Especially anything that involved giving Grant motion sickness and making him hurl into a bucket.
That’s what I figure too. And if it’s true that there are only two years left on Adam and Jamie’s contracts, I could see them aiming for that as their swansong too. The show is getting a bit long in the tooth and has to end sometime. 13 years seems pretty damn good to me.
Totally agree.
Although, one of my favorite segments was the one about the cannon that Capt. Kirk used against the Gorn.
The thing that really got to me was the reduction of actual content in favor of constant teasing and recapping before and after every commercial break.
No, they appear to be downsizing.
To tell the truth, when I think about Mythbusters, I don’t think about Adam and Jamie. They just aren’t nearly as interesting. Jamie is a quiet guy who doesn’t do well on camera. Adam is just an opposite.
The build team has been with them since season 2, and that’s when the show got big. Season 1 was fresh, but it was a completely different show. They even has an urban myth expert–something that made all their experiments useless since they could have just asked her.
It is true they aren’t doing many myths anymore, but that’s because there aren’t all that many. Snopes has pretty much run out of myths, too, really, and they cover a lot more variety.
The old show spent way too long on the building, constantly teasing you about the myth. Having two different things going on at once let it be split up and not feel like they were just prolonging the inevitable every time. The sped up version made it much better.
I think the reason for the cast tightening is that the show is declining badly, and they just don’t want to pay for everyone anymore. The build team’s contract is up, so they let them walk. In a couple years, Jamie’s and Adam’s contract will be up, and they’ll be let go unless the show becomes big again.
Either that, or they are doing the desperate thing shows do before they go off the air, where they shake things up to hold on to viewers. Heck, it’s probably both at the same time.
Scottie ROCKED. I loved her and vastly preferred her over Kari, precisely because she was more interested in the hands-on creating and building.
I haven’t watched in ages because of what others have said. But most importantly, I got fed up with “experiments” that had glaring errors, unreasonable assumptions, etc. And the show wants to weasel both ways: They OBVIOUSLY want to look all sciencey and researchy, but when someone points out an error in their experiments or reasoning, suddenly they aren’t SCIENTISTS, you guys and they’re just regular joes messing around for fun.
I liked Scottie, too. Kari, for all her wonderful qualities, always seemed to be on the show to be part token female, part eye candy. It was good to have another woman on the show who was less obvious geek fantasy material, to balance things out. I wish they’d kept Scottie around.
After all, she was hired specifically for the shape of her buttocks.
That only occasionally pisses me off. Most of the time, I think they strike a pretty good balance. For instance, this most recent episode involved testing whether back-to-front airplane boarding is slower than other methods. Which they tested by building a full size replica airplane and having people board it a bunch of different ways. Basically, the correct thing to do… perform an experiment. Of course they would really need to run each test a bunch of different times with a bunch of different sets of people, in different orders, without people knowing what they’re testing for, yada yada yada. But that would take FOREVER, and be boring as hell. Overall, the basic message of “you don’t know the answer to X, so you RUN A TEST to see what is” is so important that I usually don’t mind if the test isn’t really exhaustively correct.
I’ll miss Tory, Kari and Grant.
Grant especially was very important for his knowledge of robotics and physics. Grant was a off camera consultant from the very beginning and finally was convinced to join after Scottie Chapman quit. She was the grease monkey all around mechanic that knew cars and welding.
I can’t imagine how empty the show will be with Jamie and Adam.
But he (and none of the others) don’t discuss Physics anymore. A quick calculation or explanation can be shown to prove how absurd something is and then they can prove that the Laws of Physics still stand. E.g., the guy (skydiver?) falling on a teeter-totter and sending a child onto the top of a building unharmed. Not one mention of why that is obviously impossible. (Reverse it: Toss the child off a building onto a teeter-totter with an adult on the other end. What happens?)
The only real work Kari seemed to do in many shows was paint stuff. In practical terms, she will not be missed. Tory was just a goofball comic relief character.
They needed hands-on, down and dirty types. Not media caricatures.
Maybe Buster will finally start getting back his old screen time.
I quit watching when I realized how much I hated the narrator/ announcer guy. I’d like to see them use him for the decapitated head retaining consciousness myth episode.
I’m still surprised they weren’t separated from the show with the whole
“Did you put the electric fence in here?”
<fingers crossed> “No.”
<Adam gets shocked by the Ark of the Covenant>
incident.
There lack of rigor has always bothered me, but they lost me altogether when they referred to Lawn Chair Larry as a myth and set out to “prove” it
WTF? That was an actual event not a myth. There is no proving it or busting it, it happened.
I can’t remember where I heard this, but apparently the producers insisted on that prank, against Kari, Grant and Tory’s objections. That’s why everyone looks so uncomfortable when it’s going down.
Correct. In a clip show they said that producer never worked for them again.
I saw that one. That was just mean :mad:
I was disappointed to hear the build team is leaving. I am encouraged if that means there will be more focus on the working out the aspects of the myth and how to test it.
I was just reflecting this season how the show was focusing a lot more on “here’s the myth, here’s the results” and less on “how do we test that?”
You have to remember, the team was originally the *build *team - their job was to assist Jamie and Adam in building things. It was Tory, Kary, Scottie, and they had another intern the first season. However, after a few episodes, it was felt they needed to bring more people to the front to get more myths done.
That led to splitting Jamie and Adam, and doing several of their challenges. The intern was gone after 1 season, and Scottie left after a couple, which is when the brought in Grant.
Sage Rat is right, it wasn’t until then that they started splitting into the A team and the B team for myths. The Adam/Jamie dynamic was part of what sold the show, and so it was important for them to interact. Jamie’s early comment about the show was that he needed someone who was a good talker and outgoing, and that’s why he brought in Adam.
I think the driver is money. The B team weren’t making a whole lot off the show (they mentioned at Dragon*Con back some years ago that there were times they were scrimping between paychecks - it probably got better, but not drastically), but having two shop spaces would be a savings. Plus, if they’re running two shops, that’s separate camera crews as well.
One of the recent movie myths that I liked was the one about whether you could use a corvette as a ramp to flip a mustang. Now I don’t think anybody expected the kind of controlled beauty that the movie offered, a nice pop and flip over a limousine and a clean landing, but it was still interesting to see if they could even get a clean launch. Answer: nope. Even with a ramp modification to the front of the corvette, the mustang still crunched the windshield and roof pretty bad. Too much mass on too fragile a structure. Without the ramp, even dropping the corvette bumper and raising the mustang bumper, they only got smashed car parts.
I look forward to seeing if the changes improve things. And I wish Tory, Kary, and Grant the best.