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Behind the scenes with Adam Savage, Peter Rees, and Jamie Hyneman of the hit skeptical W series MythBusters
EARLY IN 2004, I TURNED ON MY TELEVISION and saw two grown men talking to a duck. The duck had nothing to say in response. Which was unfortunate, because these guys were earnestly trying to ascertain (using state of the art acoustical devices) whether a duck's quack has an echo.
I'd never even heard the idiosyncratic suggestion that ducks might be echoless. But, I knew instantly that I was watching something special.
Created by Australian producer Peter Rees, MythBusters is an hour-format, primetime, non-fiction TV series (airing Wednesdays at 9 pm ET/PT on Discovery Channel. Some substantial video clips are available at http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html). The concept is spelled out in the opening narration: "They don't just tell the myths; they put them to the test!"
On camera, co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (with their crew of intrepid, tattooed builders and special effects wizards) design and execute ingenious, straightforward, and frequently explosive experiments to test the plausibility of popular "myths." These myths are an energetic mix of extraordinary claims, urban legends, popular factoids, and scenarios from the movies.
It's a no-nonsense, straight-ahead, damn-thetorpedoes skeptics' science show.
It is also a runaway hit. In the US alone, more than a million people watch each primetime, firstam episode (with many more catching the highrotation reruns). And, the show's appeal is global. For example, MythBusters captures another million viewers in Australia-a nation with less than a tenth the US population.
Among science popularization projects, this is an astonishing success. (To put it in perspective, almost twice as many Americans watch MythBusters than read Scientific American)
And, MythBusters reaches the right people.
Popular science audiences are overwhelmingly age-biased-and skeptics more than most. Only 13 percent of SKEPTIC readers are under 35 (which is about the median age of the US population).
MythBusters blows that trend to smithereens: an amazing 47 percent of its US viewers are under 35. To put this bluntly: hundreds of thousands of young people have helped make MythBusters one of the most popular, widely-cited, and positively-perceived skeptics' projects ever to exist.
I sat down with the guys behind the MythBusters to find out how that happened.
CO-HOST...