Adam Savage here in my cave from Tested.com with a new show-and-tell.
Well you see a piece of it right here. This looks like a charred and burnt hand
and that's exactly what it is but it is a very special hand because this is one
of the four remaining pieces of Buster that I kept from the end of MythBusters.
Buster obviously was the crash-test dummy we used in so many of our
experiments and the first thing to tell you about Buster is that there's an
original Buster but after that everything we abused we named Buster so
every time you saw something fall to its death, that was one Buster. Sometimes
Buster was a sinned a ver with realistic organs and a realistic skeletal and
veinous structure sometimes Buster was a rescue Randy that firemen carry and fire
women carry up and down stairs to train for carrying actual people up and down
stairs during fires which is amazing and if you've never had to lift the dead
weight of a full human oh my god your respect for fire people will go up so
fast but there was an original Buster and I'm the one that actually found him
so we shot the pilots for Mythbusters in the summer of 2002 they spent a few
months additive the first episode of Mythbusters aired in January of 2003 and
within a week discovery called us and said we want a full series and we had a
couple of months before the production company showed up and so I thought and
we had talked about it during the pilots that a crash-test dummy would be amazing
thing to have for a show like this so I started to look into crash test dummies
and I found out that in 2003 the most modern crash test dummy was called a
hybrid 3 and they were expensive hundreds of thousands of dollars for one
of these well I knew no one was gonna give us a hybrid 3 but I thought well if
a hybrid 3 has come out recently then maybe there's a bunch of people with
hybrid twos on the shelf and they might let us borrow one of those and so I
called and now I'm going to be circumspect about who I spoke to because
I spoke to a company agency what have you hooroo wishes still to remain
anonymous however I called up this company agency
etc and I said hey I'm working on this new television show for the Discovery
Channel it's called Mythbusters and we need a
crash-test dummy and they were like oh yeah you need to crash test dummy and I
said yeah I said what do you want what are you thinking about and I said I'm
thinking that since the hybrid 3 is a new addition that you might have a
hybrid - you might loan us and holy moly were those like the right words
sometimes when you're talking to someone just having done a little bit of
research yourself helps get them across the line because of course they thought
you want one of our crushes Amit's we spend tens of hundreds of thousands of
dollars on these things why would we give you one and then I asked for last
year's model and all of a sudden they were like I think we could do that and
sure enough they literally mailed me a hybrid - crash-test dummy in its
entirety and said please don't tell anyone where you got this sight don't
five years after that I sat on a plane next to the very executive who had
authorized the giving of that crash-test dummy to me and he denied it right there
to my face it was awesome so this is a secret and I'm keeping that secret but
here is Buster's hand and this is the hand from the very first buster that we
received back then eventually I think Kari grant and Tory got their own hybrid
- dummy that they played with but this is from the very first one and this is
one of four pieces I have saved I also have one of Buster's shoulders that
shoulder we actually we shattered dropping him from the very first
experiment we did with Buster we broke him into little chunky pieces see
because we were operating under this assumption that a crash-test dummy was
meant to be heavily abused and would survive anything we could throw at it so
the first thing we did was we dropped it from a hundred and eighty five foot tall
crane into water and it shattered our crash-test dummy it literally sheared
the shoulder right here and you can see weld marks where Scottie Chapman welded
it back together before it fell apart again in another subsequent experiment
so here's how far off the mark we were about Buster's resiliency
we thought he'd be able to survive anything your average car crash though
the human body sustains somewhere between zero and about 75 G's of force
in your average car accident 75 GS that's 75 times the force of gravity
I myself have experienced seven and a half G's and I stayed awake and it took
every ounce of my strength so 70 G's is a very very lethal amount of G's to
sustain in an accident but when you drop Buster from 185 foot
Tower into water he sustained over 550 G's aha
yeah like half an order of magnitude or more force than a standard car crash so
that's when we started making our own Buster's and sort of being more
judicious about what we used Buster for and like I said if we abused it and
threw it out of a plane or a train or an automobile that's we called it Buster
but Buster was well let me just put it this way there is in fact still an
international church of Buster they worship Him because he has died so many
times for your knowledge but these are two of the pieces I also have a piece of
Buster's under skull and as you can see there's evidence of much damage where it
was shattered welded back together again shattered again above the weld I love
how much narrative there is in these pieces and then just last weekend I was
going through my storage space and I found the box of all the key bits of
Mythbusters display that I kept in my office at Jamie's shop and I found the
most important piece which is Buster's face yeah and I have so much sentimental
love for this thing these magnificent Frankenstein stitches which were done by
the brilliant and amazing kari byron while they were filming with buster she
really turned him into a leather-faced horror show which is right up my alley
and my sense of humor and I will tell you that we had so many parts and chunks
that for Mythbusters series ending the production and Jamie
and I put together a small plastic box for every single crew and cast member
that included chunks of Buster my favorite new salsa and also a burnt
broken or waterlogged or bullet hole camera because those are the other
things we destroyed more of than anything else on the show Burtt cameras
and chunks of Buster that was our crew gift and this is my show-and-tell
this all lives on a shelf over in the corner so I can wax philosophical about
all the time I spent with this lovely dude over the years thanks for watching
you