hey everybody adam savage here with a mythbusters answer to a question with
an answer to a mythbusters question um i it's funny that this is coming up now
uh because a couple of nights ago i got a text in the middle of the night from kyle hill
um who came across for the first time uh a famous quote of mine from mythbusters
and he found its origin source um and season one of mythbusters we were replicating a scene from
american graffiti in which the whole rear part of someone's transmission is dragged out of their car
and we attempted to replicate it and we were down in hunter's point uh working on it and it
was kicking our butt and i turned to the camera and i said this phrase i said this isn't i said
something like this isn't going the way we want but i reject your reality and substitute my own
and i didn't realize i just you don't ever know i didn't realize it would become a thing i didn't
realize the editors in australia would pick that up and run with it i didn't realize it would
become one of the hallmarks of mythbusters uh you know i've had my own mother repeat that phrase
back to me which is just weird and hilarious but it's not my phrase it's not my joke no no no
in fact uh it originally comes from a wonderful weird cult movie called dungeon master
yes i know many of you been yelling dungeon master into the camera the into the screen
it comes from dungeon master and it's not my joke and it's important to tell you how i learned the
joke because uh in the early 90s when i was first working commercial films and special
effects with jamie i worked another one of his regular hires was a model maker and a wonderful
sculptor named ralph miller and i haven't kept tabs on ralph i don't know how he's doing
um but uh i had a wonderful time working with him back in the day and he told me that joke
he said it to me and i was like oh that is so good i'm gonna hold on to that for a long time
and then low yeah i was on set i said it and it became a thing
so this is the official video telling you where that quote comes from and how i learned about it
but also it begs this other question that came up which is what's my favorite quote
on the show and i'm a big fan of well there's your problem
um but but there are others that didn't get so much meat out of them that i found hilarious
again in the very first set of pilots we were doing we were shooting biscuit bullet which is
can a tin of biscuit dough heat up so much in your car that it could explode and could its explosion
then smack you in the back of the head and lead you to believe in some way that you had been shot
um as we were attempting to do this as we've got like five six eight radiant heaters on the
outside of a car heaters on the inside of a car the car running the car's heaters running trying
to get the temperature in there high which is you know there are plenty places in the world
texas springs to mind where you leave a car in the sun it's going to be like 150 degrees but
san francisco isn't one of those places so we had to artificially create this heated weather
and it took a long long long long time it took forever um hang on just a second
at any rate um a lot of my so uh i was telling the story about biscuit bullet
we're there and we're trying to attempt to get the car hot enough and it's taking
what we thought would take an hour is taking like five six hours and the temperature is just
increasing tiny bits it's just exhausting and i turned to the camera and i said remember kids
science can be boring and i was just thinking like what's the what's the opposite of what one
should say if one is hosting a science type show and that made me laugh and that engendered um a
set of church giggles on set that lasted for like 10 minutes um many of my favorite quotes
came from jamie hyneman and most of those are unrepeatable i'm not here to tell you some of the
um hilariously off-color things mr heinemann has said that is between me and him and yeah it's not
it's not for me to tell his jokes um i have a joke that is one of my favorite jokes on the show
and it got cut to ribbons by accident um we were doing an episode about uh handguns
i i can't remember which one um it might have been how you hold the different ways to hold a handgun
but uh one of our regular uh uh uh gun experts was a man named frank tabor and frank owned a gun shop
in the south bay uh and was a regular contributor to mythbusters you saw him on a bunch of different
episodes frank is awesome frank i mean frank is committed you know you'd ask him to bring a couple
of pistols to the set and i'm not joking he would show up with 50. yeah also frank i i don't think
frank would mind me telling this story frank is uh not the tallest person and he's got big
mustache so there's a little yosemite sam in frank i mean he's very evocular easy to get along with
um funny guy and he's a little like yosemite sam i just like that's for real anyway uh we're on this
show we're on this shoot and frank has brought this day like 50 pistols we only needed two
or three but it's great and uh he's got this little tiny derridger let's say it's roughly
as big as this this is a little crick this is a little cricket replica from men in black um
it literally was like this big this pistol and i picked it up and i i just was like
tim or scott i can't remember who was filming like put the camera on me and i went
everybody be cool this is a rubbery a wobbly it's a wobbly everybody be cool this is a robbery
now i'm not here to adjudicate whether that's a funny joke but it made me laugh i loved the
mix of saying robbery and rubbery and the tiny shmoo voice it made me laugh and so
when that episode aired i wanted to see how that joke would land
and reader the joke was butchered and here's why um in the u.s i believe the current length of an
hour-long television program in the u.s is 41 and a half minutes that means there's eight and a half
minutes of commercials uh however internationally there is more programming and less commercials
i think it's by a few minutes i can't remember the numbers anymore but international so
there's basically an international cut and a u.s cut and the u.s cut is shorter
so uh beyond productions our production company would turn in an international cut and discovery
for some reason would insist on doing the cut to clock to the u.s
i'm not sure exactly why beyond told me that they wanted to be able to do that but
for some reason there were some who knows way above my pay grade but what happened
frequently when the u.s people would cut the clock they would cut my jokes
seriously i swear i think i lost three jokes in those cuts and so um there literally was
like it was really weird like there's this point in which i'm like everybody and then they cut
to a commercial and i didn't get to see my joke i look i'm not burying hatred so i don't really care
uh but it was asked what is my favorite quote and that one came to mind as a as a favorite joke um
but i think i'm gonna have to go even uh one step higher for my all-time favorite quote
from the show um and it came from actually another firearms expert of ours alec jason uh
alec jason is internationally renowned firearms expert many author of many published papers i
believe he worked with my friend james randy way back when randy busted a faith healing preacher
um this is totally amazing randy went to one of these guys this guy's rallies and he managed
to tune into the radio frequency that the preacher's wife was using to feed him information
about the parishioners they had people seeded out in the audience gathering information and they
would feed that information to the preacher and he'd walk up to someone and say i hear
you i you know the lord is telling me you're behind on your mortgage right and it's like no
it's his wife telling him in his ear at any rate when randy did that alec jason operated the radio
equipment he was the radio specialist for uh uh busting i think his pop-off is the name of the
of the preacher at any rate alec jason one of my heroes uh an amazing individual to
work with and we were doing the episode about um can you skip bullets off the pavement to
shoot up under someone's car and get at them and he said to me the only difference between science
and screwing around is writing it down and he said that to me while we were gathering data
and i literally stopped and i was like alec
i'm gonna use that quote on this show and i think it's going to become a thing i'm just
letting you know sometimes you know when cameron pro wrote they'll show me the money scene from
jerry maguire he knew what he had in that phrase and when alex jason said that to me
i knew what i had in that phrase because it's a beautiful thing it's a beautiful ethos and
i i when i was touring around the world with jamie or michael stevens i could say the first part of
that and the audience would finish the phrase how cool is that the only difference between science
and screwing around is writing it down i love that quote because it brings
science closer to screwing around and we think of science as the opposite of screwing around
but if you want to find people who've tested weird crap talk to a scientist man yeah
yeah it it the quote secretly has this thing in it that lowers the threshold for entry to science
that's inherently an amazing thing that's why i love that phrase so much and if there's anything
that typifies my my awakening as a scientist and an engineer on mythbusters and it's that
that doing that show taught me uh that i am both of those things uh it's because of that quote that
quote exemplifies all of that to me thank you guys so much for watching this uh very quick uh
quick and dirty mythbusters answer uh we just saw that it was getting a lot of traction and thought
we'd answer it and throw this into the mix and uh cheers you guys i will see you next time stay safe