I kinda miss the build team, but I’m OK with the new, stripped down format.
I rcall that they mentioned their homemade cherry bombs contained two ounces of black powder. Does seem a bit much; is that what real cherry bombs contained?
Yes, real cherry bombs were a quarter stick of dynamite.
Joey P, the splash they got from the blast they used was barely a fountain, at the lower limit of being called similar to the fountain show in the cartoon. The cartoon has multiple showers that shoot to the ceiling and flood the room. They got something resembling jets of water, but hardly that volume. Smaller blast would have been even less water shooting out. The scale test showed that.
Just watched the Indiana Jones episode. Overall, okay.
I think they should have done something to demonstrate the damage from the whip to flesh. Use a flesh analogue (chicken carcass) to see what marks are left, maybe measure strike force.
For the dart gun run, they set up the 1 second delay, and then quickly discovered that was way too long. However, if you watch Indy’s actual run, there is not a one second delay between contact and firing. The demonstration where he activates the first pad is, what I think, dramatic license to set up the tension. The key was not the timing from when he started pushing the pad to when he gets hit, but rather the amount of displacement that triggers the firing. A faster run with more weight will push the pads down faster, tripping the triggers. The shots were reacting nearly simultaneously from his steps.
So I think their demo run with zero delay was actually a better replication of the movie run, and it showed it still was plausible. Yes, Adam got hit once, but only once out of 16 is very good results.
The pit swing was fairly well done. Adding the bark was an important step I’m glad they considered. A rough tree limb is different than a smooth pole.
“Cherry bombs”, at least the late 50s early 60s ones that I got to take apart in the 70s, used a roughly 1/2" cube loosely filled with flash powder not black powder. Comparing flash powder to black powder and either to “dynamite” is like comparing rattlesnakes to tigers to great white sharks. You can get them to do the same thing but they do it in such different ways that a one to one comparison just doesn’t work. A cherry bomb might be as loud as a quarter stick of dynamite, but nobody would use flash powder to turn mountains into tunnels.
which sounds about right in my experience.
CMC fnord!
I’ve mostly been enjoying this season quite a bit… but the most recent episode (video game myths) was TERRIBLE. I don’t mind the idea that recreating scenes from movies or TV shows counts as busting “myths”, but no one in the history of time who played either Fruit Ninja or an FPS ever thought that it was implied that what was going on was a realistic depiction of reality. Clearly the result was exactly was we saw (hard to cut real fruit with a sword, carrying heavy stuff slows you down, but if you’re really fit it slows you down less), and it wasn’t particularly interesting to see.
Yeah, I thought it was lame, too. I mean, it looked like a hell of a lot of fun to play Doom in real life, or to swing at fruit with a sword, but it wasn’t that great to watch someone else do it on TV.
It also bugged me that they consistently referred to Doom 3 as “Doom” and never once showed footage from Doom I or II. Doom 3 wasn’t the game that made the series iconic. They should have at least talked about the legacy of Doom I and II.
Also, I wish, for the fruit ninja segment, they actually got a professional swordmaster to attempt it and see if he could have gotten a higher score.
I might’ve agreed for the first few episodes, but I think it has been getting worse as the season progresses. For this last episode, I could safely fast-forward through the commercials, and the first 30-60 seconds of show, before hitting play and not miss a thing. Far too much recap after break.
Well, in some ways the show is better. The banter is sharper, the intro is better, better art, etc. But so far, they have not busted any myths at all. The concepts behind these first three shows have been lame.
I do feel like the new format is largely just forcing them to push through the myths too fast, because they’re trying to do two per episode with just Adam and Jamie to do everything. They aren’t doing all the small-scales and science as well as they had been (which was already fairly low).
They really should just do one myth per episode, with the occassional mini-myth episode of 2-4.
It’s possible that they did, but it turned out like the professional swimmer in the pool of syrup, that the parameters were too weird to give the professional an advantage. And if the segment didn’t add anything, it might get cut for time.
I like the new format.
Without the build team the show’s pace is slowed down. You get more questions answered about what they are doing and how they are doing it. The show feels smarter now. The graphics popping up are informational. The terminology is a lot more advanced. I think this new season viewers might actually learn a few things. I loved the whip-making.
Did you all notice that there haven’t been any huge explosions? Sure, they blew up toilets with pipe bombs, but that was the myth. In the old format of the show the build team would have strapped a MOAB to the toilet rig and remote detonated it from a half mile away, because… EXPLOSIONS! They also would have blown up the whole house with Homer in it.
I think the new, higher brow version of the show is great.
I also predict it will be cancelled half way through this season. No explosions? No tits? No Tory wisecracking into the camera? Lots of terms people have never heard before?
It’s like they don’t even know American television audiences at all.
I don’t think that Australian audiences are that far removed from American.
The show has never had mass appeal. Its audience is a very specific sort of personality that its hosts probably well-represent. And that type of person, while probably appreciating explosions and tits, probably appreciates learning how to make a wrench that you can hit someone with safely just as much.
They don’t need to be a popular show. They just need to be popular by Discovery Channel standards.
Did you miss the A-Team episode? There were two major explosions in that one. 9 sticks of dynamite directly under a car, followed by 9 sticks in a sewer under a car.
Plus they blew up a log with propane and oxygen.
I believe they claimed Adam is a trained swordsman. Of course, that doesn’t actually mean he’s any good, and a professional would likely still be better.
The reinvention also comes at a cost savings. Less on air personalities saves their pay (and I don’t recall seeing some of the usual supporting cast like the LEO at the bomb range on camera). The slower pace also means they need less stuff to experiment on (cars, rockets, explosives, etc.) further reducing some aspects of cost. Potentially that gives them some room to drop per episode cost if revenue/ratings drop. It is, after all, the bottom line that matter most to the network
There’s just too much filler. I’ll still watch it, on VOD, but the whole reason they had the Build Team was because Jamie has the personality of wallpaper and Adam is not nearly as cute as he thinks he is, and that has not changed.
Finally got around to watching the new episodes. So far, yeah, I guess they’re… okay.
I know the idea, supposedly, was to slow the pace down and show more of the process, but the show still feels very rushed to me. I still get the feeling that everyone is hyped up on caffeine. For instance, the new graphics. They’re more informative, sure, but they’re on screen for about half a second. I can’t even read them without pausing and rewinding, and after a while I just started ignoring them.
Even without the Build Team, I think they’re still trying to cram to much into a single episode.
I still want to see more building and brainstorming. The messing around and interaction between the guys from the early seasons has also failed to make a return so far. They’re better TV presenters than ever, I suppose, but at the same time less fun. I want to see Adam put things up his nose, and fall over. I miss that, and there seems to be less of it than ever.
It’s not all bad, though. I’ve been reminded of just how smart and talented Adam and Jamie really are. I guess it says something about the past few seasons that I’d actually forgotten that. The A-Team gun that they built in the lumber yard was freaking brilliant.
Agreed. I know they have decades of special effects experience behind them but the “magazine” and aiming platform was jaw-dropping for having only an hour to conceive and build.
If you go to tested.com, there’s some videos of Adam building things in his free time. It’s sort of fun, since he’s basically like the roadrunner of the “building things” world. He sets up doctor’s trays-style things of all the tools and bits he’ll need, so that he doesn’t have to move from the spot, and then just dives in and throws things together in an hour or two that look like entirely reasonable products.
Watching the “video game” episode now. The Doom “myth” they’re testing is ridiculously dumb. Whether in real life carrying more will slow you down unlike in the game where they didn’t put that in because hello that game is decades old and also it would have made it less fun even if they could have done it? Gimme a break.
Also Doom didn’t start the FPS thing, Adam. Wolfenstein 3D, bitch. (Maybe there are some other obscure ones earlier still, but Wolf3D definitely is the one that made them “a thing”)