What I find ridiculous about the show is that they claim these projects are all about benefitting society – like they’re inventing and testing new things to save lives. But their methods are so half-assed that they don’t gain any real, useful information to discover anything genuinely new.
Not to mention that of the three “experiments” so far, two solutions have been outright failures and the third was completely impractical.
And Kari is way hotter. She actually has a figure, and Deanne’s voice is grating to my ears.
Yeah, it seems as if they start out by finding footage of something compelling: a train hitting a car on the tracks, an explosion, a plane landing in that weakened concrete runoff area. Then they look for ways to re-create that incident while somehow attempting to prevent it. Never mind the fact that the reason no one has implemented these concepts is almost certainly that smarter minds have realized that no cost-effective and reliable solution is practical. We’re trying to save the world while getting ratings!
Last night’s episode (train hitting car) was a perfect example. Almost every aspect of it was eye-rollingly ludicrous, from their ideas to the tests to the solutions. (Setting off an airbag by hand? Good idea! :rolleyes: ) And in the end they made the situation worse.
Another thing that bugs me is that, unlike Mythbusters, which may have a little off-camera assistance, but where it’s clear that the on-camera talent is really doing most of the work, the Smash Lab crew is clearly clueless and is getting **lots **of undisclosed expert help. The fancy air cannon for shooting 2x4s just magically appeared last week. This week the huge bumper thing they welded to the train at the last minute was obviously not built by any of those dweebs.
Last week they reinforced a mobile home with carbon fiber and showed that it would survive a hurricane almost intact. That would have been a pretty decent show, but for one thing. At no point did they answer the question, So why don’t they make mobile homes out of carbon fiber? If they had explained that the cost of the carbon fiber they applied to their junker was probably at least three or four times what the original home cost new (I’m guessing–it could have been much more), the audience would have been educated. As it was, some people could have come away from the show thinking, “Stupid mobile home makers and buyers. It’s all their fault when a tornado rips them apart.”
The concept of Smash Lab might have worked if they had gotten hosts who really knew something (like Jamie and Adam) or if they weren’t so obviously faking so much stuff. I may watch a little longer, but I’m not expecting much.
I may start watching it again just to see how bad it is. Kinda like Plan 9 from Outer Space. We should MST3K this show.
I searched out this thread specifically because I wanted to know if that damn show had shown up on anybody else’s radar as it did mine…As a pale aping of Mythbusters and a platform for hipsters to show how clever they are by blowing things up.
I’ve seen two of these reels of dreck now, and I don’t think I’ll be bothering with a third. The first was the train episode. I don’t have enough time to go through every little thing that bothered me about it, but what I’m finding is that someone thinks that re-inventing the wheel is the easiest way to get dumb people to watch tv. Their “experiments” to find out which model of deflection to use on the front of the train were imbecilic. Using a couch? No science involved, really, and no analysis of why their dipshit ideas didn’t work. And then the show ends with them saying, “Well, we didn’t do it right. Oh well.”
What?! It isn’t as if you’re on live tv. You fix your problem and re-tape if you want to make it anywhere close to resembling a success.
Then the carbon fiber episode with the trailer. No explanation of why it isn’t used in building homes or anything. Not to mention the fact that what they were going for in that episode NEVER materialized. They didn’t get to cat 5 speed, they didn’t wreck it. They rolled it over. Big deal. We’ve seen jet engines roll things over before. Their first experiments to show how strong carbon fiber was were lame in the extreme. Having all four of them stand on an uncovered two by four to see if it breaks, and then doing the same thing on a carbon fiber covered one that doesn’t? We want to see AT WHAT POINT it will break. Mythbusters would have hung weights on both from the center until it broke. That’s what I want. Sending a brick into a piece of plywood that is uncovered, then one that is covered was fine, but they didn’t go that extra step and show what would happen if you used the double knit stuff, which is supposedly what they were going to use on the trailer.
All in all, I’m kind of rambling because I’m annoyed at the show. They could do better, but they won’t. They’ll just get some ratings from the low IQ segment because they say they use science, but they really don’t. Real science is harder to understand, but far more interesting and entertaining than just simply blowing something up to blow it up.
Oh, and could anyone fathom why in the blue hell they dropped the car upside down on the bounce house in the train episode? If all they wanted to know was whether or not the bounce house would slow the descent of the car, couldn’t doing it right side up have given them the data they needed with the added bonus of still being able to roll the car away after the fall? Or were they just going for more drama with no cause? Oh look! A car falling upside down! That’s gonna be messy! :rolleyes:
I would have been way happier with the show if they dropped the whole fake science thing and just had fun blowing shit up.
They were testing the valves they had built for their air bags to see if they would release the air at the proper speed. They obviously didn’t realize that the seams of the bounce house were weaker than their valves, and were therefore bound to fail first, making the whole exercise a waste of time.
Isn’t something like this coming to one of the Discovery channels later this month? Title’s something like “Blast Brothers”.