Saturday night, Esther and I went to the Mythbusters. They came to campus as part of our family weekend program and I was really excited. It was Kari and Grant and I really had no idea what was going to happen. As we drove the the venue, I was thinking: They can’t possibly bust a myth on stage. How would that work. They have to do hundreds of repetitions to ensure accuracy. If they aren’t going to do mythbusting, what are they going to do?
Ah! All was made clear once the lights dimmed. Kari and Grant came on stage, sat in two armchairs and proceeded to show the audience a blooper reel. While it was funny to hear them talk about NanoSiemens (get it seamens?), it was over in 15 minutes. It was definitely a rough cut, an odd voice over and sometime unintelligible dialogue took a little bit of the myth out of the experience. It might have just been my ears or an improperly calibrated sound system (I’m betting on the latter).
After the video they started with a canned Q&A session. The questioner, a student who I know, was mediocre at best in delivering the questions and in getting a better answer out of them. Being a super-fan of the show also took alot out of the answers. I knew everything that they were talking about, so their explanations held nothing new for me.
Esther and I ducked out just before the end. When the opened it up to questions, they went down hill really fast. I think the fact that young children were in the audience, lead to the type of questions: What’s the biggest explosion you’ve had on the show? How do you get your guns?
The oddest thing about the experience was the realization that it is a tv show. I know that it is a show on TV, but when Grant was talking about auditioning for the show and them discussing Scotty leaving for “personal reasons” (air quotes included), it really brought it back that it was a television show with all the some what slimey reality show editing involved.
Overall I enjoyed it, but I would say that the myth of Mythbusters… has been busted.
