Some absurd movie tropes are so pervasive that you almost believe they could happen
in real life.
That's why Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, and the rest of the Mythbusters crew have tested
dozens of movie myths over the years.
Here are some of their most memorable cinematic myth busts.
In the original Point Break, Keanu Reeves plummets to earth with a gang of surfing bank
robbers as the score plays melodramatically in the background and everyone in the audience
sighs in satisfied happiness.
Skydiving is an activity that some people do every day for reasons that remain totally
unclear to the rest of us who'd rather not fall out of a plane.
In Point Break, the skydiving buddies join hands as the ground rapidly approaches.
They then proceed to have a conversation about how awesome the experience is.
They may be shouting, but we're led to believe that they can all clearly hear and understand
each other, which seems a bit fishy.
"How do ya like it, Johnny?"
"Amazing!"
The MythBusters thought so, too, and in one episode, they decided to test this scenario
by making Grant jump out of a plane.
While in freefall, he was approached by a skydiving instructor who was asked to shout
a specific phrase several times, but Grant was unable to understand the words.
That's because in freefall, the sound of rushing air drowns out the sound of a human voice.
Thus, the myth was busted.
Incidentally, it also takes around 31 seconds to fall 4,000 feet, whereas in the movie the
freefall took three times that long, so that myth was busted as well.
Maybe you didn't notice through all your salty tears, but when Jack and Rose are floating
around in the ice-cold North Atlantic at the end of Titanic, there's a moment when they
both could've been saved.
Or at least, that's what people were saying back in 2012 around the time of Titanic's
3D re-release, when someone released a bunch of photos showing all the different ways that
both Jack and Rose could have fit together on that floating door.
You can't ever bust a myth until you actually do it for real, though.
To honor the 15th anniversary of the movie, MythBusters decided to find out if it really
was possible for both Jack and Rose to survive the sinking of the unsinkable liner.
Titanic director James Cameron told Adam and Jamie that the door wouldn't have been buoyant
enough to support both of them.
But full-scale testing seemed to prove otherwise.
In fact, Adam and Jamie boosted the door's buoyancy by tying a life jacket underneath
it.
They were both able to climb on and stay more or less out of the water.
Cameron, however, was unmoved.
"The script says Jack dies.
He has to die.
So maybe we screwed up, and the board should have been a little tiny bit smaller, but the
dude's goin' down."
James Bond films are full of ridiculous gadgets and action sequences and improbable ideas,
like Bond somehow managing to never get an STD.
But most of that just gets overlooked because it's James Bond, and he's awesome, and who
really cares whether or not science agrees with anything he does?
But some of the dumb stuff in 007's adventures really does need to be myth-busted, especially
that goofy scene in Goldfinger in which Jill Masterson gets smothered in gold paint and
dies.
MythBusters called B.S. on that one, and both Adam and Jamie went under the brush to see
if they could survive being covered in gold paint.
Jamie seemed to have a weird blood pressure response, though doctors speculated it was
probably just because his blood pressure tended to be high anyway.
Meanwhile Adam had a drop in body temperature, which may have had more to do with the fact
that he was essentially naked except for the paint.
But neither of them suffered any serious physical consequences.
Well, maybe except for the rectal thermometer, which was certainly uncomfortable, though
far from lethal.
If you ever find yourself dangling from a ledge by your fingertips, that's no big deal.
Just hang on for a few minutes and help will arrive soon enough.
We've seen this happen often enough in the movies to know that ledge dangling is just
a temporary problem.
After all, Frodo Baggins could do it even when he was short one finger.
It turns out we were right about one thing: ledge dangling is only temporary, because
nobody can hang onto one for as long as movies imply that we can.
When the MythBusters team tested this out, they found that everyone who tried it was
able to hold onto the ledge for just one minute, and that was only because they had about three
inches of space to hang onto.
When the space was reduced, their times were cut down to between 30 and 40 seconds, with
the exception of Grant, who couldn't get a grip at all with a half inch ledge.
So unless someone happens to be standing by with a safety net or a large bucket of styrofoam
peanuts, your chances of surviving a ledge-dangle really aren't that encouraging.
Shooting around corners is something that cool characters are known to do in certain
action movies.
This trope might not be as prevalent as some of the others the MythBusters have tested
over the years, but what gun-toting movie hero or villain doesn't wish for a device
that will let them shoot around a corner?
MythBusters tested a couple of myths related to this idea.
In the first, they bent the barrel of a rifle and tested it to see if the bullet would exit
the barrel with actual lethal force.
Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, it did.
On another episode, they tested a specific myth perpetrated by the 2008 movie Wanted,
in which the characters can curve bullets just by swinging their arms.
When the MythBusters tried it out, they were unable to duplicate the feat using normal
humans, though it sure looked like they were all having fun trying.
"I have to look at the high speed, but I'm pretty sure I curved that one."
Just to be sure, they also rigged a robotic arm to swing twice as fast as a human arm,
but the bullet still left the gun in a straight line.
One of the most memorable scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
happens when Jack Sparrow and Will Turner use an upside-down rowboat as an improvised
submarine.
They walk underwater with the boat over their heads, and the camera cuts to them inside
the boat, where there's a pocket of air that lets them breathe while sneaking across the
ocean floor.
"This is either madness or brilliance."
"It's remarkable how often those two traits coincide."
But then the MythBusters crew had to come along and ruin it all.
In one episode, they tested the rowboat myth as well a couple of others from popular pirate
movies.
When they tried to walk into the water with the boat over their head, they found that
they weren't able to actually drag it down with them because their bodies were too buoyant.
60 pounds of pirate gear didn't weigh them down enough, nor did 500 pounds of weight
on the boat itself.
In the end, they figured it would take about 2,000 pounds of force to keep the boat underwater,
which means there's really no way Jack and Will could've pulled this one off, no matter
how mad or brilliant.
Is it possible that the MythBusters could ever be wrong?
Almost certainly not.
They are science incarnate.
They might occasionally send cannonballs through random suburban neighborhoods, but they're
never wrong.
Not even when it comes to a galaxy far, far away.
In the MythBusters Star Wars Special, Adam made a Tauntaun out of foam, synthetic skin,
and fur.
The crew stuffed the fake carcass full of fake organs, and then put a dummy with a circulatory
system called "Thermo Boy" inside of it.
They then warmed the gross duo to 99 degrees and placed them in a negative 40 degree refrigerator.
Jamie and Adam reasoned that Han Solo would've needed two and a half hours to build a shelter,
and by the end of that time period Thermo Boy's temperature had only dropped to 92 degrees.
This myth was thus deemed plausible.
"So, if you had access to the large thermal mass of a large animal and could get inside
it, it might just save your life."
Not everyone agrees with them, though.
In 2012, io9 came to the conclusion that Luke would've been a goner inside the Tauntaun,
though they used some slightly different numbers to arrive at that conclusion.
Like the Mythbusters, they decided on a starting body temperature of 95 degrees, since Luke
was probably already in a mild state of hypothermia.
But they calculated an outside temperature of negative 60 instead of negative 40.
Using those numbers as a baseline, they figured that Han only had about 47 minutes to get
Luke inside a real shelter.
They didn't have a fake Tauntaun to try it out on, though, so we'll give the edge to
the MythBusters' "plausible" conclusion.
Indiana Jones is all kinds of awesome, especially with a bullwhip.
He uses it to swing across holes in the floors of scary jungle temples, to yank a hot poker
out of a Nazi's hand, and to even save his dad from falling off a tank.
MythBusters did a whole episode on Indy, and they had plenty to say about bullwhips.
In one segment, Adam and Jamie made a chasm out of shipping boxes and put a wooden post
over the top to simulate a tree branch.
When they covered the post with sandpaper, which is more similar to the bark of a tree
than sanded wood is, Adam was able the cross the simulated chasm via bullwhip.
The pair also tried to master hitting a small target with a bullwhip, which is evidently
not as easy as Indy makes it look.
They brought in a whip expert, and after that, Jamie was able to snag Adam's hand with the
whip, which would've been enough to throw off his aim.
Adam was then able to strike Jamie's gloved hand, which would've been enough to make an
ungloved hand drop its weapon.
Both myths were thus deemed plausible.
Jaws is a classic of blockbuster and horror filmmaking.
Any movie about the hunt for a man-eating great white shark is going to be thrilling,
so did Steven Spielberg really need the climax to be an explosion?
Of course he did.
It's not like you could kill a giant shark with a whale-sized harpoon gun or something
obvious.
But could you actually blow up a scuba tank by shooting it while it's lodged inside the
mouth of a very big fish?
"Why, you son of a-"
This myth ended up being busted not just once but twice.
Shooting the scuba tank in the mouth of a fake shark did nothing, until the crew tried
shooting it with a .50-caliber sniper rifle.
Even then it didn't explode, though it was punctured, as the bullet propelled down its
gullet and out the tail end.
So it would've been a kill shot for sure, just not the dramatic explosion shown in the
movie.
In Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Bride finds herself in a coffin.
Unlike an average person, she doesn't freak out and end up dying from oxygen deprivation
within a few minutes because of hysterical screaming.
Instead, she keeps her cool and punches a hole in the coffin, then she climbs out through
the dirt, literally rising from the grave, thus giving hope to all humans who have ever
been terrified of waking up inside a coffin.
But then MythBusters had to go and snatch all that hope away.
The crew built a punching robot that could generate the same force as a human punch,
put the poor thing inside a pine coffin, and let it try to punch its way out.
The robot punched the lid 600 times and barely cracked it.
So the mythbusters then decided to see if it would be possible to dig yourself out through
the dirt.
They tested that out by using a coffin with a sliding trap door in it that allowed dirt
inside.
When buried six feet under, the coffin filled with dirt so quickly that it would've been
impossible to get out before suffocating.
Perhaps we should return to the practice of equipping coffins with bells on strings just
in case.
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