I just watched the rerun of last week’s Mythbusters episode - the one about the bubble wrap.
Was it just me or were they incredibly irresponsible? They had established that 10 g’s was the safe impact they were aiming for. They had also established that dropping Buster off a building could produce impacts that would definitely be fatal.
So they tested various different options and they found one that brought the impact down to 15 g’s on a test with Buster in the lab. So Jaime came up with another tweak that he thought would improve the performance…
…and they tested it with Adam at the building site.
Is it just me or was that insane? What if the new tweak hadn’t improved performance and Adam landed at 15 g’s like Buster had? What if the new tweak made conditions worse and Adam landed at 20 g’s? What if the conditions at the building site were significantly different from conditions inside the lab?
It seems obvious to me they should have kept using Buster in the tests until they came up with a system that reliably produced 10 g impacts at the building site before Adam or any one else tried it out.
Admittedly, they may have done more tests off camera that weren’t shown. But they certainly said in the show that Adam was trying an untested system.
On a side note, that episode and this week’s episode used the phrase “butter zone”. (At least that’s what it sounded like.) Is this a new buzzword I’ve never heard of before?
I don’t remember where they wound up on the g forces for that final test. I remember they were aiming for 10 gs, but I don’t remember them suggesting that 15 would be unsafe. Buster got “hurt” in other tests with far less padding. By the end they had Adam wrapped in 100 or 150 pounds of the stuff. I think it should go without saying that they would not have done it and would not have been allowed to do it if they felt 15 gs was going to cause Adam serious injury. Adam has a wife and children and the crew and Discovery doesn’t want to injure or kill anybody. That said, the last few moments of that episode were very tense with that wind whipping around and the look on Adam’s face when the release was pulled was genuinely alarming. Usually when they’re doing something dangerous, the dangerous thing is separated from them by a blast shield or shark cage or something. Not this time.
And the say “butter zone” a lot. I don’t remember when I first heard it.
Back in earlier seasons when they still showed more of this kind of thing, I remember a few episodes where some planned stunt was canceled because they couldn’t get approval from the insurance company. I doubt that the insurance company would have approved the bubble wrap drop if the team hadn’t demonstrated to their satisfaction that Adam would be reasonably safe. And yeah, I assume they did a lot of off-screen tests that we didn’t see, as well.
They have insurance people on-site at all times during their experiments. They wouldn’t let them go forward if the experiment was not safe. Unless it involves firing a cannon into a suburb.
That took me by surprise as well, but it turned out that all it was it that when he was released his head came up off the board and they hadn’t planned for that. I’d imagine if they did it again he’d either know that he has to actively hold it down (similar to how you have to push it back on some roller coasters) or they’d restrain it. I don’t think he was worried about the fall, just the unexpected head movement.
Having said that, I’m going to agree with Runner Pat, while it seemed odd to me as well that they suddenly decided to drop him, I’m assuming they did some off camera (or un-aired) tests that showed that he’d be fine.
They’ve said many times that even though the viewers might only see 10 minutes of a given myth there a lot more hours of footage (available on discover dot com slash mythbusters) and many many many more hours of work and research that goes in to it.
Yeah, they definitely tested it and cut it out to ramp up the tension. Which is a little lame, because that’s the kind of cheap reality show stunts that Mythbusters usually avoid. They cut stuff out for time, but you can generally see where a myth is going from the tests.
That’s what I would have expected them to do. Except that normally they would either explicitly say they had done some off camera testing (usually as a plug for the website) or they just wouldn’t mention it. If they did off camera testing for this episode, they explicitly misled the viewers.
The sequence was them trying out different ways of making padding; testing them with Buster; not quite getting the results they said were their safety target; Jaime coming up with a new idea (taping one end of the tubes to make them cone-like); Jaime demonstrating how he was going to change the padding while saying Adam was going to take the next test. The narrator even made a point of “rewinding” the tape so we could hear Jaime say that again.
So watching the show, it was clear that they were saying Adam was using an untested idea. If they did test it, they deliberately were misleading us.
Like you said, bad reality shows do this all the time. But I expect better from Mythbusters.
“butter zone” was first coined in 1995 in the classic example of modern cinema, Hackers, starring a young Angelina Jolie before she started collecting African kids. The exact quote is, “You’re in the butter zone now, baby.”, and they are using it to describe a laptop that has gasp a 28.8 modem. It’s fly, ya know?
Yes, I think he explained that later in the episode. But you didn’t know that at the time, and it was unnerving at the time. Especially since the camera was right in Adam’s face.
The thing that bothers me is that the narrator did actually say that they were dropping Adam using an untested design. It stood out for me, because I was thinking exactly what the OP was - they’re dropping Adam without testing? Oh, they must have cut it out.
So either (a) they did the testing, then mislead the audience with the narrator’s one line, or (b) they didn’t test.
Both kind of leave me feeling uneasy, and a little sad.