They’ve had a couple like that. Sometimes I think they should stop being Mythbusters and start being 'People that make cool things for fun" it would give them more freedom. Sometimes I think THEY made up the myths just because they wanted to test or make something fun.
I was surprised that the fingerprint door lock wasn’t secure. A photocopied fingerprint worked? :eek: Wow, what a useless piece of junk.
The fingerprint scanner on the pc was very secure. It took Adam and Jaime several tries to find a way around it. I’d love to make one of those plastic finger pads myself. 
Shame, they didn’t give instructions. 
If I remember right, they still needed a copy of Grant’s thumbprint, which they got by tricking him into handling a CD case, then dusting it for the print. How many people who want to rip you off can get a copy of your thumbprint?
It would have been really hysterical if they could have gotten the thumbprint by dusting the lock itself.
And then IIRC they etched the fingerprint into a piece of metal and used that to transfer it to a gummy bear.
Not everything is a myth everywhere or for everyone, in one episode they tested the ‘myth’ that your tongue will stick if you lick a cold lamppost, from personal experience I could have told them that, yes, your tongue will stick. But when you’re from California I suppose you don’t encounter cold lampposts very often.
I had never even heard of the Hwa’cha before they tested it on Mythbusters.
I think the idea is that they should be dealing with things that almost no-one has the ability to test themselves and that are genuine “myths”. I think anyone who has been anywhere it gets cold enough to rearrange the anatomy of a brass monkey can tell you that your tongue will stick to metal outdoors if you’re daft enough to lick it. The fact someone in California or the North Territory or the Sahara desert can’t test it first hand is neither here nor there in this modern internet age, IMHO.
I’m a military historian so I’m realise I’m probably atypical (from a “general person” point of view) in that I have a pretty good knowledge of gunpowder weapons from their inception to the present day, but the Hwa’cha has been in a couple of historical RTS games too- Age of Empires II? Rise of Nations? Something like that, anyway (they all look alike after a while). The point is, it’s a historic siege weapon that was known to exist and to have functioned in the way described in the “Myth”.
It’s not an urban legend (like the skydiver landing on the see-saw and catapulting the kid onto the roof), or something that looks plausible but isn’t, or something persistent yet untrue that needs debunking (you can blow up a petrol station talking on a cellphone)- it’s just them saying “The Koreans had rocket-launchers in the 13th Century. Isn’t that awesome? This is what it looked like and how it worked.” It’s fun, it’s educational, and it is cool, but it’s not a myth.
A few years ago there was a similar, British show called Brainiac: Science Abuse. It was hosted by Richard Hammond (of Top Gear fame) and happily admitted that the point of the show was to blow things up in some vaguely scientific way. I think Mythbusters is at the point where they’ve run out of actual myths to test and are now at the “Science Abuse” stage of proceedings. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I can’t help but feel they should be a little more up front about it.