oh that's it
well greetings i am adam savage and i am in my cave in san francisco
uh today i am taking time to answer mythbuster questions submitted by tested.com patrons
and today's question comes from hugo doll are you related to road doll
i wonder hugo wants to know had you known the success that the show would have would you have
done something different from the start would you have expected that something different to do
what would you have expected that's okay he just wants to know uh if we when we started
mythbusters if we had known the level of success the show would eventually achieve would we
have changed any of the uh any of the original parameters what would we have changed anything
nothing no that's an easy one nothing at all uh there's a way in which
there is no formula for success there is no formula for success
there's a formula for failure and it involves thinking that you know the formula for success
that's definitely true um the thing is the thing is is that the show happened the show began by
happening to us we were hired it's not our pitch it was not our idea we weren't looking to be
on television but we start filming this we film these pilots it airs discovery likes the ratings
they hire us on contract for a year plus several options and we start filming the show
and in a very very real way we were blank slates we were tabla rasas uh we didn't know what our job
was nor was it clear what our job was we were sort of figuring it out as we went and even though
uh uh carrie and tory joined in the second season and grant in the third
all of them still had that same experience of like showing up and what we're doing is
like a fire hose and you're just trying to catch all the bogies and make it all work
but in a way that's why it worked they barely contain chaos of the five of us trying to figure
out what our jobs were and trying to connect with the material and connect with the camera
and connect with each other i mean i view all of that as happening in such an organic way that i
wouldn't change a bloody thing i think it i i have to conclude that it was intrinsic to
what contributed to our success which was that we ended up being a we didn't even think of it
as a science show in the first couple of seasons we weren't even really thinking about it as a show
that explicated the scientific method that was several seasons in before we had that epiphany so
it made the science accessible in the best possible way because we weren't saying this
is science and this is how you should think of it nurses says well i'm your ambassador
to science i'm going to show you what you should know and how you should understand it
i will give an example
because one thing that the five of us did have do have did have do have
okay i want to address one thing here which was recently i did a q a
in which i was talking about fans approaching us and i named carrie grant tori i named kerry torrey
and jamie and i and scotty and i didn't name grant and i apologize for not doing that i want you to
understand the reason is at that moment in time i couldn't say grant's name at the end of that
sentence i couldn't i couldn't say something like and the people who used to approach grant
even though he's in the same boat that we were in every way so i just wanted to explain that
um but the five of us all were interested in the material that we were working with
and we had opinions about it we had points of view about it and the best episodes are the one
in which those point of view points of view were extant um and so a uh uh here's an example i'll
give about the kind of point of view i had on the material i was working with a few years a
few years after mythbusters was going so i'd say probably like 2010 2011. uh discovery reached out
to me and asked me if i wanted to host a science show that they were working on and they wanted me
to do the the the narration of the science show and they sent me a sample script and the sample
script had this thing about trucks jackknifing and it said well the truck jackknifes when it gets
past 22 degrees and that was that was the written script and i read that and i was thinking well
i don't understand what that means at all like that's not that's not an explanation that's
a fact but i don't know what that to what that fact refers and so i did a little research and i
in the research what i found out was and i might have the number of degrees wrong it's
been long time but what i learned was when a truck when a when a tractor-trailer truck uh
is traveling uh so there's the there's the truck part and there's the trailer part
and what i learned was when these two things are moving in a straight line everything is good
but in braking if they if their angle gets past 22 degrees it becomes unrecoverable
something a little like that again i i didn't redo this research uh and i'm going off of memory but
suffice to say i read their sentence it didn't make any sense i researched it figured out the
reason why a truck jackknifes and then i rewrote the script for them that bit and i sent it back
and said uh look this takes the same amount of time to say this is what i would say
and they were like oh no no no no there's no rewriting of this script we've it's all
done uh we just want you to read it and i was like oh well that's easy then i i just
don't want to that's fine i don't have to read scripts i don't understand and i won't
um that's not based on some philosophy i have what a science host is that's just simply based on me
wanting to understand the things that i'm saying and
that all happened really organically
so no there's nothing i would change about how new we were to the idea of
television or making a science show or what mythbusters was or how we participated in it
the the organic way in which it all came to pass is exactly how i would do it again we
we shot pilots with a crew of like five people nobody does that anymore that does that doesn't
happen in television no sure it happens in youtube but it didn't exist when we started so the
kind of lean lean and mean machine that we were back then is also intrinsic to our success
the difficulties we had in the first couple of years i could not be prouder of that show and
what we did and what it meant and what it still continues to mean i i could not be prouder
prouder of all of my colleagues prouder of all the producers proud of of discovery for
supporting us all those years giving us extra dough to send rocket cars into the stratosphere
i wouldn't trade it for anything and i cannot presume that i am at all smart enough to think
about something that i could have done differently that would have made it even better because
there is no even better to me it went exactly as it ought to have
yeah thank you hugo uh tested patrons keep submitting your questions and i
will continue to answer them thank you guys so much stay safe and i'll see you next time