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Mythbusters - "Crash and Burn"

Grade the episode:

  • Myth Confirmed! (Excellent)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Good

    Votes: 2 20.0%
  • Myth Plausible (Average)

    Votes: 4 40.0%
  • Bad

    Votes: 4 40.0%
  • Myth Busted (Terrible)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    10

Trekker4747

Boldly going...
Premium Member
Myths tested:

  • Does a car explode when driven off a cliff?
  • Can a huge rocket launch a cage holding a human and would the person survive?
 
Does a car explode when driven off a cliff?

The first thing that comes to my mind when I read this is the Dukes of Hazzard episode where the charges were apparently triggered a bit too early and the car flew off the cliff and exploded in midair for no apparent reason. :guffaw: Either they couldn't afford to do another take or they just didn't care when it blew up so long as it blew up. :lol:
 
I still want to know when the Gorn cannon episode is.

Near as I can tell next week's episode is the last one of the season, which is a "Myth evolution" episode.
 
Well, the Gorn cannon myth could itself be considered an "evolution" of one of their previous cannon myths, like the tree cannon. Indeed, when I posted it as a suggestion on the Mythbusters Fan Club Forum a few years ago, I think it was in response to that myth or something similar. (Not that I'm claiming credit for them doing it; I'm sure I was just one of multiple people who brought it up.) So there's at least a chance it could be in that episode.
 
I love it! Adam and Jamie did a Pinky and the Brain "Are you pondering what I'm pondering" gag! Well, almost.


Crash and Burn: Totally unsurprising results on driving the cars off the cliff. Looked cool, though, even without the kaboom. But wouldn't it have been so much cooler if the second car had landed right on top of the first one? I mean, it just missed it!

But the result of dropping the weight on the gas tank was very surprising. Given how detonation-proof gas tanks have been in past myths, I was surprised that this actually worked right off, without any trick to it beyond having matches to ensure the "spark."

What intrigued me, also, was that on the high-speed playback, the fireball on the left-hand side was an unusual dark purple color. I wonder what caused that.


Rocket Man: An intriguing bit of history. The Ottomans were very advanced for their time; the Islamic world was the most scientifically advanced culture in the West until the Scientific Revolution in Europe (which owed a lot to Islamic influence). So there may be some truth to this tale.

Was there any actual data collected by the hang-gliding trip that they couldn't have just deduced with a little calculation? Well, this is TV.

And dang, that spring-loaded parachute kicked Kari right in the belly. I bet the Mythbaby wasn't too happy about that.

Aww, and it's time for her to take her leave for the baby to be born? Good for her, but sad for us. But what's confusing is that the rocketry expert who joined Grant and Tory for the experiment was named Carrie or Kerri or something that sounded the same as Kari, and was of similar build and appearance (aside from not being hugely pregnant).

Okay, so the results suggest that any truth to the account was partial and exaggerated. Maybe something less ambitious was attempted and the result was embellished in the telling.
 
I loved Jamie and Adam's "Pinky and the Brain" moment. :lol:

The episode itself? No surprising results. I think anyone with all of their neurons firing knew the exploding car/cliff thing was a bunch of Hollywood hooey. As Jamie said it might happen if all of the stars and planets are lined up right -all of the elements for it to happen are there- but it's no certainty. Still fun to see them test it.

The Junior Mythbusters stuff was mostly a waste. When they abandon period-specific materials and construction techniques in favor of modern ones you know they've little faith in it working. I mean, was anyone surprised that a 17th century man didn't parachute down from a rocket he made and launched with black-powder?

Again, fun to see them do but this episode, like the last couple ones, just most felt like filler. Sigh.
 
I mean, was anyone surprised that a 17th century man didn't parachute down from a rocket he made and launched with black-powder?

Was anyone surprised that cars aren't designed to consistently explode on impact? Since when did unlikelihood ever stop them from testing a myth? This was a nice bit of history, a sort of companion piece to the Chinese Astronaut myth. And it's good to expose the audience to the fact that other cultures had advanced science and technology before the West caught up.
 
I guess the first myth would have been better worded as "Is it possible to get a Hollywood type explosion?" rather than "Does every time a car go off a cliff it explodes?" which was a real non-starter. Still seemed like an excuse to drive cars off a cliff, too bad they couldn't get enough speed to launch it down that full face.

The B-Team myth, while basically just as ludicrous, was more interesting in execution in my opinion. I thought it was strange that they didn't try Grant's design with multiple rockets in the small-scale testing.
 
I mean, was anyone surprised that a 17th century man didn't parachute down from a rocket he made and launched with black-powder?

Was anyone surprised that cars aren't designed to consistently explode on impact? Since when did unlikelihood ever stop them from testing a myth? This was a nice bit of history, a sort of companion piece to the Chinese Astronaut myth. And it's good to expose the audience to the fact that other cultures had advanced science and technology before the West caught up.

All true, it just seems that sometimes the "Junior Mythbusters" get very silly myths.

It's still a fun show to watch, though.
 
It was a lame episode. I generally don't like them testing movie-myths (although the exploding car thing is so ubiquitous that I guess it can't hurt busting that) or obvious legends (maybe it was possible to get a guy 1000m into the air with a rocket 400 years ago, but survive? No way). This episode had both, so: meh.
 
I guess the first myth would have been better worded as "Is it possible to get a Hollywood type explosion?" rather than "Does every time a car go off a cliff it explodes?" which was a real non-starter.

But that's the myth. In movies and TV, cars always blow up when they go off cliffs. Sometimes they even blow up in midair for no apparent reason. Again, since when did the fact that a myth was highly unlikely on the face of it ever stop these guys from testing it? The show is about testing myths. And that means taking the version of the myth that is widely believed or portrayed and showing what would really happen. Yes, sometimes common sense alone would give the answer, but common sense is very uncommon. There are a lot of people gullible enough to buy into this stuff. There are actually documented cases of people causing unnecessary injury to car-accident victims because of the false belief that they had to get them away from the car in a hurry before it blew up. So real people actually do believe that cars are explosions waiting to happen, and they're injuring people because of that fallacy. That makes it a myth worth debunking.
 
^^ Maybe from 1970-1980 or whatever, I think there have been plenty of examples of cars not exploding in the movies.

EDIT: Besides that, even if not I'm not sure how many people actually believe this happens every time. Is there a contingent of people that actually think a car would blow up every time it goes off a cliff?
 
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I know the show can't use live pilots/subjects in most of their myths, but it really grates on me how they overlook the major impact a living pilot can have on the success of many of their myths. Apparently if a dead-weight dummy just thrown into a carriage can't do it, it can't be done. Which is silly in and of itself.

They also tend to ignore the tenacity of a dedicated person would have in testing and designing something. Especially something they, themselves, would be getting inside. If it can't be done on your first shoddy try, MYTH BUSTED.

Drives me crazy about the show, especially since they're supposed to truly be testing the validity of myths.
 
I know the show can't use live pilots/subjects in most of their myths, but it really grates on me how they overlook the major impact a living pilot can have on the success of many of their myths. Apparently if a dead-weight dummy just thrown into a carriage can't do it, it can't be done. Which is silly in and of itself.

They also tend to ignore the tenacity of a dedicated person would have in testing and designing something. Especially something they, themselves, would be getting inside. If it can't be done on your first shoddy try, MYTH BUSTED.

Drives me crazy about the show, especially since they're supposed to truly be testing the validity of myths.

Just because we only see them test it once doesn't mean they only tested it once.
 
Many of these new episodes have been just average. In fact, it often seems they pad the episodes now with fottage of minor set backs more often than they used to, since there isn't as much "meat" to the thing as a whole.
 
^^ Maybe from 1970-1980 or whatever, I think there have been plenty of examples of cars not exploding in the movies.

It's a lot more common than it used to be. Films feed on their own conventions and tend to escalate them over time. If you look at On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the big mountain-road car chase scene in the middle, when the cars crash, they just crash, or maybe catch fire a little. But there's a much later Bond film, either a Dalton or a Brosnan film, where there's a snowmobile chase in which every snowmobile instantly explodes the moment it hits anything, even a bush. Honestly, they go up so easily that it's like you'd have to be careful not to sit down too hard lest you blow yourself up.


EDIT: Besides that, even if not I'm not sure how many people actually believe this happens every time. Is there a contingent of people that actually think a car would blow up every time it goes off a cliff?

Aren't you splitting hairs to a rather extreme degree? It doesn't matter whether some threshold percentage of the population believes it would really happen every single time. The point is testing the myth as it exists in the culture, as it is presented in its source, whether movies or television or folklore or historical accounts or tall tales or whatever. This is what they do. This is what they've always done. They test the myth as it is presented. And this is certainly one of the most pervasive myths of film and television. I don't see what the problem is.


I know the show can't use live pilots/subjects in most of their myths, but it really grates on me how they overlook the major impact a living pilot can have on the success of many of their myths. Apparently if a dead-weight dummy just thrown into a carriage can't do it, it can't be done. Which is silly in and of itself.

They also tend to ignore the tenacity of a dedicated person would have in testing and designing something. Especially something they, themselves, would be getting inside. If it can't be done on your first shoddy try, MYTH BUSTED.

In this case, the occupant would pretty clearly have been killed on the first try, so I'd say there's not much chance he could've tried again.

And what do you mean, "shoddy?" This myth was tested using far more advanced and reliable materials and propellant than would've been available in the 17th century. Hell, they went to the actual White Sands Missile Base and used real rocketry experts to help them (and how amazingly cool is that?). That meant their version was far more likely to work than something done using period resources would've been. And since it failed spectacularly, that makes it pretty conclusive that it wouldn't have worked with cruder materials and less reliable propellant.

Also, you need to understand that television shows are edited, and that the US versions of Mythbusters episodes are more severely edited than the full-length Australian ones because of the commercials. The Mythbusters always conduct more trials than are shown on TV, but the editing strips it to the basics.
 
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