For anyone who’s ever wondered exactly how much time may transpire between shooting a scene and airing an episode, Mythbusters “leaked” some information in their holiday myths episode that aired last week.
They’d concocted an enormous Rube Goldberg machine designed to give poor Buster a face-plant to the floor, triggered by pulling a string. String releases Mentos into pop, bowling ball knocks over pins, sending skiiers down the hill, robot bumbles into a stop sign, oven tips over, dinner falls out, cymbal-playing monkeys march forward, a cannon is lit and eventually, 35 or so mechanical gags later, Buster falls over.
Naturally, all this intricacy means there’s a lot of spots for it to go wrong. So, we see someone with the slate, indicating Take 1, Take 2, Take 6, etc…
Sharp eyes catch a date: 3/10/06, which would mean they built this very tenuously Christmas-themed rig in March, or that they engaged in some intentional deception.
Q.E.D. - any insight on this? Do they really work that many months in advance, or were they messing with us?
Mythbusters is an Australian production. The clapper’s accent was Australian. I presume that the date was written in Australian convention (day/month/year), which means the episode was filmed in October.
Easily. In fact, the research phase of the segments for an episode can take place more than a year before the segment even goes to production. All told, from conception to airing, can take up to a year and a half or more, depending upon the complexity of the build and other factors.
The production company, Beyond, is an Australian company, and some of the crew may be as well. But, most of the actual taping is done Stateside, primarily at M5 in San Fran, CA. October is unlikely as a shoot date for that segment, since postproduction takes a lot longer than that, normally.
Yes, the vast majority of Mythbusters is filmed in the Bay Area, and generally if they leave the Bay Area, they’ll show something to that effect on camera (“Time for a trip to the Mojave Desert!”). And the abandoned Naval base they go to regularly is on Alameda, which is in SF Bay.
When I was at M5 Industries on 10/27, (…he said ever so casually…), the guy showing me around told me the on-screen people were on Alameda, blowing up the Hindenburg. The NY Times happened to cover that day here (looks like it’s subscription-only now). I don’t think that episode has aired yet. He also said that they were still doing some stuff for the December episodes.
And of course, remember that some of their experiments require several months of letting something sit and fester, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the footage that makes it to air is even a year old sometimes, especially if they screw something up (like the Pyramid Power experiment where they forgot to sterilize the cutting instruments).
Not to mention, I’d like to think all parties involved would want to eliminate confusion, so the slate loader would either write 3/10/06, meaning March 10 to suit the presumably overwhelming majority of Americans in the room, or 3 Oct 06, which would be odd to Americans, but at least not ambiguous.
I’d never realized Beyond was an Australian company. How do the logistics of that shake out? Do they fly over Australian crew, shoot the bits, fly home and edit the show? Or are they Australian in management, but use local crews end equipment, and edit the show in the US? Or do they shove the raw footage through the Internet or by satellites over to Australia for editing?
Adam and Jamie would have to be idiots to take this one on. No matter what happens, they’ll get thousands of outraged emails about how they did it wrong.
Witness the current thread on the subject, which is still tottering along in spite of the fact that zut gave a stunningly thorough (and funny) treatment of the entire problem including all of the variants and assumptions more than a page ago.
Speaking of which (and I’m off to the mythbusters fan site to see if I can get an answer there), I’ve noticed in the past couple of episodes that they seem to be referring to Jamie’s company now as M7, rather than M5.
Is the voice over guy just misreading it suddenly? Or was there a name change?
Or am I just completely mishearing? (I did rewind a couple of times on the DVR to make sure I wasn’t losing it completely… )
If, say, a friend of mine’s workplace was contacted (within the last week) about using their facilities for an experiment, about when would the myth be expected to air?
Yeah… it (generally) is the one with white walls, though part of the upstairs of M5 is white, too. I have no idea where M7 is, though. The alley they use doesn’t look like the one in front of M5.
I was really disappointed in that. I know they never got the whole thing to work, but when they showed it during the credits, there was more scenes of Adam and Jamie laughing and commenting on the contraption than the contraption itself.
)
Are you suggesting that they’re not idiots?