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.
Mythbusters is one of my favorite series of all time, but for the love of God, please don't revive it
RIP Grant…
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.
“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.
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).
Love it. RIP Grant.
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 still remember the cement truck explosion but I don't remember what myth they were testing lol
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 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
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.
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.
Naah, they'd never recapture the magic. Bring back similar shows like junkyard wars and battlebots.
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!
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
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