I was unaware of this show (till I saw a link on the Darwinawards). Is this just a British rip off of Mythbusters? Did it come first? Did Richard Hammond do this at the same time as Top Gear or was it before or after?
Don’t know if it’s meant to be a copy of mythbusters, but the things done on Brainiacs tend to be a lot sillier and less ‘scientific’ than the things done on Mythbusters.
Brainiac (Brainiac: Science Abuse) is kind of but not really like Mythbusters.
It’s very much student humour posed in the guise of science. Here are an example of some of the experiments they run (taken from Wiki)
[ul]Does having sex before playing a game of football improve your game? [/ul]
[ul]Can you swim faster in syrup than you do in water? [/ul]
[ul]Can the viewer spot the deliberately made goofs or hidden secrets in one episode? Hammond deliberately made colour changes and visual changes in one whole episode. At the end, he explained it to the viewer, finishing with “and yes, my clothes did change three times in that last bit.”[/ul]
Lots of poo and boob jokes, with blowing stuff up and drinking booze.
Some of their “experiments” and the Mythbusters ones will overlap, but really only the most puerile ones (see: The Brown Note).
Also, Mythbusters original run was January 2003, Brainiac was November 2003. And according to Wiki Mythbusters didn’t air in the UK until 2006. It’s possible the creators of Brainiac saw Mythbusters some time earlier and thought “this is cool, let’s rip it off”, but I’d say it’s rather unlikely.
I liked the Alkali Metal and Thermite episodes
Apparently, some of the alkali metal experiments were faked with conventional explosive charges. I’m pretty sure there’s a fair bit of creative editing going on in other places too (the fuse-lighting sequence for all of the thermite experiments is the same every time; the green flames emerging from the caravan they blew up with explosives plus copper sulphate were digitally recoloured - because other things in the frame also went green)
I just want to say, purely in the interests of scientific inquiry, I will volunteer to exhaustively study this particular question. I am even willing, at risk of possible personal injury, even expand it to see if sex before playing cricket will improve your game. Or baseball, or biking, really almost anything.
Brainiac is what Mythbusters will deteriorate into if they throw away the current basic premise of the show, plus cease showing any of the “build” behind the tests, and just keep the sexy bits (the explosions and so on). I had fun watching Brainiac, but comparing it to Mythbusters is like comparing 20/20 cricket to a test match. OK, let me try that again for US dopers: it’s like comparing sex to an orgasm.
So in this case Brainiac is the sex and Mythbusters the orgasm?
Other way around. Mythbusters has a long build up explaining what they are doing, Brainiac is just the explosion at the end.
I once described Brainiac as one part Beakman’s World and three parts Jackass.
There’s an occasional bit of actual science, often something to do with explosives chemistry.
There are lots of stupid stunts–putting dynamite in toasters, putting anything from cell phones to liquid oxygen in a microwave (the champagne was particularly spectacular)–usually prefaced with “The following experiment is dangerous. Do not try this at home…No really. Don’t.” Not to mention celebrity impersonators blowing stuff up, darts or golf contests that end with stuff blowing up, lots of electrical shocks, and “Professor Myang Lee” melting things with a flamethrower.
And there are lots of (usually poorly controlled) experiments addressing such questions as “What is the best itching powder?” “Will cats walk on tinfoil?” “What food makes the best shaving cream?” and “What’s the fastest way to eat spaghetti?” Occasionally they tackle something that might actually give useful information, like the best hangover-prevention measures (other than the most obvious one, of course) or the best cure for bad breath.
On the whole I’m a fan. It’s a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure.
Professor Myang Lee>Kari Byron
…just sayin’.