After 12 years, 13 seasons, 10 specials and 960 myths, rumours and urban legends tested, MythBusters is the longest-running, and one of the most popular, shows on The Discovery Channel.
Hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage have presented the show since its pilot in 2003, and their mission remains simple: they take a popular “myth” – for example, a mobile phone can cause an explosion if used beside a petrol pump – and put them through meticulous scientific testing.
By the end of their investigation, they have been either “confirmed”, “busted” or judged “plausible”, meaning the reality lies somewhere in between.
The pair keep the show interesting for viewers through a mix of their on-screen chemistry and a willingness to tackle just about anything. Their backgrounds in movie special effects tend to result in a disproportionate number of tests involving explosions, and episodes such as the Star Wars Special, in which they investigated whether Luke could really have used his grappling hook to swing across the chasm in the Death Star with Leia (plausible), and whether a human could survive overnight in freezing temperatures by crawling into the belly of a recently dead tauntaun (confirmed). Hyneman says he's become more interested in science during the 12 years he's presented the show and hopes audiences feel the same.
“One of the most interesting things to me about all this and with the show is that we’ve actually become who we are on the show,” he says.
“We had a lot of experience doing effects work, but the whole science thing, that was simply us wanting to do a good job at trying to answer these questions about urban legends. And so we started getting methodical and careful about our work. And the neat thing about that is basically, that’s what science is.
"Science isn't just for guys in lab coats, you know? It's for anybody who wants to do a good job of understanding and investigating the world. That's what we did. That's what we do. We just tried to do a good job and that happens to be science. At its core, what we do in MythBusters is turn science into an adventure. So that means you set off down a certain path that you don't necessarily know where it's going to lead. So we found, through the course of all these 12 years of doing these shows, that we can take just about anything and launch ourselves down that path, and the process of investigation actually can be incredibly rewarding."
While science is at the heart of the show’s appeal, Savage does concede that an equal part of its success is down to the sheer juvenile excitement with which he and his co-star embark on their experiments.
“We like to say that the only difference between us and a pair of 14-year-old pyromaniacs is that we call the police and the fire department first and usually get their help,” he says.
“But science isn’t just for little boys with matches. It’s for everybody. It’s always really pleasing, when we do our live shows, to look out at the audience and see little girls screaming about the science on the stage.
“There’s this theory that art and science are polar opposites but that’s wrong. Every scientist is an artist and every artist is a scientist.”
“Children are just little scientists,” says Hyneman. “When they’re playing, they’re running experiments on their world and so we kind of approach it the same way. I think it’s one of the reasons that the show’s had the appeal that it has had to date. It’s had a wider demographic than any other show that I know of, at least from what we see ourselves. And adults are no different than children when it comes to some of those kinds of things.”
As if to prove the point, one of the pair’s favourite confirmed myths could easily have come straight from a Disney cartoon. It seems they have empirically proved that elephants are indeed scared of mice.
“We were in South Africa. We were filming with great white sharks in False Bay and a storm kept us off the water for a couple days which, from a production standpoint, was a disaster. We needed to get some footage in the can and we needed to get it quickly. So we thought ‘let’s go inland and film elephants, and if they are afraid of mice’.
“We actually thought of it as filler when we started to head out but, of course, because we like to think like this, we built a methodology and found that when confronted by a mouse on a path, an elephant, as big as it is, actually tiptoes around the mouse just like a cartoon. Not expected.”
The latest season began showing in the US in January, and is scheduled to debut in the Middle East next month, exclusively on Discovery Channel through OSN. With episodes dedicated to The Simpsons, The A-Team and Transformers, the team don't look like they'll be losing that popular touch any time soon.
Discovery Channel HD will debut new episodes of MythBusters beginning on Wednesday, July 22 at 10pm. They will run every Wednesday until August 26
cnewbould@thenational.ae
