Subscribe for more videos (and click the bell for notifications): ua-cam.com/users/testedcom SCARIEST Myth From MythBusters: ua-cam.com/video/LoMYCqV2IZU/v-deo.html Two Scenes Adam Refused to Film on MythBusters: ua-cam.com/video/QwWOUYpwi1I/v-deo.html Watch Dan Tapster's newest series, Life on Our Planet, on @Netflix : www.netflix.com/title/80213846
On the patience and journey issue, I'll tell you something that would help a lot, and it's about the way these shows are edited - which you still see today. When something has commercials, you have to then remind the audience where we left off. But when you watch these without the commercials today, it gets incredibly repetitive. I wish these shows would have another edited version for when you are watching without the commercials, which would not back up and repeat so much.
I loved it when MythBusters scaled up their testing and production quality. No one talks about it but when Kari, Tory, and Grant were fired (or whatever terminology you want to use) the show died for me. Sure the main co-stars were there but it was a worse show and to be honest somewhat boring. I don't know who dropped the ball at Discovery but the salaries seemed pretty low to begin with dealing with hundreds of thousands at best and not millions. If a Big Bang Theory star can make over a million per episode Discovery can afford some chump change.
I was doing my engineering degree when the show came out. I didn't have time to watch it, and when I saw it I was unimpressed. Mostly because a sound grasp of engineering principles made the results obvious in-advance. At the same time, I'm glad there was an approachable introduction to these principles for the public at-large.
Can I just say, as someone interested in the evolution of language, it is kind of fascinating hearing Adam reminisce about Discovery forcing him into conference calls and just dropping the phrase "Zoom calls" as if that was just how conference calls were always thought of, even though Zoom as a company was essentially unheard of until the pandemic, and the software for Zoom would have only been around for three years of Mythbusters run (2013 onward). And yet, knowing all that, I bet most people didn't even think twice about it as everyone understood what a "Zoom call" meant even in this ahistoric context. Interesting.
I can absolutely picture Adam being told to send less footage, hanging up the phone, turning to Jamie and saying "We're absolutely not doing that" Jamie agreeing and them both laughing.
On that idea of "Mythbusters for the impatient", my one discomfort with the show was the constant recapping of each sub-story's progress within the episode. I would have loved a version of the show without the recaps, for it to have treated us as if we have a working memory and just jumped directly between the myths and straight back into it after ad breaks. It was something that never got better for the whole run of the show and it tried my patience. :)
Yeah, this was a common issue amongst "reality" (unscripted) TV at the time. Every time the scene shifted or the show came back from commercial the producers assume we've blacked out... Ugh.
It is just a way to make a runtime longer. Of course they could have shown us more how they build things or discussed them. But that's just easier. You repeat a lot of things and look: there's 20 more mins to the show!
This happens a lot on TV, because of how people watch TV. People might jump between channels, and land in the middle of the show. Your choices are to constantly recap annoying your existing viewers but bringing these new viewers up to speed and keeping them interested, or not recap and potentially lose those new viewers that don't understand what is going on. I also find the jumping between 3 different myths at the same time annoying, but it's a TV technique to keep the audience engaged. If you find a myth boring, you might switch away. But if they present 3 myths in parallel and you are interested in only one of them, you might keep watching to see the conclusion of that. On-demand video is where finally videos are free to be whatever length they need to be, without all that useless padding and repetition.
That's it exactly. I am certain that "Mythbusters for the impatient" STARTED with the idea of "let's edit out the recaps" then they decided "while I'm already cutting out things, let's just skip to the end".
The very first episode has a segment of Jamie calling the Air Force to try to get a JATO rocket, and having to explain who he was, and why he wanted it, before getting a resounding “No!”
While I hadn't heard of "Mythbursters for the Impatient", I did encounter some fan edits once of all the episodes, but without the intro sequence, any post-commercial recaps, or any redundant footage. It varied from episode to episode, but it streamlined each episode as if it were on a streaming service rather than broadcast television with commercials, and it was great to watch.
yes, it wasnt so much "for the impatient" but that once you took all te post comercials recaps, the repetition and all the fluff the episiode lasted about 40% of the original time. We still wanted to see the whole process but it really felt condescending on us that they felt they needed to remind us what was happening 5 mins ago.
@@matiasleder6804I don't think it was meant to be condescending so much as just meant for a different (part of the) audience. They wanted the show to be watchable both for people like you and me, who watch pretty deliberately and will watch the whole episode or not at all, and for people who might just be flipping channels looking for something interesting, or making dinner, or watching their kids, and who might actually need recaps. That's part of why the ratings kept going up and up, too. (So you might look at those "condescending reminders" and consider that they helped get us the last eight or ten seasons.) That said, I'd love to find those edits, because I certainly do find that stuff irritating even knowing it serves a purpose, y'know?
@@matiasleder6804 It did not feel condescending on the children who grew up watching it, which I presume you were one of them. I was not complaining about the recaps when I was 8 years old lol. Getting older and noticing that kind of thing was a little obnoxious, sure, but the content mattered more to me anyway. Keep in mind that this show originally aired in 2003, a time where reality tv was popping off in ways that were less than desirable. In order for the team to even have a place on television, they had to pull tactics from their best competitors: other reality tv shows. The whole "recap" thing is massive in reality tv, regardless of whether or not it is scripted. I may be wrong, but I believe the recap era was at its peak from 2000-2015ish. Somewhere between 2015 and 2018, everything shifted to streaming (as it grew more popular). Recap-style television is definitely annoying, I agree. But they didn't show the whole process for a reason. If they did show the entire process without any sort of recap, the show would not have been as massively popular as it was. Why? Because bored people used to flick through channels trying to find something entertaining to watch. That's what the recaps were for. They were not there to insult you and call you a dumb toddler. It was for all the bored souls who thought "so what's this show about?" and then they give you the recap of what it's about, and that's why their audience stayed. The pre-streaming era utilized these tactics to gain viewership. It sucks NOW, in RETROSPECT, but how can I be offended at the guys who got me studying engineering when I was a prepubescent child? I sure af didn't have a fraction of the attention span I have now! Thank god for those recaps!
I always remember one closing blueprint room scene where Karry, Tori and Grant throw their scripts onto the table. Their faces just screamed "finally we're free!". Is it safe to say that was the last scene filmed on one of those 8 hour filming days?
I think the reason Mythbusters for the impatient is popular is because it unamericalised the way the show was presented. There's nothing wrong with the journey of how you reached a conclusion, or the best method to get to a result, that's the best bit and I think modern younger audiences are totally up for watching that (see how long some UA-cam content can be and still get millions of views?!) but when you have to sit through the "ad break" and watch ANOTHER summary of what you missed before the ad break, it gets tedious when binge watching.
I loved mithbusters as a child, you basically changed the path of my childhood. Thank you for what you’ve done and what you will do, I love you all in all. No matter what you do.
Mythbusters will forever be a staple of my education history. The whole team and crew made the scientific method come ALIVE and showed me the possibilities of not just learning about the world... But building it 😊💙 thank you
I find it fascinating that Mythbusters were the successors to Bill Nye The Science Guy. And yet there isn't any 1 successor to Mythbusters but dozens on the low side.
That creative collaborative process you describe sounds so amazing! I have never been in an environment where everyone has been able to offer different ideas and everyone honestly considers them and looks for ways to improve what they are doing. That must have been such an incredible job to be able to work with such great people.
I love these chats. It is great to hear what went on behind the scenes that we didn't know about. I learned so much growing up as a teenager watching the show from when it first aired until the final episodes and rewatching them at times. My favourite parts with the myths was the whole process of you guys figuring out how to test the myths and the various ways you would do that. Also seeing how different you and Jaimes ideas were sometimes. I never knew about that condensed Mythbusters channel, but going straight from what the myth to seeing it being tested with the conclusion is like the "Teach a man to fish" quote. It cuts out the important things you learn along the way that could be useful (like the car underwater myth) and you don't get that understanding of why people thought this myth/idiom etc... was true or false.
I think Dan missed the point for the "shortened" Mythbusters clips. As the show went through the years, the footage started repeating A LOT. There were episodes where it FELT like a good 50% of the airtime was just recapping what was already shown. That's the main reason I'd watch the show on DVR and not live, so I could hit the skip button to the footage I hadn't seen yet.
Hearing about Mythbusters for the Impatient reminds me how I have often wished for a re-edit of the show without the repetitious recaps and sticking to one myth at a time instead of going back and forth. If Discovery (or Disney, now) could do an edit like that I would absolutely buy that DVD collection.
That would have been the best way to do the show in my opinion. When I DVRd it I always started my FF at the coming up on part not the start of the commercial.
Yeah, I've watched some of the "for the impatient series" before, and they were lacking something in the middle. OTOH, in the age of streaming content, the old "catch people who have just changed to this channel up" is quite redundant. Even back in the days of TV, as you rightly point out, it could get annoying for those watching from the beginning.
Right now the official Mythbusters channel are uploading all full episodes on UA-cam and none of them have those recaps. It's amazing that they're doing this, because it's also 50 minutes long, which means it gives us extra not-before-seen clips, rather than the normalized 40 minute episode made specially for tv. I highly recommend checking it out
On shooting the 'blueprint' scene last: Similarly, I teach my students that you write the abstract of your paper last, because it is only then that you know what the paper really is.
Oh yeah my fave part of Mythbusters was ALWAYS the middle acts. The research, the small scale, the failures and rethinking, the personalities. SO GOOD! I watched it more for that than the pay-off, but HAD to watch the pay-off.
one of the many reasons why people love the show still yet today is the fact that you took on the challenge of dealing with myths an tall tales an movie physics in a fun science way .the myths dealing guns an other relatable every day things was so much fun to watch an along the way told a good story an taught people to think out side of the box an inspired people to ask an think . keep up the great work
The process of setting out a game plan for myths reminds me of how my history assignments often have to be completely restructured as my understanding of the events improves
@3:14 the mention of Kai Zen and people thinking it's a new thing really grinds my gears! Worked for a company years ago and the new owners were all over Kai Zen. I quietly informed the new CEO that this was not a new concept, that Robert Deming from Ford Motor company went to Japan after WWII and taught THEM the concept of "continuous improvement"!
This was a fantastic conversation. I love hearing about how your understanding of a myth changed as you researched and tested. Mythbusters was one of the very few shows my whole family enjoyed and would watch together.
Being over in the UK and having neither satellite nor cable I'd barely heard of Mythbusters until after it was done. That didn't stop me devouring all of the content I could on streaming services. That description of the creative process, working out how to test the myths etc sounds like heaven to me though. I don't consider myself a creative person but give me a desired end result, a starting point and then let me loose! The actual doing of the thing? Not so much but the research, planning and then fettling things to make them work whenever you hit a stumbling block? That I thoroughly enjoy :)
The great thing about the abbreviated episodes on that channel wasn't that it cut out the middle of the myth, it was that it cut out the adverts and the interminable recaps. That's also what's so great about episodes that air on European channels with no commercial breaks.
I love the first few seasons were you guys went out shopping and calling people and sourcing things and all that included in the show was awesome! Along with the planning and building of rigs and experiments, loved that vibe of the first few seasons! Rest of the show is awesome as well
2:33 That has nothing to do with how a scientist thinks. It has everything to do with how an impatient, self-involved person who should never be allowed within ten miles of a classroom, where he WILL sometimes be asked incompletely researched questions, thinks.
Adam I wonder if you could go back in time to reveal the initial ultra raw pilot of Mythbusters that featured 2 Australians. It is the absolute nebulios of the shows format. As I heard it the show was amazing but needed to be 'Americanized' to work. The rest is history. The episodes I remember to this day is the times when you were in the car underwater and had to free yourself. I found those to be horrifying. Adam to me you were more stunt professional Vs SFX tech.
As a 44 years old fan, I'm re-watching all the chapters now in UA-cam, at regular speed, and enjoy every minute of them (I usually watch videos at x1.75 speed, besides comedy videos...). ❤
I loved mythbusters for the impatient! It took all the problems with the TV production, all the constant recap after recap, going over what's about to happen after the break and what just happened in case you forgot during the ad break and just cut that shit out... I go back and watch the show now on demand without ads and I'm like "I JUST watched this, please get on with the show"
I never understood why the US episodes had so much recap filler, when they were cut down from the longer international episodes to make room for a full 19 minutes worth of US commercials. Seems like there would have been room for the full episode if they just took out all that recap that happened after every commercial break.
Speaking of Mythbusters for the Impatient, I do understand that some people thought that constantly juggling three stories and doing multiple recaps is "more engaging" but it's worse than TikTok. It's like trying to watch three episodes simultaneously. Let me have three of them in a row, not mished mashed together.
My ten year old son only found MythBusters on prime and loved it, we're in the third season now we watch two episodes every night and he loves every part of it
3:50 While a nightmare for a directorial editor, I can absolutely understand " more footage, not less." 1) You never know what miniscule nuance will be captured by one camera angle that five other simultaneous angles missed 2) In terms of possible liability questions, MORE footage/angles/takes is better b/c you are NOT trying to hide anything.
Mythbusters for the impatient is great to go back to because we don't have to plough through the entire episode. We just want to watch what we remember.
In a time in society where people are coming out about their successful shows talking about how horrible their experience was, it's very refreshing to hear people from a show I loved talk about how great it was for them as well
I never watched Mythbusters for the Impatient because Im a habitual completionist, but I had always assumed it just cut out the repetition, I never relased it cut so much. At the end of the day, Mythbusters was a show made for broadcast television, in ways that make it a little frustrating to binge on the internet. Obviously on television with program scheduling and ad breaks, there's good reason to repeat a lot of stuff and repeatedly reintroduce ideas and such, but its so unnecessary in the modern day that I think mythbusters could hypothetically be recut for binging to be substantially shorter without losing any actual content. So I'd always assumed thats what Mythbusters for the Impatient was.
I absolutely loved the journey as the Mythbusters went to work understanding first what the myth was really about, how to formulate a hypothesis (or throw out or revise an old one that's just been invalidated), and how it can be practically tested. Seeing the apparent dead ends where they had to backtrack and come up with new hypotheses and experiments because an earlier assumption turned out to be false... THAT whole thing was what I enjoyed the most in the show. It's hard to think of any other show that really demonstrated the scientific method in its truest form, with all the blind alleys and surprise twists.
(circa) 4:24 A thought on this is that it's not a 'tiktok generation' thing, it's feedback from the audience that something isn't working in the show's format. If you look at TV nowadays, it's shorter, more compact seasons (
The golden rule isn't just "the guy with the gold makes the rules", it can also be "the guys who make the gold also make the rules". Good on you for shutting down meetings that could have been an email!
Thank you so much for the continued back stories. It's very interesting and wonderful to hear them. I appreciate your passion and your energy hasn't subsided one bit 💞 Thank you
I'm embarrassed to say this, but it's taken me years to realize that the Steveo behind the scenes at Mythbusters isn't Steve-O from Jackass. I think what caused the confusion was that Mythbusters used the same insurance crew as Jackass and I just jumped to the wrong conclusion. 😅
There's a video in this channel where Adam mentions their Steve-O and immediately clarifies afterward that it wasn't the Jackass' one 😂😂 but yeah, it can be confusing. How awesome would it be if it had been the same one, though? 😂
There is never a reason for scientists to dismiss the questions of tye lay public, especially considering the time spent in thought by the caller before making contact. As an engineer, I always try to explain things in a way the person asking can get the concept, no matter the level. I love encountering fellow techies with arrogance because it's fun to deflate those egos. We are all in this together.
Myth buster was the pinnacle of my childhood. From the only thing I watched, to trying things myself What I’d give to be able to watch them all over and over
I feel like Mythbusters needs to be re-edited and re-released. By far the largest issue is the big pay-off shots are over edited. Rarely is there a single shot, without a cut to a different camera, right in the middle of the action. It needs to feel like you're there watching the event.
The MB team has talked so many times about having to cut footage and condense episodes to fit into a TV slot. Would love to see it come back, released online with an open format. Two hour MB episode? Game on.
Mythbusters was one of the greatest shows to ever be on the tv. It changed how we were entertained at a fundamental level. I remember when I first got out of the Navy this show was in it's hay day. I spent a couple of months trying to figure out what my next move was and I watched this show with my dad daily. Dad is gone now, but those were such great memories watching with him and trying to guess what the outcome was going to be. Sometimes we would even take bets. The old man was almost always right.
As a scientist, the research process is very similar to what happens. To me anyways. You put all the work in for weeks or months, get to the end, and realize that you have to reframe your entire approach or change how it presented or find different experiments to better explain the phenomenon. A never ending iterative loop that you have to stop at some arbitrary point otherwise you won't find a "natural" end.
I'd love to see a Mythbusters edit where each individual myth were cut into a single short video, especially with all the recaps and "fat" removed. It'd be an absolute gold mine if uploaded to UA-cam, one myth every couple days.
I remember Mythbusters for the impatient, and it in turn inspired people to cut versions of the show without the pre-post ad repetitions, and without the other filler, while still keeping all the logical reasoning and experimenting. Those episodes was about 20-25 minutes, and it was so much more enjoyable to watch for me who felt the original show was too repetitious and too ad-filled.
Yeah, same. The amount of time wasted is just ridiculous. Every time Adam talks about how difficult the episodes were to cut down I just keep thinking "half the runtime is completely unnecessary filler, cut that part."
"Streamlined Mythbusters" it's called. Great project, the episodes are titled by the myth that's being tested so it's easy to find a specific one if you want to re-watch something, there's a subreddit for it r/smyths and a torrent file so you can just select a specific episode if you don't want to download all 275 episodes
@@ze_rubenator unfortunately that filler is a structural pert of the tv broadcast format. we future people on the internet don't need a recap because we came in 20 minutes after the episode started. but yeah that streamlined format is so so much better than the tv way
@@kaiserruhsam Nah I disagree with that. Even back then 90% of shows didn't have all those recaps and "coming up"s and whatnot. It was excessive on Mythbusters. Imagine if Stargate dedicated the same amount of runtime to catching people up on the story every 5 minutes. Ads are over, three seconds of splash at most and then get on with it.
the reason we enjoyed the mythbusters fot the impatient wasnt becuase we disliked the meat, we disliked seeing the same scenes 20 times and being told the same thing 30 times, the meat of the show was simply to repetitive. to say they cut out all the meat kinda disappoints, to many of us it cuts out the fluff of the show that stretched it to long
i thought at some point the hardest part would still be finding actual „myths“. I found in the end it was more of a „investigating interessting questions or suggestions“ or trying to debunk metaphorical quotes that (lets be honest here) were jokes or not to be taken literally but it was still fun.
And yes the commercials weren't so much the problem (the joys of VCRs and DVRs), but rather it was recap that was done after the 4-minute ad. We just watched the stuff, we didn't need the recaps. Also, a pet peeve of mine for all cable channels was all the on-screen text ('coming up next...') as well as their huge logos (and discovery's used to rotate, continuing the annoying distraction). I haven't watched anything via cable since 2010 or so. If it's not on an ad-free streaming channel or netflix dvd (I already miss them), I won't be watching any movie or tv show.
Mythbusters meant so much to me. It made me a critical thinker, developed that inquiring mind to view the world around me. So thank you for making me who I am.
idk about that youtube channel but there's a set of re-edits out there that makes the a and b stories self-contiguous and gets rid of all the broadcast recaps and bumpers, and that is by far the superior way to watch tv shows on a computer. No shade to the production team, gotta make a tv show when you're making a tv show for a tv network, but good lord does the tv episode structure suck to rewatch for the rest of time.
Thank you, Adam, for this insight into the world of "Mythbusters". Still one of my favorite reality shoes and apparently, I have not seen ALL the episodes. (I am not sure how, but I haven't)
I still remember how i think you guys got boomlift catapult wrong, i even drew diagrams but didnt end up sending them in. I though the lift you were using was too large and new. Something older without a tip sensor and overload protection would have been able to raise a pair of its wheels easily. Then the connection to whatever load breaking would cause it to swing back onto its wheels, flinging whoever was in the basket. Catching your show was the only one i did after i stopped watching TV regularly.
I remember using Myth-busters for the impatient as an advertisement for the show. Since as you say the science bits are the best parts, you could use it as a spoiler-free advertisement.
5:39 that explains something. Years ago my dad was hosting a software conference at the Swan and Dolphin and Disney suggested you & Jaimie as keynote speakers. I got very hyped up about this until he found out you were charging $108k for the experience. He ended up getting Joe Theisman to do the keynote, but I still fantasize about the time I could’ve gotten a chance to meet y’all.
I wonder if any teachers include Mythbusters episodes in their classes? I learned a lot from watching the show. It's the main reason I know for a fact that people cannot drive well when talking on the phone, even hands free. I consider that episode in the essential viewing category. It's can save lives. ♥️
I would think the hardest thing as the show went on would be finding good myths to do. You find all the good ones up front and keep getting more obscure as time goes on.
You pitch of the temporary measuring tattoo really got me! At the beginning of the video I was thinking that your tattoo was of something you love, because on my forearms i have Chinese symbols for my two Son’s nicknames. Insight. ❤️
@@fender42421 I was thinking that his tattoo represented his love of building things, which I share. On the same place on my arms, I have the representation of what I love: Chinese symbols for “Bear” and “Tiger.” My two son’s nicknames. Now I’m confused as well…made sense when I thought it!
I actually watched the raiders ep last night! I was kinda confused because there is a whole segment of them texturing and painting the zorb but then it didnt go anywhere, now i know why hahah
"Whenever that disagreement happened I'm thrilled." There are very few of us that get excited by this - but, boy, do we love finding out the truth! (7:30)
Is there a website with all the whiteboard drawings of the episodes? Would be very interesting for schools, students, technicians, eeeh humanity, aliens gods etc...
I wouldn’t be a University professor in charge of Design Research for a faculty of Science if I hadn’t watched Mythbusters. It sounds cliché, but it’s true, I might had been a competent professional in a completely different area, but the seed to questioning and thinking different began with MB.
Honestly I could always tell when they reshot the intro... after having already done the myth and something unexpected happened. Jamie and Adam were amazing personalities and excellent scientists and great fun.... not the best actors XD and I say that with all the love in the world. Mythbusters was and is and always will be my favorite show of all time. I've said on occasion and stick by it: Mythbusters is one of the only shows worth wasting your time staring at a screen.
The one thing I always felt was a downgrade in the later seasons was that you began to gloss over the design and build process. That (along with the 'scavenging' due to lack of resources) was my favorite part, and by the end it was largely absent. Luckily, I now have Tested for much of that. Although I would love to see you build things with a minimal budget, such that you have to improvise and scavenge!
So the helicopter pump people didn't want you to dump water on an RV in case it turned out to be an actual risk? Did anyone else reject your enquiries because of their concerns over proving that something that has a generally innocuous public acceptance is actually dangerous, and therefore bad PR? And I mean for things that people have generally been doing without one of these freak incidents occuring, and because they're rare, tend not to factor in to the day to day operations where said phenomena probably won't occur, but opening that can of worms might in fact alert some sort of beaurocracy to their process and then they'll have to go through the painful process of accounting for this newly proven danger.
Subscribe for more videos (and click the bell for notifications): ua-cam.com/users/testedcom
SCARIEST Myth From MythBusters: ua-cam.com/video/LoMYCqV2IZU/v-deo.html
Two Scenes Adam Refused to Film on MythBusters: ua-cam.com/video/QwWOUYpwi1I/v-deo.html
Watch Dan Tapster's newest series, Life on Our Planet, on @Netflix : www.netflix.com/title/80213846
On the patience and journey issue, I'll tell you something that would help a lot, and it's about the way these shows are edited - which you still see today. When something has commercials, you have to then remind the audience where we left off. But when you watch these without the commercials today, it gets incredibly repetitive. I wish these shows would have another edited version for when you are watching without the commercials, which would not back up and repeat so much.
I loved it when MythBusters scaled up their testing and production quality. No one talks about it but when Kari, Tory, and Grant were fired (or whatever terminology you want to use) the show died for me. Sure the main co-stars were there but it was a worse show and to be honest somewhat boring. I don't know who dropped the ball at Discovery but the salaries seemed pretty low to begin with dealing with hundreds of thousands at best and not millions. If a Big Bang Theory star can make over a million per episode Discovery can afford some chump change.
Wait.
Adam has pictures of all the whiteboard brainstorming sessions?!? THAT'S a best selling book.
PLEASE.
You guys were so important to so many people’s childhood and education journey. I mean MB is the reason I’m an engineer today.
Same, in my second last year of engineering now.
I was doing my engineering degree when the show came out. I didn't have time to watch it, and when I saw it I was unimpressed. Mostly because a sound grasp of engineering principles made the results obvious in-advance. At the same time, I'm glad there was an approachable introduction to these principles for the public at-large.
@@garrettkajmowicz well yeah but most of us saw this as kids so
Bro Mythbuster was my childhood for real, the little me really enjoyed all those experiments and scientific process they went through
Me too!
Can I just say, as someone interested in the evolution of language, it is kind of fascinating hearing Adam reminisce about Discovery forcing him into conference calls and just dropping the phrase "Zoom calls" as if that was just how conference calls were always thought of, even though Zoom as a company was essentially unheard of until the pandemic, and the software for Zoom would have only been around for three years of Mythbusters run (2013 onward).
And yet, knowing all that, I bet most people didn't even think twice about it as everyone understood what a "Zoom call" meant even in this ahistoric context. Interesting.
I can absolutely picture Adam being told to send less footage, hanging up the phone, turning to Jamie and saying "We're absolutely not doing that" Jamie agreeing and them both laughing.
On that idea of "Mythbusters for the impatient", my one discomfort with the show was the constant recapping of each sub-story's progress within the episode. I would have loved a version of the show without the recaps, for it to have treated us as if we have a working memory and just jumped directly between the myths and straight back into it after ad breaks. It was something that never got better for the whole run of the show and it tried my patience. :)
Yeah, this was a common issue amongst "reality" (unscripted) TV at the time. Every time the scene shifted or the show came back from commercial the producers assume we've blacked out... Ugh.
It is just a way to make a runtime longer. Of course they could have shown us more how they build things or discussed them. But that's just easier. You repeat a lot of things and look: there's 20 more mins to the show!
This happens a lot on TV, because of how people watch TV. People might jump between channels, and land in the middle of the show. Your choices are to constantly recap annoying your existing viewers but bringing these new viewers up to speed and keeping them interested, or not recap and potentially lose those new viewers that don't understand what is going on. I also find the jumping between 3 different myths at the same time annoying, but it's a TV technique to keep the audience engaged. If you find a myth boring, you might switch away. But if they present 3 myths in parallel and you are interested in only one of them, you might keep watching to see the conclusion of that.
On-demand video is where finally videos are free to be whatever length they need to be, without all that useless padding and repetition.
that was so if someone just joined the show after commercial they had some background? or it was time filler ?
That's it exactly.
I am certain that "Mythbusters for the impatient" STARTED with the idea of "let's edit out the recaps" then they decided "while I'm already cutting out things, let's just skip to the end".
The very first episode has a segment of Jamie calling the Air Force to try to get a JATO rocket, and having to explain who he was, and why he wanted it, before getting a resounding “No!”
While I hadn't heard of "Mythbursters for the Impatient", I did encounter some fan edits once of all the episodes, but without the intro sequence, any post-commercial recaps, or any redundant footage. It varied from episode to episode, but it streamlined each episode as if it were on a streaming service rather than broadcast television with commercials, and it was great to watch.
yes, it wasnt so much "for the impatient" but that once you took all te post comercials recaps, the repetition and all the fluff the episiode lasted about 40% of the original time.
We still wanted to see the whole process but it really felt condescending on us that they felt they needed to remind us what was happening 5 mins ago.
@@matiasleder6804 Exactly. Mythbusters should have been a 30 minute show - cut out the recaps and maybe do one less myth per episode.
@@ragnarokangaroo Frankly, i would have loved an extra 30 mins of them building the stuff and explaining how and why.
@@matiasleder6804I don't think it was meant to be condescending so much as just meant for a different (part of the) audience. They wanted the show to be watchable both for people like you and me, who watch pretty deliberately and will watch the whole episode or not at all, and for people who might just be flipping channels looking for something interesting, or making dinner, or watching their kids, and who might actually need recaps. That's part of why the ratings kept going up and up, too. (So you might look at those "condescending reminders" and consider that they helped get us the last eight or ten seasons.)
That said, I'd love to find those edits, because I certainly do find that stuff irritating even knowing it serves a purpose, y'know?
@@matiasleder6804 It did not feel condescending on the children who grew up watching it, which I presume you were one of them. I was not complaining about the recaps when I was 8 years old lol. Getting older and noticing that kind of thing was a little obnoxious, sure, but the content mattered more to me anyway.
Keep in mind that this show originally aired in 2003, a time where reality tv was popping off in ways that were less than desirable. In order for the team to even have a place on television, they had to pull tactics from their best competitors: other reality tv shows. The whole "recap" thing is massive in reality tv, regardless of whether or not it is scripted. I may be wrong, but I believe the recap era was at its peak from 2000-2015ish. Somewhere between 2015 and 2018, everything shifted to streaming (as it grew more popular).
Recap-style television is definitely annoying, I agree. But they didn't show the whole process for a reason. If they did show the entire process without any sort of recap, the show would not have been as massively popular as it was. Why? Because bored people used to flick through channels trying to find something entertaining to watch. That's what the recaps were for. They were not there to insult you and call you a dumb toddler. It was for all the bored souls who thought "so what's this show about?" and then they give you the recap of what it's about, and that's why their audience stayed.
The pre-streaming era utilized these tactics to gain viewership. It sucks NOW, in RETROSPECT, but how can I be offended at the guys who got me studying engineering when I was a prepubescent child? I sure af didn't have a fraction of the attention span I have now! Thank god for those recaps!
I always remember one closing blueprint room scene where Karry, Tori and Grant throw their scripts onto the table. Their faces just screamed "finally we're free!". Is it safe to say that was the last scene filmed on one of those 8 hour filming days?
Very possibly!
I think the reason Mythbusters for the impatient is popular is because it unamericalised the way the show was presented. There's nothing wrong with the journey of how you reached a conclusion, or the best method to get to a result, that's the best bit and I think modern younger audiences are totally up for watching that (see how long some UA-cam content can be and still get millions of views?!) but when you have to sit through the "ad break" and watch ANOTHER summary of what you missed before the ad break, it gets tedious when binge watching.
I loved mithbusters as a child, you basically changed the path of my childhood. Thank you for what you’ve done and what you will do, I love you all in all. No matter what you do.
Mithbusters?
Mythbusters will forever be a staple of my education history. The whole team and crew made the scientific method come ALIVE and showed me the possibilities of not just learning about the world... But building it 😊💙 thank you
Well said, i feel the same.
I find it fascinating that Mythbusters were the successors to Bill Nye The Science Guy. And yet there isn't any 1 successor to Mythbusters but dozens on the low side.
That creative collaborative process you describe sounds so amazing! I have never been in an environment where everyone has been able to offer different ideas and everyone honestly considers them and looks for ways to improve what they are doing. That must have been such an incredible job to be able to work with such great people.
I love these chats. It is great to hear what went on behind the scenes that we didn't know about. I learned so much growing up as a teenager watching the show from when it first aired until the final episodes and rewatching them at times. My favourite parts with the myths was the whole process of you guys figuring out how to test the myths and the various ways you would do that. Also seeing how different you and Jaimes ideas were sometimes.
I never knew about that condensed Mythbusters channel, but going straight from what the myth to seeing it being tested with the conclusion is like the "Teach a man to fish" quote. It cuts out the important things you learn along the way that could be useful (like the car underwater myth) and you don't get that understanding of why people thought this myth/idiom etc... was true or false.
I think Dan missed the point for the "shortened" Mythbusters clips. As the show went through the years, the footage started repeating A LOT. There were episodes where it FELT like a good 50% of the airtime was just recapping what was already shown. That's the main reason I'd watch the show on DVR and not live, so I could hit the skip button to the footage I hadn't seen yet.
The Gift Shop Sketch. Mitchell and Web
Not just mythbusters, shows in the UK drive me nuts telling what they were doing right after a commercial break, like we would have forgotten.
And they finish the recap just in time for more commercials
Hearing about Mythbusters for the Impatient reminds me how I have often wished for a re-edit of the show without the repetitious recaps and sticking to one myth at a time instead of going back and forth. If Discovery (or Disney, now) could do an edit like that I would absolutely buy that DVD collection.
That would have been the best way to do the show in my opinion. When I DVRd it I always started my FF at the coming up on part not the start of the commercial.
Yeah, I've watched some of the "for the impatient series" before, and they were lacking something in the middle. OTOH, in the age of streaming content, the old "catch people who have just changed to this channel up" is quite redundant. Even back in the days of TV, as you rightly point out, it could get annoying for those watching from the beginning.
Right now the official Mythbusters channel are uploading all full episodes on UA-cam and none of them have those recaps. It's amazing that they're doing this, because it's also 50 minutes long, which means it gives us extra not-before-seen clips, rather than the normalized 40 minute episode made specially for tv. I highly recommend checking it out
On shooting the 'blueprint' scene last: Similarly, I teach my students that you write the abstract of your paper last, because it is only then that you know what the paper really is.
Oh yeah my fave part of Mythbusters was ALWAYS the middle acts. The research, the small scale, the failures and rethinking, the personalities. SO GOOD! I watched it more for that than the pay-off, but HAD to watch the pay-off.
one of the many reasons why people love the show still yet today is the fact that you took on the challenge of dealing with myths an tall tales an movie physics in a fun science way .the myths dealing guns an other relatable every day things was so much fun to watch an along the way told a good story an taught people to think out side of the box an inspired people to ask an think . keep up the great work
I still watch Mythbusters to this day, and I'm grateful for all the hard work you all put in to make this show shine!
The process of setting out a game plan for myths reminds me of how my history assignments often have to be completely restructured as my understanding of the events improves
Thumbnail had me thinking, I thought this was a conversation between the two former hosts of the show.
I'm under the assumption that that is never going to happen.
@3:14 the mention of Kai Zen and people thinking it's a new thing really grinds my gears! Worked for a company years ago and the new owners were all over Kai Zen. I quietly informed the new CEO that this was not a new concept, that Robert Deming from Ford Motor company went to Japan after WWII and taught THEM the concept of "continuous improvement"!
This was a fantastic conversation. I love hearing about how your understanding of a myth changed as you researched and tested.
Mythbusters was one of the very few shows my whole family enjoyed and would watch together.
I love these "behind the scenes" chats. More insight into one of my favorite shows ever.
Being over in the UK and having neither satellite nor cable I'd barely heard of Mythbusters until after it was done. That didn't stop me devouring all of the content I could on streaming services. That description of the creative process, working out how to test the myths etc sounds like heaven to me though. I don't consider myself a creative person but give me a desired end result, a starting point and then let me loose! The actual doing of the thing? Not so much but the research, planning and then fettling things to make them work whenever you hit a stumbling block? That I thoroughly enjoy :)
The great thing about the abbreviated episodes on that channel wasn't that it cut out the middle of the myth, it was that it cut out the adverts and the interminable recaps. That's also what's so great about episodes that air on European channels with no commercial breaks.
I love the first few seasons were you guys went out shopping and calling people and sourcing things and all that included in the show was awesome! Along with the planning and building of rigs and experiments, loved that vibe of the first few seasons! Rest of the show is awesome as well
2:33 That has nothing to do with how a scientist thinks. It has everything to do with how an impatient, self-involved person who should never be allowed within ten miles of a classroom, where he WILL sometimes be asked incompletely researched questions, thinks.
That's why they're not in classrooms; "scientist" does not automatically mean "teacher."
Adam I wonder if you could go back in time to reveal the initial ultra raw pilot of Mythbusters that featured 2 Australians. It is the absolute nebulios of the shows format. As I heard it the show was amazing but needed to be 'Americanized' to work. The rest is history. The episodes I remember to this day is the times when you were in the car underwater and had to free yourself. I found those to be horrifying. Adam to me you were more stunt professional Vs SFX tech.
Seeing that difference of understanding of base concepts between a layman and a specialized scientist is the core of great science communication.
As a 44 years old fan, I'm re-watching all the chapters now in UA-cam, at regular speed, and enjoy every minute of them (I usually watch videos at x1.75 speed, besides comedy videos...). ❤
I loved mythbusters for the impatient! It took all the problems with the TV production, all the constant recap after recap, going over what's about to happen after the break and what just happened in case you forgot during the ad break and just cut that shit out...
I go back and watch the show now on demand without ads and I'm like "I JUST watched this, please get on with the show"
I never understood why the US episodes had so much recap filler, when they were cut down from the longer international episodes to make room for a full 19 minutes worth of US commercials. Seems like there would have been room for the full episode if they just took out all that recap that happened after every commercial break.
Speaking of Mythbusters for the Impatient, I do understand that some people thought that constantly juggling three stories and doing multiple recaps is "more engaging" but it's worse than TikTok. It's like trying to watch three episodes simultaneously. Let me have three of them in a row, not mished mashed together.
I love how Adam is still shining light on the show and into a bit of his every day experiments
Wow. Hearing him mention kaizen straight up gave me ptsd flashbacks. Nothing can kill the morale of a production line faster than kaizen.
My ten year old son only found MythBusters on prime and loved it, we're in the third season now we watch two episodes every night and he loves every part of it
3:50 While a nightmare for a directorial editor, I can absolutely understand "
more footage, not less." 1) You never know what miniscule nuance will be captured by one camera angle that five other simultaneous angles missed 2) In terms of possible liability questions, MORE footage/angles/takes is better b/c you are NOT trying to hide anything.
Several times I've used a shot in the clip from before "action" or after "cut" because it was the only thing that fit the transition I needed.
Mythbusters for the impatient is great to go back to because we don't have to plough through the entire episode.
We just want to watch what we remember.
Your little advertisement at the end actually told me what that was. I thought your tattoo was a scale, but it's a ruler. Pretty cool.
In a time in society where people are coming out about their successful shows talking about how horrible their experience was, it's very refreshing to hear people from a show I loved talk about how great it was for them as well
I never watched Mythbusters for the Impatient because Im a habitual completionist, but I had always assumed it just cut out the repetition, I never relased it cut so much. At the end of the day, Mythbusters was a show made for broadcast television, in ways that make it a little frustrating to binge on the internet. Obviously on television with program scheduling and ad breaks, there's good reason to repeat a lot of stuff and repeatedly reintroduce ideas and such, but its so unnecessary in the modern day that I think mythbusters could hypothetically be recut for binging to be substantially shorter without losing any actual content. So I'd always assumed thats what Mythbusters for the Impatient was.
I absolutely loved the journey as the Mythbusters went to work understanding first what the myth was really about, how to formulate a hypothesis (or throw out or revise an old one that's just been invalidated), and how it can be practically tested. Seeing the apparent dead ends where they had to backtrack and come up with new hypotheses and experiments because an earlier assumption turned out to be false... THAT whole thing was what I enjoyed the most in the show. It's hard to think of any other show that really demonstrated the scientific method in its truest form, with all the blind alleys and surprise twists.
(circa) 4:24 A thought on this is that it's not a 'tiktok generation' thing, it's feedback from the audience that something isn't working in the show's format. If you look at TV nowadays, it's shorter, more compact seasons (
The golden rule isn't just "the guy with the gold makes the rules", it can also be "the guys who make the gold also make the rules". Good on you for shutting down meetings that could have been an email!
Thank you so much for the continued back stories. It's very interesting and wonderful to hear them. I appreciate your passion and your energy hasn't subsided one bit 💞 Thank you
This was a great conversation. Thank you.
I'm embarrassed to say this, but it's taken me years to realize that the Steveo behind the scenes at Mythbusters isn't Steve-O from Jackass. I think what caused the confusion was that Mythbusters used the same insurance crew as Jackass and I just jumped to the wrong conclusion. 😅
Ohhhhhhh! Two very different people!
There's a video in this channel where Adam mentions their Steve-O and immediately clarifies afterward that it wasn't the Jackass' one 😂😂 but yeah, it can be confusing. How awesome would it be if it had been the same one, though? 😂
I'm really loving these segments
There is never a reason for scientists to dismiss the questions of tye lay public, especially considering the time spent in thought by the caller before making contact.
As an engineer, I always try to explain things in a way the person asking can get the concept, no matter the level.
I love encountering fellow techies with arrogance because it's fun to deflate those egos.
We are all in this together.
If you can't explain it to a five year old, you don't understand what you're talking about.
Can't remember who said that, but it stuck with me.
@@brothergrimaldus3836 There's a lot of truth in that statement.
Myth buster was the pinnacle of my childhood. From the only thing I watched, to trying things myself
What I’d give to be able to watch them all over and over
I feel like Mythbusters needs to be re-edited and re-released. By far the largest issue is the big pay-off shots are over edited. Rarely is there a single shot, without a cut to a different camera, right in the middle of the action. It needs to feel like you're there watching the event.
Jamie “What exactly are we testing here?”
*Adam in his Indy costume*
“Uhhhhh…”
The MB team has talked so many times about having to cut footage and condense episodes to fit into a TV slot. Would love to see it come back, released online with an open format. Two hour MB episode? Game on.
I'd imagine the hardest thing would be coming up with new myths to test.
@11:05 - You should refer to it as your "measuring cubit," since that was the ancient measuring system based on the length of a forearm.
Mythbusters was one of the greatest shows to ever be on the tv. It changed how we were entertained at a fundamental level. I remember when I first got out of the Navy this show was in it's hay day. I spent a couple of months trying to figure out what my next move was and I watched this show with my dad daily. Dad is gone now, but those were such great memories watching with him and trying to guess what the outcome was going to be. Sometimes we would even take bets. The old man was almost always right.
As a scientist, the research process is very similar to what happens. To me anyways. You put all the work in for weeks or months, get to the end, and realize that you have to reframe your entire approach or change how it presented or find different experiments to better explain the phenomenon. A never ending iterative loop that you have to stop at some arbitrary point otherwise you won't find a "natural" end.
I recognise Dan Tapster from our time on Supercar Megabuild, lovely chap, surprised to see him here, didn't realise he was with you on Mythbusters!
I'd love to see a Mythbusters edit where each individual myth were cut into a single short video, especially with all the recaps and "fat" removed.
It'd be an absolute gold mine if uploaded to UA-cam, one myth every couple days.
I remember Mythbusters for the impatient, and it in turn inspired people to cut versions of the show without the pre-post ad repetitions, and without the other filler, while still keeping all the logical reasoning and experimenting. Those episodes was about 20-25 minutes, and it was so much more enjoyable to watch for me who felt the original show was too repetitious and too ad-filled.
Yeah, same. The amount of time wasted is just ridiculous. Every time Adam talks about how difficult the episodes were to cut down I just keep thinking "half the runtime is completely unnecessary filler, cut that part."
"Streamlined Mythbusters" it's called. Great project, the episodes are titled by the myth that's being tested so it's easy to find a specific one if you want to re-watch something, there's a subreddit for it r/smyths and a torrent file so you can just select a specific episode if you don't want to download all 275 episodes
@@ze_rubenator unfortunately that filler is a structural pert of the tv broadcast format. we future people on the internet don't need a recap because we came in 20 minutes after the episode started.
but yeah that streamlined format is so so much better than the tv way
@@ze_rubenatorLove your channel description, mate. Bet you can guess why. Keep living the 90s.
@@kaiserruhsam Nah I disagree with that. Even back then 90% of shows didn't have all those recaps and "coming up"s and whatnot. It was excessive on Mythbusters. Imagine if Stargate dedicated the same amount of runtime to catching people up on the story every 5 minutes.
Ads are over, three seconds of splash at most and then get on with it.
the reason we enjoyed the mythbusters fot the impatient wasnt becuase we disliked the meat, we disliked seeing the same scenes 20 times and being told the same thing 30 times, the meat of the show was simply to repetitive. to say they cut out all the meat kinda disappoints, to many of us it cuts out the fluff of the show that stretched it to long
i thought at some point the hardest part would still be finding actual „myths“. I found in the end it was more of a „investigating interessting questions or suggestions“ or trying to debunk metaphorical quotes that (lets be honest here) were jokes or not to be taken literally but it was still fun.
And yes the commercials weren't so much the problem (the joys of VCRs and DVRs), but rather it was recap that was done after the 4-minute ad. We just watched the stuff, we didn't need the recaps. Also, a pet peeve of mine for all cable channels was all the on-screen text ('coming up next...') as well as their huge logos (and discovery's used to rotate, continuing the annoying distraction). I haven't watched anything via cable since 2010 or so. If it's not on an ad-free streaming channel or netflix dvd (I already miss them), I won't be watching any movie or tv show.
The thumbnail featuring Jamie when hes not in the video is annoying
Agreed
Bro. This is Adam’s channel. While featuring a screenshot from the show. Cope.
No, it's not.
@@rootedapollo8908Not a cope, he just said it was annoying. The fuck is he coping about?
@@dempfer9037right? He get so defensive and for what? 😂
Mythbusters meant so much to me. It made me a critical thinker, developed that inquiring mind to view the world around me. So thank you for making me who I am.
idk about that youtube channel but there's a set of re-edits out there that makes the a and b stories self-contiguous and gets rid of all the broadcast recaps and bumpers, and that is by far the superior way to watch tv shows on a computer. No shade to the production team, gotta make a tv show when you're making a tv show for a tv network, but good lord does the tv episode structure suck to rewatch for the rest of time.
Thank you, Adam, for this insight into the world of "Mythbusters". Still one of my favorite reality shoes and apparently, I have not seen ALL the episodes. (I am not sure how, but I haven't)
I still remember how i think you guys got boomlift catapult wrong, i even drew diagrams but didnt end up sending them in. I though the lift you were using was too large and new. Something older without a tip sensor and overload protection would have been able to raise a pair of its wheels easily. Then the connection to whatever load breaking would cause it to swing back onto its wheels, flinging whoever was in the basket. Catching your show was the only one i did after i stopped watching TV regularly.
I remember using Myth-busters for the impatient as an advertisement for the show. Since as you say the science bits are the best parts, you could use it as a spoiler-free advertisement.
Wow, I love the conversation about blueprint days. Such a testimony to the nature of science
5:39 that explains something. Years ago my dad was hosting a software conference at the Swan and Dolphin and Disney suggested you & Jaimie as keynote speakers. I got very hyped up about this until he found out you were charging $108k for the experience. He ended up getting Joe Theisman to do the keynote, but I still fantasize about the time I could’ve gotten a chance to meet y’all.
I wonder if any teachers include Mythbusters episodes in their classes? I learned a lot from watching the show. It's the main reason I know for a fact that people cannot drive well when talking on the phone, even hands free. I consider that episode in the essential viewing category. It's can save lives. ♥️
I would think the hardest thing as the show went on would be finding good myths to do. You find all the good ones up front and keep getting more obscure as time goes on.
I really wish Jamie would join in on one of these videos.
He is very, very happy being off camera.
@@tested would he do one for my birthday?
3:59 that channel sped up the process of the myths. No commercials, none of the redundant mid talking. Plus it was before TikTok.
Indeed Adam... *_Love_** the cubit.*
Sadly, they killed it off centuries ago!
_How do I know?_
I read the *cubituary,* of course!
Thank you for doing what every guy in a pub has ever discussed (over a pint).
You pitch of the temporary measuring tattoo really got me! At the beginning of the video I was thinking that your tattoo was of something you love, because on my forearms i have Chinese symbols for my two Son’s nicknames. Insight. ❤️
ummm, what??? read your comment aloud and tell me it makes sense lol.... help
@@fender42421 I was thinking that his tattoo represented his love of building things, which I share. On the same place on my arms, I have the representation of what I love: Chinese symbols for “Bear” and “Tiger.” My two son’s nicknames. Now I’m confused as well…made sense when I thought it!
I actually watched the raiders ep last night! I was kinda confused because there is a whole segment of them texturing and painting the zorb but then it didnt go anywhere, now i know why hahah
"Whenever that disagreement happened I'm thrilled." There are very few of us that get excited by this - but, boy, do we love finding out the truth! (7:30)
Mythbusters opened my eyes as a child what science is and how fun it is and how it makes you think and think.
Adam You probaly dont know but do you think discovery will ever do a "myth busters week" similar to shark week. That would be awesome
Such an awesome show! Love rewatching it with my kids
I can't understand why anyone would want to skip the testing of the myth, that's literally where all the entertainment is. That's the entire show.
Is there a website with all the whiteboard drawings of the episodes? Would be very interesting for schools, students, technicians, eeeh humanity, aliens gods etc...
Loving these videos.
Glad you like them!
I would have loved to see a behind the scenes of busters. And all that creativity wow.
That was a very good question, SamuraiCoding
Brilliant Adam & Dan!
It's hilarious to me, that Jamie would go through the trouble of crafting the boulder... and then realize they didn't have a test-case for it.
So how about a time lapse of the decay of the wrist ruler (tm) decal?
I wouldn’t be a University professor in charge of Design Research for a faculty of Science if I hadn’t watched Mythbusters. It sounds cliché, but it’s true, I might had been a competent professional in a completely different area, but the seed to questioning and thinking different began with MB.
Honestly I could always tell when they reshot the intro... after having already done the myth and something unexpected happened. Jamie and Adam were amazing personalities and excellent scientists and great fun.... not the best actors XD and I say that with all the love in the world. Mythbusters was and is and always will be my favorite show of all time. I've said on occasion and stick by it: Mythbusters is one of the only shows worth wasting your time staring at a screen.
I wish MythBusters would be offered on streaming service in the Netherlands!
Those whiteboard pictures could make a great coffee table book!
Watching Mythbusters in school was fun. Dont know if they watch mythbusters nowadays but it was a staple in my education.
STNG science advisers in an interview once said "The hardest part of the job was the real world catching up to the show."
The one thing I always felt was a downgrade in the later seasons was that you began to gloss over the design and build process. That (along with the 'scavenging' due to lack of resources) was my favorite part, and by the end it was largely absent.
Luckily, I now have Tested for much of that. Although I would love to see you build things with a minimal budget, such that you have to improvise and scavenge!
So the helicopter pump people didn't want you to dump water on an RV in case it turned out to be an actual risk? Did anyone else reject your enquiries because of their concerns over proving that something that has a generally innocuous public acceptance is actually dangerous, and therefore bad PR?
And I mean for things that people have generally been doing without one of these freak incidents occuring, and because they're rare, tend not to factor in to the day to day operations where said phenomena probably won't occur, but opening that can of worms might in fact alert some sort of beaurocracy to their process and then they'll have to go through the painful process of accounting for this newly proven danger.
I remember watching the pilot and being so blown away. Was an instant hit but am glad you ended it before it became too stale.