Adam Savage spent 13 years blowing things up on MythBusters, probably one of the coolest
jobs in the world.
But Adam Savage is more than just the sum of all the things he's exploded - he's worked
on Star Wars and done a lot else besides.
Here's the untold truth of Adam Savage.
Sesame Street played a big role in Adam Savage's life, and not in the same way it did for most
kids who grew up in the '70s.
Adam Savage is artistic, creative, and clever, and it's probably not a stretch to say that
some of that came from his dad, Whitney Lee Savage, who was an animator on Sesame Street
and also did work for another popular children's television show called The Electric Company.
"And he's found it: a rubber glove sandwich."
Writing for AV Club, Savage said his dad spent two or three months a year drawing and animating
30-second spots for Sesame Street.
His dad's involvement with the show eventually led to Savage's first acting job - he did
the voicework for a series of Sesame Street spots that taught kids how common household
objects worked.
"I'll show you how a faucet works, Sheila.
You turn the handle and it releases a rain cloud named Sam inside the faucet.”
Savage also got a lot of inspiration from his dad's work, experimenting with claymation
and animation and even doing a spot for Swatch in 1988.
He said:
"Those simple animations are what I thought of as 'Dad's work' growing up.
To me, they represent a creative brain allowed to run free.
What more can one ask?"
The kid version of Adam Savage once had some pretty lofty career ambitions, as in, he just
wanted to get paid to play with toys all the time.
He told The Sneeze that before he ever wanted to work in special effects or blow things
up for a living, he wanted to be a Lego designer.
He said:
"Hands down, the best toy ever has to go Lego.
I mean, Lego fueled my desire to build things from age 5 to… age 17, I think."
Savage didn't become a Lego designer, but that desire to build undoubtedly led him to
his career in special effects and later to his career in explosions and disagreeing with
Jamie Hyneman all the time.
"This is exactly what I imagined being a mad scientist would be like when I was a child."
Just about everyone who lived in the United States during the '80s remembers Mr. Whipple.
While today's Charmin commercials feature animated bears alluding to their number two
bathroom activities, yesterday's Charmin commercials featured an old grocer named "Mr. Whipple,"
who got really bent out of shape when customers dared to "squeeze the Charmin."
"Squeeze Charmin.
Squeeze Charmin."
According to SF Gate, by the time Adam Savage was a teenager, he'd decided that maybe acting
was his thing.
And because people who are new to acting don't turn down roles, no matter how silly they
are, his legacy includes a brief stint in one of the Mr. Whipple commercials, where
he plays an apron-clad stock boy named Jimmy.
"Mr. Whipple, the roof is leaking all over the new Charmin."
And because that's not '80s-nostalgic enough, he also appeared in the 1985 Billy Joel music
video "You're only Human (Second Wind)," in which he played a kid who is rescued from
drowning as Billy Joel goes fishing in a black overcoat.
There was really no other time like the '80s.
What's the world's coolest job, besides blowing stuff up for the Discovery Channel?
Designing models for Star Wars!
Not only did he spend 13 years on MythBusters, before that he worked for Industrial Light
& Magic as a model designer.
"I worked on Episodes I and II.
Sorry about that."
For Adam Savage, watching Star Wars was a life-changing experience.
According to StarWars.com, Savage grew up reading Star Wars and special effects magazines,
so by the time he landed a job at ILM he not only understood the Star Wars universe, he
also knew how to create it.
He explained:
"I had a reputation at Industrial Light & Magic for being quite fast and that afforded me
some really cool jobs."
But after three years at ILM, Savage says he started to become restless.
That's when he got the opportunity to work on MythBusters, the other most awesome job
of all time.
And he still got to play with Star Wars toys.
"Nice bucket.”
“Thank you."
If you know anything at all about the strained relationship between Adam Savage and co-host
Jamie Hyneman, you might assume that the two incompatible personalities ended up hosting
MythBusters together through some casting accident, but the truth is actually stranger
than that.
Savage and Hyneman knew each other before MythBusters - according to SF Gate, they worked
together in the 1990s at Colossal Pictures, a special effects house in San Francisco.
Savage told The Sneeze that Jamie was responsible for his first job in the movie industry.
The pair collaborated for three years making models for commercials, and they also built
the semi-legendary Battlebot robot "Blendo."
"Blendoooooo!”
In fact it was Hyneman who first called Savage about doing MythBusters - Hyneman had been
approached by the show's creator, but didn't think he was "interesting enough" to carry
the whole show on his own.
So he called Savage and thus began one of the most antagonistic co-host relationships
in the history of television.
“Those didn't sound like regular seconds, what kind of seconds were you counting there?
Two four five six seven eight nine ten?”
Now, some people will tell you that after 13 years of myth busting, Savage and Hyneman
actively dislike each other, but that's not accurate.
Savage told Entertainment Weekly:
"It is true that we're not friends.
[...] We disagree about the small details every single day - on almost every single
detail.
But we don't really disagree about the big stuff."
He added that even though they aren't friends, they do have a deep amount of respect for
each other.
"Aw!
Holy crap!”
Even Adam Savage's most devoted fans aren't necessarily aware that he suffers from hearing
loss.
Given the nature of his job, it's tempting to conclude that the hearing loss must have
happened when something blew up on the set of MythBusters - or more likely, when lots
of things blew up on the set of MythBusters.
“WOOOOOOOOW!
Look at that!"
But explosions aren't to blame.
Savage's hearing loss is actually congenital - his ears have structural problems that leave
him at risk for infections, which can potentially lead to larger problems like partial facial
paralysis.
In an interview with Still Untitled, Savage said he's undergone a series of operations
meant to correct the structural problems in his ears, but his hearing loss is still severe
enough that he has to wear hearing aids.
"Honestly when I don't have my hearing aids in, I start to get panicked because I can't
hear anything and the world gets very small very quickly."
Savage is open about his hearing loss and is a champion for the use of hearing aids.
“But if you think you have hearing loss, or if you know someone who has hearing loss,
go get them checked, it really will radically, radically improve your life.”
You can't call yourself a bona-fide geek until you've gone to Comic-Con in awesome cosplay.
According to SyFy, every year Adam Savage not only goes to Comic-Con, he goes there
incognito in an elaborate, full-body costume that he either builds himself or commissions.
"I decided that I would build an elaborate costume that covered me completely, and I
walk the floor of San Diego Comic-Con anonymously."
His costumes have been inspired by everything from Hellboy to Chewbacca.
In 2017 he attended Comic-Con as King Arthur in a 20-pound suit of armor.
The armor was made by Terry English, who also created the costumes for the 1981 film Excalibur.
Unfortunately, you can't really be incognito if everyone knows you're always incognito,
and Comic-Con fans in the know have made a game of trying to spot Adam Savage at the
annual event.
So the next time you're at Comic-Con just look for the guy in the 100 percent self-contained
suit who looks really hot and uncomfortable, and then ask for a selfie.
He may not reveal his identity to you but you can be pretty sure he'll let everyone
in on the secret on his YouTube channel.
There are some real job perks to being the star of a long running television program
in which you get to build super-cool things and then blow them up.
One of those perks is the paycheck.
The other one is that people take you seriously even though you're pretty much the same geeky
fanboy you've always been, only now you're a geeky fanboy with leverage.
In 2017, Adam Savage got to appear in 2048: Nowhere to Run, a film short promoting Blade
Runner 2049.
According to SyFy, the film takes place in a crowded, underground marketplace and follows
the shady activities of replicant Sapper Morton, played by Dave Bautista.
Savage plays a "blood bag merchant" and can be seen over the shoulder of Bautista for
several seconds.
It's not exactly the role of a lifetime, but the awesomeness points are pretty off the
charts.
"Every bit as much fun as you’d think."