Mythbusters 7x01 "Demolition Derby Special" - Discuss and Grade
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That sounds pretty stupid, who the hell believes that could be possible?
I'm sure they'll explain where the myth comes from in the show.
Perhaps the 4000-foot drop is with a parachute or encased in balloons or something.
I'm glad they're revisiting the "pancaked between two trucks" myth. I had my problems with the execution there, their inability to get the trucks to hit really head-on. I always thought it would have been better if, instead of pulling both trucks toward each other at 70 mph, they'd had one truck stationary and the other slam into it at 140 mph. Same physics, but fewer variables to control.
I'm glad they're revisiting the "pancaked between two trucks" myth. I had my problems with the execution there, their inability to get the trucks to hit really head-on. I always thought it would have been better if, instead of pulling both trucks toward each other at 70 mph, they'd had one truck stationary and the other slam into it at 140 mph. Same physics, but fewer variables to control.
Well, good luck getting the producers to pay for trashing a truck that goes 140 mph... 
I'm glad the show is back. I read recently that Kari Byron is pregnant, but I don't know if that will figure into this episode.
Well, good luck getting the producers to pay for trashing a truck that goes 140 mph...
Well, the truck that got trashed wouldn't have to be capable of driving at that speed, just getting towed at that speed. The tricky part would be getting a tow vehicle powerful enough to get up that kind of speed while towing a massive semi truck.
Or they could stick a rocket on the back...
Shame they can't try out the "Classic Corvette survives re-entry from Shuttle cargo bay" bit from "Heavy Metal" 
One of the most amazing movie opening scenes... EVAR!Shame they can't try out the "Classic Corvette survives re-entry from Shuttle cargo bay" bit from "Heavy Metal"
Speed Bus Turn: I'm not sure I'd even call this a myth, let alone a busted one. Under the circumstances in the film, I can't blame Keanu's character for being afraid that the bus might flip and taking precautions to reduce the probability. There's a difference between a myth and a precaution. And the physics behind the idea made sense.
On the other hand, though, the bus in the movie tipped a lot more than the real one, no doubt thanks to some kind of suspension rig. Now, what would've been a myth worth testing is, if a bus going at 50 MPH tilted that far, could it recover?
I was disappointed at the overkill they applied to making it flip. They should've tried it with just the barrels first, then the shocks (since those might conceivably fail), and only gone for the weights on top (the least realistic parameter) if all else failed.
Car Chase Myths: Ohh, all that fresh fruit gone to waste! It's horrible! Couldn't they have used wax fruit or something?
I was surprised the fruit stand was smashed so thoroughly; it looked pretty robust. But 70 MPH is very fast, and the car was also pretty thoroughly smashed. An interesting result. The chain-link fence result was not too surprising; if a car could smash through a heavy wooden fruit stand like that, the fence would surely give way too.
The trailer result was a little scary -- those things are flimsy! But I'm not surprised it stopped the car; it looked like the trailer had a more solid understructure or chassis or whatever the word is, and the car sort of got snagged in that.
I'm surprised at how well the "convertible conversion" cliche worked. Too bad the car got wrecked separately thereafter so they couldn't really determine if it stayed driveable. And I'm wondering if a living driver would've been in danger from shrapnel and glass.
Car Drop: I'm not sure this is so much testing a myth as testing the authenticity of an event in a commercial, but I guess a lot of what they do these days is like that. Anyway, it's hard to se what the commercial was trying to demonstrate, since it was kind of apples and oranges -- one car maintaining steady velocity at its top speed, the other accelerating at something less than 9.8 m/s^2 from zero to terminal velocity. It wasn't saying anything about the car's acceleration, apparently; it was just an overly convoluted way of saying "our car goes real fast." Which is stupid, since nobody's legally gonna be able to drive it that fast anyway.
Anyway, the high-speed shots of the cars hitting the ground were impressive. I particularly liked the first one, where it hit nose-first at an angle and sort of changed from a \ to a __.
The setup of the test, with Grant and Tory flying overhead in the small chopper while the big chopper dropped the car, looked very dangerous. What if the winds had blown the falling car to land on top of the small chopper?
It was ironic to see Adam & Jamie come up with this great new steering waldo for the bus, with Adam saying they'd be keeping it and using it whenever they needed to RC a car again, and then seeing Grant making do with his usual joystick controller. The two teams really do operate pretty separately, don't they?
Compact Compact: Well, they didn't revisit it the way I suggested, but they managed to pull it off pretty well with just a slight refinement of the original technique, having the tow trucks pull both cables in tandem to get the trucks to arrive simultaneously. I wasn't quite sure it worked; it looked to me like the crash was not quite head-on, that the trucks were staggered enough that the car got pushed past rather than sandwiched between. But Jamie made a good point about how you'd get some slipping and twisting even with a head-on collision. And the car did look pretty thoroughly crushed, so I guess it was hit by both cabs.
But then they ramped it up and did it kind of the way I suggested -- right down to the rocket! Except without the trucks. And I was just thinking about a track and enough rocket propulsion to reach maybe 100 mph or so. Not 600-plus. That collision was amazing to watch on high-speed. Hell, it wasn't a collision so much as a splash. The impact basically disintegrated the car from front to back. It was so fast that the structure of the car simply didn't have time to deform in order to get out of the way of the oncoming steel plate; it just got pulverized and pushed aside. That's a truly extraordinary thing to see.
And yeah, that second rocket stage did go really fast.
I wish their caption writers had checked their spelling at the end there -- it's In memoriam, not In memorium.
On the other hand, though, the bus in the movie tipped a lot more than the real one, no doubt thanks to some kind of suspension rig. Now, what would've been a myth worth testing is, if a bus going at 50 MPH tilted that far, could it recover?
I was disappointed at the overkill they applied to making it flip. They should've tried it with just the barrels first, then the shocks (since those might conceivably fail), and only gone for the weights on top (the least realistic parameter) if all else failed.
Car Chase Myths: Ohh, all that fresh fruit gone to waste! It's horrible! Couldn't they have used wax fruit or something?
I was surprised the fruit stand was smashed so thoroughly; it looked pretty robust. But 70 MPH is very fast, and the car was also pretty thoroughly smashed. An interesting result. The chain-link fence result was not too surprising; if a car could smash through a heavy wooden fruit stand like that, the fence would surely give way too.
The trailer result was a little scary -- those things are flimsy! But I'm not surprised it stopped the car; it looked like the trailer had a more solid understructure or chassis or whatever the word is, and the car sort of got snagged in that.
I'm surprised at how well the "convertible conversion" cliche worked. Too bad the car got wrecked separately thereafter so they couldn't really determine if it stayed driveable. And I'm wondering if a living driver would've been in danger from shrapnel and glass.
Car Drop: I'm not sure this is so much testing a myth as testing the authenticity of an event in a commercial, but I guess a lot of what they do these days is like that. Anyway, it's hard to se what the commercial was trying to demonstrate, since it was kind of apples and oranges -- one car maintaining steady velocity at its top speed, the other accelerating at something less than 9.8 m/s^2 from zero to terminal velocity. It wasn't saying anything about the car's acceleration, apparently; it was just an overly convoluted way of saying "our car goes real fast." Which is stupid, since nobody's legally gonna be able to drive it that fast anyway.
Anyway, the high-speed shots of the cars hitting the ground were impressive. I particularly liked the first one, where it hit nose-first at an angle and sort of changed from a \ to a __.
The setup of the test, with Grant and Tory flying overhead in the small chopper while the big chopper dropped the car, looked very dangerous. What if the winds had blown the falling car to land on top of the small chopper?
It was ironic to see Adam & Jamie come up with this great new steering waldo for the bus, with Adam saying they'd be keeping it and using it whenever they needed to RC a car again, and then seeing Grant making do with his usual joystick controller. The two teams really do operate pretty separately, don't they?
Compact Compact: Well, they didn't revisit it the way I suggested, but they managed to pull it off pretty well with just a slight refinement of the original technique, having the tow trucks pull both cables in tandem to get the trucks to arrive simultaneously. I wasn't quite sure it worked; it looked to me like the crash was not quite head-on, that the trucks were staggered enough that the car got pushed past rather than sandwiched between. But Jamie made a good point about how you'd get some slipping and twisting even with a head-on collision. And the car did look pretty thoroughly crushed, so I guess it was hit by both cabs.
But then they ramped it up and did it kind of the way I suggested -- right down to the rocket! Except without the trucks. And I was just thinking about a track and enough rocket propulsion to reach maybe 100 mph or so. Not 600-plus. That collision was amazing to watch on high-speed. Hell, it wasn't a collision so much as a splash. The impact basically disintegrated the car from front to back. It was so fast that the structure of the car simply didn't have time to deform in order to get out of the way of the oncoming steel plate; it just got pulverized and pushed aside. That's a truly extraordinary thing to see.
And yeah, that second rocket stage did go really fast.
I wish their caption writers had checked their spelling at the end there -- it's In memoriam, not In memorium.
Just started watching this on my TiFaux. Looks like a great episode and start to this new season of Mythbusters!
Someone above remarked on Kari's pregnancy, and she did seem to be showing in the host segments, though not in the experiment segments that were clearly taped months earlier.
I wonder how this will affect her participation in upcoming myths.
I wonder how this will affect her participation in upcoming myths.
Anyone have a link to the car commercial that they talk about in the show? Seems kind of annoying that they didn't bother to clear the commercial to use it.
Loved the rocket sequence, and the new remote control system.
I think it's funny that Grant arrived at the conclusion to control the car from a helicopter and yet nobody pointed out that this was what Jamie did in the very first episode of the series, for much the same reasons if I remember correctly.
The revisit of the pancaked car myth was an admirable attempt but still did not result in the perfectly timed collision I wanted to see. I thought it was pretty clear that the rig on the left hit the car before the rig on the right and the wreckage was ricocheted outwards as a result. Still I can't see the pulley system getting a better result than that ever again and I can't think of any other realistic way to do it so I suppose that's the best result we are ever going to see.
Did anyone catch the commercials for that DaVinci show that's premiering next week? Looks interesting!
I think it's funny that Grant arrived at the conclusion to control the car from a helicopter and yet nobody pointed out that this was what Jamie did in the very first episode of the series, for much the same reasons if I remember correctly.
The revisit of the pancaked car myth was an admirable attempt but still did not result in the perfectly timed collision I wanted to see. I thought it was pretty clear that the rig on the left hit the car before the rig on the right and the wreckage was ricocheted outwards as a result. Still I can't see the pulley system getting a better result than that ever again and I can't think of any other realistic way to do it so I suppose that's the best result we are ever going to see.
Did anyone catch the commercials for that DaVinci show that's premiering next week? Looks interesting!
Probably easier to just link the site than explain: Doing DaVinci
Looks kind of like Mythbusters except that instead of making builds to test myths, they are building stuff out of DaVinci's notebook
More likely "couldn't afford" than "didn't bother." They probably blew their budget licensing the Speed clip.
As I recall, they said that Grant was using a long-range radio system that should have a 2-mile range, though maybe that was for the controls rather than the camera. Unlike in the pilot, the actual remote control system worked fine; the problem was that the camera reception kept dropping out sooner than expected. So the chopper was a fallback position.
As Jamie said, getting the conditions just right would be a billion-to-one chance. Even with a perfectly timed, head-on collision, there would still have been torsion and slippage and the car would've popped out from between them in one direction or another.
I do think they took the "fused" part too literally; I never thought that meant that the metal was actually welded together, just that the wreckage of the three vehicles was so thoroughly mashed and twisted together that it was hard to pull them apart.
That did look intriguing. It's called Doing DaVinci, and it's about a team of people actually building working replicas of Leonardo DaVinci designs that have never existed outside of paper. It premieres Monday the 13th at 10 PM Eastern. Here's Discovery's website for the show:
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/doing-davinci/doing-davinci.html
Apparently the team includes a couple of special-effects artists (following Mythbusters' lead, clearly), a couple of builders, a neurologist who's a Leonardo expert, and a design engineer. I was expecting more engineers. Also, disappointingly, it's an all-male group.
And probably too large. What makes MB work so well, even when the myths are weak, is the charisma of its cast. Adam and Jamie are very distinctive personalities, and Kari, Grant, and Tory are to a lesser extent; plus we had time to get to know them, since they weren't all sprung on us at once. But on the MB-knockoff shows Discovery has tried like Smash Lab and Prototype This, the casts have been somewhat nondescript, and it's been harder to sustain interest without that personal connection.
Still, seeing Leonardo's designs actually built and tested should be intriguing even if the people doing it aren't.
Well that was pretty good episode and an awesome return to the series.
I wish they'd done more with the bus and the Speed myths (it was neat, though, they seemed to get to exact same model of city bus used in the movie.)
They could almost of devoted an entire episode to Speed myths if they didn't burn the turn on this one.
The turn was well executed and I was impressed that it worked and also surprised moving the weight didn't seem to make a big impact. But given the circumstances in the movie it was a smart thing to do and certainly didn't *hurt* matters.
But, come-on, there's so much from that movie they could've tested. The highway gap jump being the biggest and most obvious one. The bus maintaining a high-speed while side-swiping cars and, hell, they could've tried jumping a subway car.
But good episode and a nice return.
As for the movie-cliches myths.
Chris. It was just a bunch of fruit. The stuff is grown by the thousands of tons. I think it's OK to smash a few hundred pounds of it. Though I guess it would've been "nice" if it was rotten or tossed out produce.
Anyway, I suspect the instant-convertable car would've still be drivable as the engine compartment took no damage. I would've liked them to have done the trailer smash-through, by having the car ramp some to go through the cabin itself rather than trying to go through a much more rigid steel frame.
I wish they'd done more with the bus and the Speed myths (it was neat, though, they seemed to get to exact same model of city bus used in the movie.)
They could almost of devoted an entire episode to Speed myths if they didn't burn the turn on this one.
The turn was well executed and I was impressed that it worked and also surprised moving the weight didn't seem to make a big impact. But given the circumstances in the movie it was a smart thing to do and certainly didn't *hurt* matters.
But, come-on, there's so much from that movie they could've tested. The highway gap jump being the biggest and most obvious one. The bus maintaining a high-speed while side-swiping cars and, hell, they could've tried jumping a subway car.
But good episode and a nice return.
As for the movie-cliches myths.
Chris. It was just a bunch of fruit. The stuff is grown by the thousands of tons. I think it's OK to smash a few hundred pounds of it.
Though I guess it would've been "nice" if it was rotten or tossed out produce.Anyway, I suspect the instant-convertable car would've still be drivable as the engine compartment took no damage. I would've liked them to have done the trailer smash-through, by having the car ramp some to go through the cabin itself rather than trying to go through a much more rigid steel frame.
The only thing I thought of when I saw this one is that most of the time the car is air-born when goes right through it, at least in the movies I have seen anyway. I suspect this will be a gripe a lot of fans bring up.
Well, there aren't that many different models of bus, are there? So it's probably not hard to find any given one.
Hmm, possibly. Except the highway jump is also the most obviously nonsensical one, so it would be kind of like... well, I'd say like shooting fish in a barrel, but Adam & Jamie already tested that one. But the sideswipe thing is a good thought. How about deliberately breaking off a car door by running it into something at highway speed?
Chris. It was just a bunch of fruit. The stuff is grown by the thousands of tons. I think it's OK to smash a few hundred pounds of it.
But I like fruit. My reaction was more sentimental, or gustatorial, than pragmatic. I hated to see all that yummy-looking fruit go to waste.
Yeah, that was what they showed in the animation recreating the Mad Max stunt (another clip they clearly couldn't afford to license). And I can definitely see that working, given how flimsy the trailer body was. In their defense, though, I submit that the car being airborne is a very unrealistic scenario. How often, in an extemporaneous car chase, does one come across a strategically placed jump ramp?