I’m going to a convention tomorrow where Salvatore “Tory” Belleci, and Kari Byron will be doing Q&A sessions. If anyone has any seriously burning questions for them post her and I’ll try to ask.
Can we ever expect to be able to buy a complete taping of an episode unedited? I am talking all 60+ hours of film they probably have per myth that they cut down to the hour they air.
I always thought it would be neat to see how they actually do business on a daily basis. Probably more of a question for their marketing manager, though.
How about a serious question for a change. Like is Kari single?
I would venture a guess and say yes.
My boyfriend’s ninjutsu dojo was asked to participate for an upcoming episode in Mythbusters. I think the episode will be all about ninjas and what they actually can and can not do (this is probably getting hyped up due to the TMNT movie coming out :rolleyes:). Anywho, they asked the leader of his dojo to come in with a few people and be taped for the show.
They didn’t get to meet the two main guys, but they did work with the three younger ones, including Kari. From what my boyfriend tells me, Kari was practically trying to get into the leader’s pants the moment she saw him. Ninja powers are strong!
I saw an interview with her last summer and she was dating at the time. She spoke about going to the Home Depot with her boyfriend and being recognized.
When is Season 2 coming out on DVD?
I bet her husband will be very interested in this portion of the show.
Okay, here’s a question. Who decides which myths they bust? Do the producers choose and tell them “here’s what we’re going to do this season;” or Adam & Jamie suggesting which ones they want for the producers to green-light, or is it a co-operative effort between the producers and M5? Sometimes it feels like A & J are just “going through the motions” on a segment they really don’t want to do but are essentially forced to.
And one directed specifically to Tory & Kari: do they like it better being their own “mini-Mythbusters” with Grant, doing their own stuff independently, or did they prefer being the “build team” on the big myths?
How are those?
oh- and I think Tory is just too cute!
Are Adam and Jamie like that for real, or is that just an act for the cameras?
If it’s the former, will Jamie’s eventual on-camera ass-whuppin’ and/or murder of Adam be shown on the program? 
Are they ever going to do the concrete glider myth over? Because that was the worst episode I’ve seen, they totally blew any chance at meaningful results by launching the gliders in such different ways.
Here is one I always wanted to know: have there been any myths they’ve started to test, but the build/budget/whatever went so badly that they scrapped it and it didn’t air?
Ask them if they read the SDMB.
The Discovery Channel offered a Season 2 DVD on their website for a bit, but looking at it, I don’t see one listed. Whether it’s sold out or what, I’ve no idea.
My question for the panel…erm, the two people is: there are only so many urban legends out there, and it seems like the Mythbusters have covered most of the big ones. So, where do ideas for new experiments come from?
Also, have they counted on being able to revisit something because they ran out of time/money/etc. on the build and didn’t get to cover all the aspects of the myth they wanted to cover?
So you’re sayin’ there’s a chance?
This one I can answer. I was fortunate enough to spend a couple hours drinking with Adam, Kari, and Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic magazine) at James Randi’s Amazing Meeting last year in Vegas.
Adam* is exactly the way you see him on the show. He’s funny, smart, and great fun to hang around with. His interests and knowledge are very wide-ranging, he’s a great storyteller, and very energetic. It was getting late, Shermer left earlier because he was speaking early the next day, but Adam wanted to keep going after the rest of us were ready to wrap it up. (FYI, he’s married and has two small kids.)
I only spoke briefly with Jamie, but he also seemed pretty much the way he appears on the show: more serious and business-like than Adam, and nowhere near as interested as being in the spotlight. A little shy and uncomfortable with the attention of being a celebrity, even, although I think he preferred being with the skeptics and atheists of the Amazing Meeting to a typical public appearance. He always wore his trademark crisp white shirt and beret.
I was interested to note that Jamie and Adam didn’t hang around together when they weren’t appearing together on stage. They are apparently not particularly good friends. You can tell there’s mutual respect, but not a buddy-buddy relationship off-camera.
- Photo by Kari.
**Photo by Adam. God, I love that picture!
She has a husband? Wow.
I have some clips that my bf took with his cameraphone…Kari is definitely the flirty/ditzy type. I don’t know if it was all for show, or if she really was trying to get with the shodan. Either way, nobody was really liking it.
Yes, dammit. She got married last year, just a couple of months after [del]our[/del], errr…my night of bliss.
I’m crushed.
I’m just going to throw this out there, 'mkay? But for whatever reason, I seem to have better luck with married women than single women. Don’t know what it is, but I think that it should be further explored in the interests of science. If anybody can arrange for me to meet Kari, I’ll see if I can’t get her interested in such a puzzling mystery. In exchange, I promise to supply my benefactors with any candid Know what I mean? Nudge Nudge Wink Wink photographs taken as part of this research effort.
I realize that this will cause me to cast certain deeply held personal beliefs on my part out the window, and I’ll have to put a number of important projects on hold to accomplish this, but I think that the demands of such research are well worth the cost.
OK so I saw Kari and Tory in two Q&A sessions and one panel today. I might see one of them again tomorrow but not sure yet. I’ll try to convey what I found out so far.
I didn’t ask and they didn’t cover this specifically, but from getting a sense of things I would say no. The show DVDs are behind by several seasons and they consider themselves a niche show. Also, the hours of stuff they edit out is typically either really boring stuff like basic informational research, or it’s repetitive tests to confirm results, or simply setting up and building something. There’s definitely not entertainment value in what they generally edit out (except for the occasional prank or whatnot), and whatever informational value it has it generally covered in the episode in some form already. I think the best you could hope for is a behind the scenes featurette on a DVD. But they are friendly people, so if you had some kind of serious academic interest in studying it and Discovery Channel didn’t mind I wouldn’t be surprised if you could arrange personal access.
They work a minimum of 10 hour days and a minimum of 5 days a week though sometimes they will work straight through several weeks in a row. They are supposed to try to do basically one show per week or 8 days about, but because of the nature of different myths they’ll often be working on three on and off at the same time. Typically they spend about half the day planning and setting up and the rest building, testing, or conducting experiments. The longest day of shooting was 22 hours.
She is recently married. She says that Tory is single though!
They don’t seem to have a good idea about this aspect of things. Kari was aware that the DVDs were lagging behind the actual seasons but thought they were up to about season three on DVD.
They seem to all decide together. Discovery will occasionally decide to postpone or not air a myth, but other than general directions like ‘more explosions’ they don’t really give them a list of myths or anything. Adam, Jamie, Tory, Kari, and Grant all collate potential myths from various sources whether from comments on their website, their friends, things they’ve heard, myths the producers will suggest, and things they see on the internet. The potential myths are filtered by 1) has to be somehow testable, 2) has to be interesting to film, and 3) has to be able to be filmed in a way in which fans won’t injure themselves trying to replicate it. Then the mythterns research them further and then they’ll all plan them. The producers tend to be the ones though, who decide whether Adam and Jamie tackle a particular myth, or Tory, Grant, and Kari.
I did not get to ask them and they didn’t cover this too much. Tory did say though that originally they were just hired to be background set up and builders on the show and Adam and Jamie were going to do all the hosting and testing. But they ended up having too much to handle and they were told they would be also hosting the show. Everyone except Tory liked the idea. It took him about two years to get used to being in the spotlight.
Both Tory and Kari are cute and positive, friendly acting people. They seem pretty cool.
Yeah they are pretty much like that for real. And basically all the footage you see is unstaged and unscripted. The only part that that is slightly rehearsed is the introduction part, because their actual discussions take much longer and are hard to edit together cohesively, so the producers just watch their initial discussions and then tell them which parts to re cover in their intros. All of them find this part unnatural feeling and awkward except Adam, who they say is a good ‘actor’ for this part.
In terms of their personalities they pretty much act that way. Adam is a little more social and less serious. Jamie is a little more serious and shy or quiet, and will basically not say anything unless you bring up a topic that interests him in which case he will talk non stop.
Jamie and Adam like and respect each other and they generally get along, but they have the kind of love hate relationship that is typical of anyone that has known each other so long. The whole team in general also typically gets along but of course occasionally get on each others nerves just because they work so many long hours together all the time.
Didn’t cover that. But if a myth’s results get a lot of fan feedback (in a way that they can retest it meaningfully) they typically revisit it.
Didn’t cover that specifically but it seems unlikely. They went way over budget on the jetpack and it still didn’t work but that was still aired.
They have had Discovery channel decide not to air certain myths for other reasons though. They did one myth about teeth whitening systems that they decided not to air because some of the whiteners didn’t work and they were sponsors of the show so… 
(It did air in Europe though where apparently tey aren’t so uptight about their teeth). Sometimes a myth won’t get started at all if it involves a brand name and the brand doesn’t want to cooperate. One episode a brand name was used in myth and the brand decided after the fact they didn’t want to be mentioned and they ended up dubbing over every mention of it in the episode rather than not air it. In another case, there was a myth about whether jumping on top of or covering a grenade could mask it’s explosive power, but it was shelved due to concerns that it was too topical with the Iraq war.
Didn’t get to ask sorry They did say that they use the internet a lot for their research. They did mention wikipedia.
See above. Themselves, their friends, the fans writing on the web site, things on the internet, things the mythterns find, etc.
They didn’t specifically cover this but it seems like the answer would be no.
They generally try to first do the myth the way it supposedly really happened and then if it doesn’t work they test it’s limits to see what it would take to actually complete the myth. Altho fan opinion obviously sometimes doesn’t think they quite right in hindsight, the mythbusters team always tries to be comprehensive. They can’t do a huge statistical sampling or anything like that, but they do always try to take the myth pasts it’s natural limits to get a thorough result.
While obviously they try to do things within budgetary constraints, they aren’t usually allowed to know what their budget actually is in most cases unless it goes over budget or Discovery tells them to do a specific myth for under a certain amount. They also try to get things very cheaply through donations of used vehicles or materials, or at auctions or junkyards or whatever.
Some other things that came up:
==Cost
As stated previously, Discovery Channel generally won’t let them know what the budget is. The most expensive thing to do on the show has been the explosions. Both because explosives are expensive and also because they have to hire so many FBI / police / firefighting people (whom Kari suspects brings more people than are needed so they can watch). The jetpack also went over budget by about three times. They suspect that Jamie is still secretly working on it.
==Injuries
Kari has dislocated her knee twice, once from slipping on ballistics gel. Tory tends to get minor injuries almost every show because he likes to push his limits. He finds it both slightly insulting that insurance will have him do something dangerous rather than Jamie or Adam because he is less ‘essential’, and also exciting because then he gets to do it himself instead of watch. Adam tends to rather than take his time building things right the first time, will rush through it and then rebuild if it gets screwed up. He recently wasn’t very careful around the band saw and sliced his finger to the bone needing something like 37 stitches.
==Scottie
Scottie left just because she didn’t like the nature of the pressure and schedule of filming a tv series with it’s high pressure long hours and lack of time off. She’s doing landscaping now and is very happy.
==Buster
Buster has only one original body part besides his face still left and recently his spine was broken. The most damaging stunt was the one in which he was exploded and his face melted. New ones are about $70,000 and would be only quasi-legal for them to obtain.
==Teams
I think they said they have two mythterns and two producers per team.
==Myth stories
Tory chose the lava lamp myth.
Tory was excited about doing the pirate sail myth. The show was a little worried about him getting cut. They had a boastful stunt guy try it too and he couldn’t keep holding the knife when it got to the seam either.
When they did the can of beans, it took a long time to finally pop and they were just sitting around bored waiting. The camera guy said if he turned off the camera it would probably pop right away ironically. So he did turn it off, but then turned it back on right away and then the can popped and he caught it on film.
When the rodent fell out of the plow (?) Grant screamed like a girl.
==favorites
Kari and Tory both loved the quirky backstory and surprising positive results of the exploding pants myth.
Kari also loved the myth where the little girl was tied to hundred of balloons because of how excited the girl was.
They both enjoyed working with the groups that came on the show for the parabolic mirror weapon episode.
==most surprising
They both were very surprised to find the Chinese buried warning drum myth be confirmed,and to experience it first hand despite what their common sense would tell them.
==least favorites
They both thought the plant sensitivity and pyramid power myths were kind of lame, but did find it important that they be tested because of how many people do believe in things like that.l
==M5
Although they both had originally been hired just for M5 before the show, the show has now pretty much consumed their lives and they rarely do stuff for the M5 company. Also, although Jamie and Adam still do M5 stuff, the kind of work they are getting has migrated to different kind of things.
==qualifications
None of them were really qualified to do the show, but the say the network and the fans like the results of that which is a more empathetic feeling of testing and discovering something yourself. I think Jamie has a degree in Russian or something and Adam just has a High School degree, but they both are somewhat of savants, being interested in many things and learning for themselves without formal education many skills and much information. Tory’s background is in film and did a lot of model making. Kari was a sculptor. She still sculpts in her spare time but she has stopped showing because people would just come to her shows because of her mythbusters fame and not her art, and also because her sculpture is a kind of darker more controversial nature in counterbalance to her positive personality and she wouldn’t want it to cause problems with the network. Grant is the closest one to being ‘officially’ qualified, he has an engineering degree.
==jokes
Tory tends to be more of the prankster. He did two similar disgusting pranks. One of the pyramid power tests we didn’t see involved yogurt. It developed maggots and he showed Adam or Jamie and then when they looked away switched it for a new yogurt and then showed them him eating it, them thinking it was the maggoty one. On another myth they had to collect saliva in a cup, and he did another switcheroo where he pretended to drink it. The whole crew was already nauseated from the smell and appearance of a cup of old saliva, and when he did it several people vomited.
During the gunpowder as engine fuel myth, he put a little more gunpowder in a pipe during one experiment and didn’t tell anyone, and the pipe flew out of the vise. Kari says this was one of the few times when she and Adam were actually legitimately angry during production.
They both said that although it was edited to seem like their idea, it was actually the producers who told them to play the joke on Adam where he gets zapped by the Raiders of the Lost Ark looking prop. They didn’t want to do it without warning him and felt bad about it.
=upcoming
They recently did a myth about a boat that supposedly hit a water pole and split down the middle. They also did one about, I’m assuming, licking a frozen pole.They are trying to come up with an episode about ninja myths.
Thank you for that very informative post. Good luck tomorrow.