Adam Savage And Jamie Hyneman's Biggest Worry During Mythbusters
The Mythbusters are popular science legends, doing more to popularize the field than any other walrus and ginger combo could have dreamt.
Their high energy (well, Adam's at least) and often explosive performances sparked the curiosity of a generation while debunking myths of previous generations. Safety was always a priority, but things still were liable to get out of hand, and occasionally dangerous, like the time they accidentally fired a cannonball through an occupied home, according to the Washington Post. In an interview with Popular Science, the pair confessed that their biggest worry had nothing to with ballistics or explosions. It was a car crash.
"I was sure we were gonna have a car accident one day," Savage said. "We do many driving stories in each season, and the part that never shows up on camera is moving the car around. You say, 'Okay, 3, 2, 1. Go.' Press on the gas and it turns out you're in reverse and you run over a cameraman or a $100,000 high-speed camera. That's the dumbest accident there could be. And yet it's probably the one we were most in danger of having if you looked at actuarial scales."
What, besides car accidents, worried the Mythbusters?
Adam Savage adds in the interview that it wasn't just car-based mayhem that kept him up at night, confessing a long-standing fear of table saws. Per usual, Jamie Hyneman remained aloof, likely because his only fear is displaying the soft, cuddly side we all know is in there. Thankfully, neither motorized saws nor motor vehicle operation ended in carnage. The sum total of the show's destructive wake totaled five broken fingers, between 30 and 40 stitches, the aforementioned runaway cannonball, and untold numbers of slaughtered crash test dummies.
The show's legacy could have been quite different, though. During a Comic Con interview, Savage describes an experiment involving homemade explosives with results so dangerous that they destroyed all evidence and footage before reporting their findings to DARPA. The Mythbusters are always looking out.