These Were The Biggest Experiments Mythbusters Never Got To Do
No matter how rich the tapestry of your existence, you will, inevitably, look back on a few things and wonder what might have been. Bob Dylan will never know how many roads a man must walk down, Doctor Samuel Beckett will never return home, and the Mythbusters, much to their own disappointment, will never turn the world into their own personal Hot Wheels track.
That's one of the laments shared by the show's co-host, Adam Savage, in a Reddit AMA on the subject of the show's 15 year run. User J_Ding inquired "What myth did you really want to do that production, resources, etc. prevented you from testing?" Savage responded at great length, detailing three potential experiments that wound up cancelled for reasons of budget constraints, safety, and the time it would take to trick a pond full of ducks into believing that he was a pumpkin. Yes, really.
The first and most eye-catching of Savage's unrealized dreams involved turning a paved road into an explosive. "There's one about a truck full of liquid oxygen that spills on a road bed and turns the entire road into a bomb. We played enough with liquid oxygen to respect its power and understand that it is some of the scariest stuff on earth," Savage recounted. "...what we found was it was dangerous and unpredictable, and that made going full scale really really touchy, so we decided to leave that one."
But for the grace of gourd
Then there was the aforementioned IRL Hot Wheels track — testing whether the downforce of a stock car could keep it clinging to the top of a tunnel if you drove it upside down. The amount of money necessary for the show to get its hands on a tunnel and a race car without being able to promise that either would come out in one piece put the kibosh on that one.
And then there's the pumpkin ducks. According to Savage, "there is an episode that we were going to do in the last season, but we didn't have time to complete, and so I had to let it go. It's a Native American myth, supposedly, that if you wanted to go duck hunting, you would float pumpkins in a pond that the ducks frequented and get them used to pumpkins floating around them. Then when you were hungry and wanted duck for dinner, you would put a pumpkin on your head and swim over to the duck that looked, I guess the tastiest, and the duck would not notice you because you're just a floating pumpkin." The experiment was nixed for time. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, Discovery Channel.