't always necessary, but they are incredibly powerful to answer questions where qualitative testing can't.
instead of showing pieces of 3 different myths at a time bouncing between them.
Mythbusters is one of my favorite series of all time, but for the love of God, please don't revive it
Jman prob wouldn't come back anyway.
Savage has a YouTube channel if anyone is feeling nostalgic. He takes questions about making and mythbusters. Sometimes it's fun to hear him reminisce. I personally like his new builds more than when he's looking back into the past.
I don't think any amount of money in the world could bring Jamie back to a revival.
I believe Adam's already said he's no longer interested in filming television.
Plus, Grant has since passed away, Kari is a big oil sell-out, and Tory has been floundering around on Amazon's streaming service for a while now
I prefer https://explainxkcd.com/397/ because it adds explanations, references, and comments.
Uncommon XKCD L. Mythbusters experiments rarely hold up to the standards of the scientific method. Controls are basically non-existent and the experiments are regularly flawed. They DO fail at basic rigor.
They don't, but they say least show a process of testing beliefs and they will rerun experiments based on feedback from the audience to see if they missed something.
And it isn't like they are testing bleeding edge science. It is more teaching skepticism and inquiry on sayings and others information which have dubious veracity.
RIP Grant…
It was so shocking, he was only 49 years old. aneurysms are crazy... :'(
Instilling the "Oh, I was wrong, THAT'S SO COOL" mindset in people is one of the best things science education can do.
And it translates to all walks of life.
There's so much misery in the world simply from people who know nothing convinced they know everything.
"It's not "Yes! My experiment was a success!" It's "Yes! My experiment yielded data!""
I seem to recall Adam Savage saying this at some point.
from people who know nothing convinced they know everything.
A lot of it is insecurity. If people feel inadequate, then they may go out of their way to cover-up that inadequacy.
I think part of the blame can be put on those who will admonish someone for being wrong.
“Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.” -Adam Savage
That single quote is the core of Mythbusters, and only the original Mythbuster team truly had that chemistry to pull it off on national television.
My favorite episode is the one where they tried to turn a city bus at 50 mph to test a scene from a movie called "Speed".
It didn't matter how the passengers were arranged in the bus, the bus just wouldn't turn over. In fact, the bus was more stable in a corner when ghe weight was evenly distrubuted, to the surprise of nobody with a mechanical engineering degree.
The most instructive part for me was what they did have to do to make the bus barely tip over. They had to fasten a big piece of steel plate to the roof, disable the air shocks on one side, and put all the "passengers" (barrels of water) on one side.
Thus reminding everyone that engineers know more about how to build a bus than movie writers do. Which shouldn't be a surprise.
RIP Grant, you are missed
I don't think you could revive Mythbusters.
I don't think Adam and Jamie are at all interested in doing the show anymore. If it wasn't them, you'd have to re-cast, and it would be really hard to get that kind of chemistry, while also finding people with the right technical background for the show. The Build Team members were fun, but they couldn't do it, although they tried with projects like the White Rabbit project.
Plus, I think the world has moved on. There are plenty of YouTube channels where people build crazy things, or test myths, or whatever. But, that's in short, 5-10 minute videos. A full hour (well, 45 minutes) of reality TV is different. Also, they tested so many myths over the years, that the only ones left are TikTok trends or gossip or whatever. Not the kinds of beliefs that go back decades.
the world has moved on
You say true, I say thankya, Gunslinger.
Love it. RIP Grant.
Mythbusters is the reason I went into STEM. On year my parents even bought me tickets to see the tour, as a Christmas present. I also still watch Adam's YouTube channel weekly (Tested).
It was revived in 2017. I think that's all that needs to be said on the matter.
If you like this kind of content, there are loads of YouTube channels doing these kinds of 'experiments' they tend to be more specialised, but that's a good thing and they often interact with each other to share expertise.
I was going to ask about some of those channels, but decided to make a post on askLemmy
Gotta throw Nile Red in there for chemistry.
Also I'm not sure what the right answer is but there should be a better format for your link so people can access it from their instance. Maybe someone who knows can chime in. Kbin always edits the display of proper links so I'm not sure the exact format.
I still remember the cement truck explosion but I don't remember what myth they were testing lol
Explosives to clean a cement truck. At first they tested it practically(empty-drum with just a layer of dried cement leftovers) but eventually went with the overkill scenario at the end: full-drum and real dynamite. Pretty fun episode
I believe the myth was that you could use dynamite to clean dried cement from the inside of the drum. Of course they decided to go all the way with it :P
See, this is why I don't like debunking shows in general, and I find the skeptic movement to be overrated and simply draws less criticism that it deserves.
MythBusters avoided the one mistake that all debunkers make. First off, they didn't come off as thinking that they were smarter than anyone else, they don't mock people for believing false information, and they never bring religion into it.
They just talked about whatever misconception, then they tested to see if it worked or not
I think Jamie comes off as if he's smarter than everyone else and is wrong most often to boot.
Well then I guess Penn & Teller's BS series is actually the Dark Side version of Mythbusters.
Loved both of those shows. Learned how to cheat on a polygraph from the Penn & Teller show.
Penn & Teller are hacks
I feel we could all use that way of thinking like if I'm right yay I'm a smart boi and if I'm wrong I'm smarter now
You learn and grow a lot more when you're wrong than when you're right. At least if you can accept that your position is wrong.
Exactly, too many debunkers just act like they are king shit, and have this smug attitude all about them, and it honestly just makes me want to punch people in the face.
It's why I started saying, they're probably isn't a god, but talking to atheists on Reddit make me wish there was one.
Yeeeeah, no, that's weird. Discovery rebooting it with different people would almost certainly suck, if you just want to hang out with that sort of engineery-makery-SFXy content there's tons of ways to do it now and Savage is a successful youtuber in that space. Pair it with Imahara's hearbreaking passing and that just sounds all kinds of depressing.
I'd sure love it if Discovery wasn't actively burying the old episodes, though. That'd be nice.
discovery reviving it with different people would almost certainly suck
No need to say "almost certainly" because Discovery did that exact same thing six years ago and it did suck.
Fascinatingly they actually ran a televised competition to see who the new hosts would be.
It would be cool if they got certain, specific people. I would pay to watch it if Allen Pan were hosting, and he got to pick the rest of the hosts
Mythbusters is good just because of how down-to-Earth and raw it is.
They show the audience what they want to see. They ask the questions the audience wants asked. They give rationales that make sense, most of them.
It's a very human show, even if it requires a lot of science and engineering to make it work.
The producers did a fine job with it. I'm glad it's not over-edited or following a checklist of what a show needs to be in order to be successful.
Its format and presentation fit the content like a glove.
I think of it like this: imagine if one day you tested the classic Newton experiment and dropped an apple, but it DIDN'T fall down. Imagine how exciting that would be!
I feel like that would be exciting in the same way finding out your brakes have ceased working in your car would be exciting.....
Edit: wording/spelling.
Naah, they'd never recapture the magic. Bring back similar shows like junkyard wars and battlebots.
Battle bots is still going on. They have new seasons every year. There is a large break in between for rebuilds and try outs.
Scrapheap Challenge! Found some of it on youtube :D
Unfortunately they can't bring Grant Imahara back :'(
Isn't there a current bot-fighting league? NHRL or something like that? They keep popping up in my YouTube recommendations, but I haven't done a deep dive into them.
Adam Savages one day builds are relly neat videos about building props and other things and Adam is such a nice person to listen to IMO
He is now definitely. Watching the first seasons of myth busters though, you start to understand why some people were annoyed by him.
Super fun to listen to him now though.
Yea, randomly get videos from his youtube channel when I'm researching new tools or something and they're always neat. I don't use youtube enough to follow channels but if I his would be one of them.
The elephants and mice episode is also my favorite non-explosion myth. I can't believe it's actually true.
I definitely recall the myth and it being busted but I don't remember if they explained why the elephants are afraid of mice, though. What was the explanation?
Any of them still have street cred left?
Yeah Adam Savage is still doing nerdy tech stuff on youtube https://youtube.com/@tested?feature=shared
He had his "Untitled" podcast for a long time, but ended it maybe 5-6 years ago. It was great, and the old episodes are probably worth a listen if you haven't heard them before.
Oil industry is pretty awful, but the engineering and logistics involved is awesome.
Oil platforms and other heavy machinery is interesting?
This is true, but it still feels Faustian as hell. She did a whole season about "deep water energy" without once mentioning the fact that this shit is gonna kill us all
The comments on that video are something else lmao, Kari doused her reputation in that "deep water energy" and burned it
Mythbusters really was the best TV has ever had to offer in its heyday.
"Holy shit, we were wrong! Oh my god! This is great! We were so wrong!"
This is the essence of science. Being wrong is exciting because it means that you're on to something. The way scientific theories are made is by challenging what you believe -- trying to prove your idea wrong. If you repeatedly can't prove it wrong then you're probably approaching something that is true which continually adds to the certainty that you're onto something. That's what the sigma certainty means in scientific discoveries. It refers to the possible margin of error in a discovery.
The sigma certainty is essentially, 1 sigma is about 85% certain - or a 1 in 7 chance you're wrong, 2 sigma is about 97.75% certainty - or a 1 in 45 chance you're wrong, 3 sigma is about 99.98% certain - or about 1 in 5000 chance of being wrong, etc. It depends on which scientific field you're in as to which level of sigma is considered enough for something to officially become an accepted theory, in Astronomy a 6 sigma is where the line is drawn which is about 1 in 500 million chance of being wrong (~99.9999998% certain).
In real science, a null result is a disaster because you probably can't get the results published. And, even if you could, you might not want to publish because spending a lot of time and not being able to prove what you set out to prove looks bad.
But, on Mythbusters, they were the very best episodes. The team had a lot of common sense, so most of the time they could predict the outcomes. They still verified their assumptions, but it wasn't that exciting. But, when the result went against expectations, they got so excited, and they worked really hard to verify they were wrong.
I think people can be too proud of being wrong, to the point they don't value being right.
a bull moves very gingerly
I imagined a bull in a red wig with purse in hand holding up plates and wondering where he'd store those in the kitchen if he bought a set
Didn't they stop because they ran out of myths that wouldn't give people explicitly dangerous information like their bomb recipe
Been rewatching mythbusters and man its a great show. Entertaining, educational and great hosts. RIP Grant. 😭
Watched the one about hot water tanks either being a bomb/or being a rocket last night. Was a super good one.
I'd like Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars or Monster Garage back. I liked the "just get it running" attitude over the muscle car and motorcycle shows.
This kind of is the opposite and explains how that bill nye show didn't last, it was a killjoy show, that wasn't open to changing its mind and hated the idea of learning anything new
There was a recent corridor crew video that had Mythbusters energy about seeing if Arnie using mud to hide from the Predator's thermo vision was realistic. It had a similar surprise outcome. Worth checking out!
Like restarting the original show - 100% would Love! Remaking it as all other 2023 shows - No thanks.
I also don't believe the modern world would allow what we had. Insurance, getting access to locations (because insurance, general costs) all those fun things.
And nobody under 30 would watch it if episodes were longer than 3 minutes. I can make fun of them because they left after the first line of this comment :)
We have the bitch from it pushing oil over renewables
And they test Tide products
So it’s basically still around
Adam and Jamie couldn't even stand each other.
That goes around a lot, I haven't seem proof they actively disliked each other, they just weren't friends.
From the way Adam talks, it really does sound like it was more they were good at working together but not friends more than they didnt actually like each other.
Yeah, I think people really took Adam saying "we aren't friends" to pretty ridiculous extremes. I work with a lot of great people that I like, I just don't talk to any of them outside of work. Adam said they "disagreed on the small stuff but agreed on the big stuff", which I think is what made them click so well. After the show ended, they just went their separate ways like many do when a gig/job ends.
In fact, I've seen Adam say that they were colleagues. Nothing more, nothing less. He's specifically talked about how the producers wanted to piss in their ears about each other to start drama (like every reality show) and they shut that shit down right at the beginning
They got on each-other's nerves, but they knew they worked well together, and they had a lot of respect for each-other. They both knew that the other one was key to the success of the show.
They didn't want to spend time together outside the show, but I don't think that means they couldn't stand each-other. I've certainly had co-workers who I respected who I had no interest in hanging out with outside of work.
And Grant Imahara isn't answering his phone.
