I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own

I tend to watch Mythbusters a lot.  It’s a fantastic show and one that has provided me with dinner table topics and great experiments to try at home and at daycare.  It’s definitely my favourite show that is not a cartoon. 

It turns out the show is eight years old!  I was astounded when I heard that and realized that it was true.  The first episode I remember seeing was the one where they blew up a cement truck.  See the myth was that when you have just a bit of cement caked and hardened on the inside of the barrel of the cement mixer, rather than chip it out with a jackhammer the truck drivers would just toss a stick of dynamite into the truck, wait for the BOOM and sweep out all the bits of cement.  It didn’t really work that well, but in what has become typical Mythbuster fashion they ramped up the whole experience for the finale of the show and had a cement mixer nearly full of hardened cement and packed the rest of the barrel with high explosive.  They stood watching about a mile away and the whole truck simply disappeared as a result of the explosion.  It was fantastic.  It was real.  And it was my new favourite thing to see on TV Sunday nights.

I also find it funny that this is pretty much the only “reality” show I watch and it’s a hundred times better than any so called reality show that has ever been.  There are some parts of the show where they are trying to explain things and they do multiple takes because they are trying to be specific about something, but all the results and reactions are completely unscripted.  Even with that unscriptedness having seen the show for eight years Adam, Jamie, Tory, Carrie and Grant are characters simply due to their personalities and you can see how so many of their interactions come from working together for a long period of time – like how Adam imitates Jamie’s voice and mannerisms all the time.

More TV shows should aspire to deliver the same type of quality with the same type of enthusiasm as Mythbusters does.  The show is fun and entertaining and I learn something almost every week watching it.