We end up with a much more cinematic look. We replaced a bunch of our GoPro cameras this season with Blackmagic cameras.
One of the other ways in which we’ve really re-jiggered the show … has been the advent of really high-resolution, cinema quality, prime-lensed cameras for under $1,000 dollars. By the way, testing Indiana Jones was a dream come true. That’s been on the list forever! We’ve just never gotten the permission to test it, or there’s some reason that the Die Hard 2 people don’t want to give us the footage. I’ve always wanted to test Bruce Willis’ C-130 grenade party on a frozen runway. Yes! For some reason, we can’t get permission to use any of the footage from Die Hard 2. We did two episodes this season that were like that. It’s like taking a new weird subtle way to tell the story. It functions totally differently than theirs. So we asked: “What if we were The A-Team?” Then we set up a “lumber yard” in which Jamie and I were “stranded” and all we had at our disposal were the things that the A-Team had. Then we also decided to take a circumstantial approach to the story, which is looking at the situation they were in. We tried everything we could to make it work. When we watched the episode, the device was so removed from reality that we felt like we might be able to do it better. The standard way Mythbusters would do that would be to just build the weapon that we see in the show and see what it’s efficacy is. We chose one in which they’re stranded in a lumber yard and make a weapon with what they have in the lumber yard to defeat the bad guys. The A-Team was always getting stranded in places, and then building elaborate Rube Goldberg ways to get out of those places. We also delve into an episode about The A-Team, which was one of my favorites. I can’t describe it any other way than that. But the weirdness of standing next to a 5’11’’ tall Homer Simpson proportioned correctly to the cartoon in real life, it’s really peculiar. It’s a very elaborate process that we went through using three or four different technologies that we’ve used over the years in special effects. Then, of course, we had to make a Homer-this was the first time we made a non-human crash-test dummy because Homer is human, but he’s also a cartoon character, which means his proportions are totally not human. We built two replicas of the Springfield house. We ended up building our two houses out at a landfill. It’s very difficult to find things that are about to be destroyed. In all of California, and we expanded our search to Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada, and really couldn’t. We put Eric on finding us a house in which we could say take a wrecking ball to two of its sides, a house that was about to be destroyed, and we could not find one. When we needed 60,000 ping pong balls to raise a boat from the bottom of Monterey Bay, he found us 60,000 for free. We have a researcher, Eric, who is just a genius at finding things that should be impossible to find. But I really feel like when they see what we’ve been producing this year, they’ll see a program that we still love to make. When we were looking down the barrel, as it were, of Kari, Grant, and Tory leaving, Jamie and I totally expected a vigorous response. You’re totally right-any change, even a change in the narrator, was something that they considered totally not okay. The fans were so protective about the structure. We thought that would be hilarious-and it was hilariou-but I made the mistake of introducing the segment by being faux-serious, saying, “We’re toying with a new narrator for Mythbusters,” and the crowd watched the whole trailer angry! There was not a lot of applause and I had to say that was a joke. At Comic-Con a couple of years ago we thought it would be really great to cut a trailer for the new season of Mythbusters, but get Randall to narrate it. Do you remember that viral video about the honey badger? The guy who narrated that, Randall, he’s a friend of Mythbusters.
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