hey everybody adam savage and i am surrounded by mythbuster props for an excellent reason and
that is well these props have all spent the last decade traveling around the united states as part
of a science museum exhibition called mythbusters the explosive exhibition i hope you got a chance
to see it because it is no longer but don't be sad because now is your chance to own a real
piece of mythbusters history all of these props from the exhibition are being auctioned off by
prop store to benefit the grant yamahara steam foundation and i'm covering some of the highlights
and this is a really i'm particularly fond of this highlight because this is some behind the scenes
mythbusters ephemera these cameras are going to auction these off as a lot all three of them
as you can imagine on mythbusters we broke a lot of cars we set a lot of buildings on a fire we
detonated countless explosives but what you often did not see is how many cameras we destroyed and
we destroyed hundreds over the decade and a half we were making the show and here are three of the
cameras we destroyed um at the end of production there was a bin full of burnt waterlogged cameras
and i just want to walk you through some of the storytelling that is extent on these
i mean they are beaten to hell but they also tell a story and it's worth walking you through
it first of all there's the issue of sound um these little sony handycams were like our bread
and butter cameras for years they were small and cheap and we could place them all over the place
in fact the way we placed them is using this gummy uh rooftop product called butyl
is a kind of a black tar putty and uh the way scott or lead cameraman would do it is he put
like let's say you had a car and you need to put a camera on the dashboard you can't screw
anything to a dashboard you can't really clamp to it because it's this big kidney-shaped thing
so what scott would do is he'd lay down masking tape on the dashboard and then stick this big
ball of butyl putty to the masking tape and then jam the camera into the ball of butyl so each of
these cameras has just this like wonderful patina of stickum on the bottom this one doesn't probably
because it got destroyed before it got a chance to second of all there is these gray muffies
these are there because these sony handicaps had excellent sound for us as you could imagine
for a sound guy using a radio mic it can be very difficult to keep continuity of sound when we're
like driving cars for a mile up the alameda runway there's no way in which for him to keep a perfect
constant signal so we used these sony handycams to get some of our best audio from inside of the
accidents here on this camera you can specifically see what probably did it and it's got this carved
out part on the front i don't know whether that meant it got torn off and banged into something
this one has what looks to me like a custom aluminum plate holding it down so this might
have been part of a rig in which we were in which we had to like come up with a specific way to get
a camera exactly where we wanted it the cameras also have multiple pieces of colored tape on them
that was part of the a procedure that scott and the camera camera department worked out
um every set was different as you could imagine when you've got 15 cameras covering all aspects
of action just making sure they're all slated with the proper date so that the editorial team
knows what the hell they're going to be working with is in and of itself an engineering task
um and lastly one of my favorite aspects of the camera department was the fact that they gave
every single camera a name and these two the name has been peeled off but this one is merle haggard
i don't know why it's merle haggard but i love that it's merle haggard there were all sorts of
different sergeant bat guano from dr strangelove was one of the cameras there were all the spice
girls for a while jurassic park dinosaurs i think was one of the name nomenclatures um like i said
we probably went through about 75 of these cameras over the course of doing mythbusters and now is
your chance to buy these three i personally would recommend you like displaying them all together in
some kind of window box but that choice is totally up to you um when you handle them you'll feel some
sticky crap on your fingers that is like that is like making you almost an unofficial member of
the mythbusters crew yeah so get in today uh the web address is propstory.com mythbusters all of
the proceeds go to benefit the grant yamaha steam foundation thank you guys and i will see you next
time