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The MythBusters are well-known for not merely testing myths, but also pushing said tests to ridiculous extremes:


  • The MythBusters built a lead balloon and made it float. They made a rocket out of meat. In two days. Hell yes.
    • The lead balloon in particular was only supposed to be a b-plot in the episode since it was just Adam and Jamie figuring out how to make a balloon. The first cut of the episode came back as a 55 minute long episode devoted just to the balloon story. The final episode includes the explosive surfboarding myth, but the fact that Adam and Jamie building balloons was entertaining enough to carry an hour long first cut ended up changing the production team's entire concept of what the show could be!
  • Any time something is utterly destroyed, especially explosively.
    Adam: Well there's your problem!
    Jamie: [Blank] went away...
    Jamie: What car?
  • Guest Jaime Vendera gets one by successfully shattering a glass with just his voice.
  • Another guest, professional MMA fighter Brendan Schaub, proving that Doomguy wouldn't need Mars' lower gravity to carry his Hyperspace Arsenal, acing the MythBusters' obstacle course with no significant difference in time when carrying just such an inventory.
  • How awesome was waterskiing behind a rowboat?
    • Not even a tenth as awesome as waterskiing behind an OCEAN LINER!
    • And about as ludicrously awesome as wakeboarding with an EXCAVATOR.
  • Adam finally beating Jamie for a change in the Concrete Glider episode. What makes it particularly awesome is that for most of the episode, Jamie seems to have Adam smoked as far as design and weight of their gliders are concerned, but Adam out-thinks Jamie on the launch method and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat at the last moment.
    • Adam had previously beat Jamie in the Paper Crossbow competition. While proving that you could kill a man with rolled-up paper and underwear elastic.
    • Before that, beating Jamie in the Needle In a Haystack competition. That time it was due to his water tank design being able to process the hay faster than Jamie's rotating drum and incinerator, winning four needles to two. Funnily enough, while Adam's early prediction didn't take into account the sheer length of time the endeavor would take, he did correctly predict the margin of victory (Adam predicted they'd be sipping mimosas on the beach while Jamie would still have two needles left to find).
      • When The Search revisited this myth, neither team found the bone needle, and the accepted explanation is that the fire component of their devices burned it to ash. So in all likelihood, Jamie was doomed to defeat from the beginning by his design, but we'll never know since Adam found all four needles well before Jamie had finished processing his pile of hay.
  • The Cement Truck incident is their Crowning Moment of Explodiness. Oh noes! You can't dislodge the dried concrete with a cherry bomb? How about an M-80? How about a pound of black powder (which, as it turns out, is effective at removing the normal slag that builds up over time)? How about packing the cement truck to the brim with ANFO, clearing the area within a 5-mile radius, and fucking VAPORIZING it?! WIN!
    • The only thing missing from the Cement Truck explosion? A high-speed shot, because the camera malfunctioned at the worst possible time. Did that stop our heroes? Heck no! Coming in the final season: Cement Truck 2. Which will be filled by 5001 POUNDS of ANFO.
    • Then they topped that with the 22,000-Foot Fall myth... a bomb big enough to where the shockwave is visible on camera and managed to wrap a couple inch thick steel rod around a sapling tree (without destroying it).
      • After that, their test on making diamonds with explosives. 5,000 pounds of explosives. They made an absurdly large crater (which is hard to do, because that essentially involves vaporizing the ground, and doesn't happen IRL as much as it does on TV), had an even bigger visible shockwave, and when you look at them from inside the bunker, you can tell that the shockwave actually knocked them back.
      • Yes those explosions were bigger in raw tonnage, but they weren't visually as cool. Blown up a cement truck? What cement truck?
      • It's the sound, the cement truck explosion sounds awesome. Even better is the fact that the explosion sounds like that because the sound had overloaded the microphone on the cameras, the explosion was that loud to do that.
  • In the golf episode, Grant gets one just with what he says:
  • Or building working versions of the two functions of Batman's Grappling Gun?
    • Face it. If anyone were to become Super Heroes, it'd be the MythBusters.
  • Jamie Hyneman. Sitting inside a Tesla coil. And shooting million-volt bolts of lightning with a squirt gun. It MUST be seen.
  • The Lie Detector episode, when the team go to have an MRI scan which is supposed to tell if they're lying or not. They each have to steal either a ring or watch from a drawer, then undergo MRI while being asked questions. Anyone who can beat the scan gets $1,000, anyone who fails has to go back from South Carolina to California by bus. Kari and Tory take the ring, Grant the watch. When the results come, the scan says that they all stole the ring, so Grant gets $1,000. Amazing.
  • Kari Byron, sawing a tree in half with a gatling gun.
  • In the golf episode, the team did an investigation into how many balls will get through if you hit them into a tree's foliage - and Tory, under his own power, got more through than Grant's robot, built for that specific experiment, did.
    • As Kari put it, "You're better than a robot!"
  • In the same spirit as the above, one for a non-Mythbuster. When testing "Son of a Gun", the Mythbusters built an incredibly stable rig to fire their Civil War rifle to make sure their aim was perfect due to all the different things they had to hit. Scottie even goes so far as to say they're making it because human error is too likely. Despite hours of design, multiple trials, and even a laser rangefinder, they can't get the gun to hit the targets just so. Civil War re-enactor Jim, who has been helping them, then steps up and makes the shot perfectly on the first try.
  • The myth? Shooting fish in a barrel. Jamie, who previously fired a bullet down the scope of a sniper rifle, actually missing the fish, even with a shotgun? Funny. Discovering that the pressure wave caused by the bullet would kill the fish anyway? Educational. Deciding to fire at a barrel with a minigun that fires 3,000 rounds per minute, to the point where the barrel is cut in half and the fish within disintegrates? This trope.
  • Water heater rockets. Especially the high-speed footage.
  • The entire Seesaw Saga episode, especially when they launched "Ariel" 130 feet into the air!!!
    • Also featuring the most masculine Grant countdown, a Funny Moment from the MythBusters' reactions and a Heartwarming Moment as Adam radios the people above him; "Tell me everybody's okay." and high-fives only begin after it's confirmed that everyone's fine.
  • The entire episode they spent debunking annihilating tearing various Moon-landing conspiracy claims into pieces and stomping them to bits was just a thing of beauty.
  • In one episode, they tried to simulate a car being flattened between two semis. When "merely" placing a car between two trucks in a head-on collision didn't produce awesome enough results, they attached 24 solid-fuel rocket engines to a one-inch-thick piece of steel, accelerated it to the speed of sound, and hit the car with that. There was nothing left. ("What car?") Adam has been impressed many times throughout the show, but this was the first time he was completely struck dumb by what they had just done.
    • Adam later confessed that when you see him bring his hand to his mouth in the reaction shot, he was wiping drool from his chin.
    • The inch steel plate in question wound up folded like a Dorito.
    • They shot a high-speed film of the impact, showing it in super-slow-motion. The car hit the wall so fast that the chassis didn't even have time to crumple. It appeared to be evaporating from front to back. As awesome as the impact looked at normal speed, the super-slow-mo shot was awesomeness on steroids. Steroids that enhance awesomeness!
    • Topping that, the build team tried to see if a snowplow can cut a car in half. After busting it at normal highway speeds, they built a rocket-powered superplow, sent it down the track at over 500 mph (800 kph), and managed to split the car in half! Including the engine block! Not only that, but the superplow disintegrated!
  • They built a shark-punching robot. That's just so awesome, it singlehandedly justifies the entire medium of television.
    • Indeed, the Discovery Channel picked a shot of that bot in action, as a part of a series of network promos based on It Makes Sense in Context moments.
  • If building and driving a speedboat made of frozen newspaper doesn't qualify as awesome, what does?
    • One-upping it by making a sailboat entirely out of Duct Tape?
      • Hey, don't forget the duct-tape cannon. That's right. They made a working cannon, completely out of duct tape.
      • For a second episode involving the wonders of Duct Tape, the build team tests how well a car holds up when being held together with the stuff. And we're not talking about a busted bumper or a broken off side-mirror, the destruction involved calling the San Francisco Fire Department to borrow the tools they use to cut open cars to slice off the roof. The test ends with the engine giving out and the Duct Tape remaining intact, including the hood ornament.
      • Duct tape's final success: the Duct Tape Island challenge. Jamie and Adam manage, with duct tape and bamboo, to: Signal for help, get water, catch food, build shelter, start a fire, go surfing, play chess, and finally build an ocean-worthy canoe.
  • The Build Team skipped a car across a lake. And the car still ran afterward.
  • MythBusters + Ask a Ninja = pure awesomeness.
  • How about when the Build Team recreated the ancient Korean hwacha arrow launcher? For those familiar with modern weaponry, it's like a 15th century Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), and it's just as spectacular to watch when it's fired. (For those more familiar with Tropes, it was basically the first Macross Missile Massacre.)
    • Also, the hwacha only missed because the fake army was too close and not big enough. Against a force of a thousand, it would be a massacre.
  • In the Chinese Invasion Alarm experiment, Kari does better at hearing Jamie and Tory's digging than Adam... and Grant's fancy geoscopic technology.
    • Adam has to wear a hearing aid in his left ear. Still, Kari doing better than the geophone and other high-tech equipment was very impressive.
  • The YouTube special, where Adam and Jamie not only confirmed that lighting 30,000 match heads at the same time creates a large fireball, but they also lit a million match heads and created an even bigger fireball. Then they used 60,000 match heads as gunpowder for a cannon. And it worked.
  • In their holiday special, the MythBusters spend the entire episode building a huge Rube Goldberg machine. It's difficult to describe in words, so a video is necessary.
  • Sawdust. Road flare. Air pressure. Large metal cylinder. That is all.
    • That is, until they replaced the sawdust with non-dairy creamer. The fireball was so massive it freaked out the whole build team.
      Grant: We should destroy this because it's too dangerous to have in our shop!
  • While testing whether it was possible to escape a car that had driven into a lake, the MythBusters found that if you didn't open the car door immediately, then you had to equalize the pressure between the outside water and the inside of the car. In other words, let the car fill entirely with water. But discovering this wasn't the crowning moment of awesome. No, the crowning moment came several months later (as revealed on the Top 25 Greatest MythBusters Moments) when Adam and Jamie received a letter from a fan. He said that he was a truck driver, who had a seizure while he was driving over a bridge. He came to in the middle of a lake, his cab slowly filling with water. Remembering what the MythBusters said about escaping a sinking vehicle, he opened up his air vent, let the cab fill with water completely, opened the door, and swam out. The MythBusters saved a person's life.
    • Four other people wrote to them saying that what they showed saved their life.
    • There's three parts of awesome to this. First, the Myth (which was confirmed) was that differential air and water pressure as the car is sinking prevents you from escaping a sinking car (either opening the door or rolling down the window against the pressure). The first part of awesome is that, if you react quickly enough, you can open the door and escape before the car submerges too far for that pressure to be overcome. The second is testing various commercial window-breakers to break open your window to escape; they work. The third is, the first time they tested this, Adam struggled and fought to open doors and windows, running out of air and requiring the safety diver to give him air from a scuba tank before the pressure equalized and he could escape. Then they tested it a second time, with Adam waiting calmly and patiently for the car to fill with water, and he was able to hold his breath long enough to open the door and swim out. Proving the benefit of remaining calm and thinking clearly in a crisis.
  • The Build Team and Adam and Jamie each have their favorite myths as their personal Crowning Moments. The Build Team's fav is "Racing Gravity", where they did Exactly What It Says on the Tin, dropping a car from a helicopter and then racing it to the impact point with a sportscar from the same distance away from the drop point horizontally as the falling car was vertically.
  • Their appearance at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, where they tested to see the force of 150,000 people jumping at once and tested to see if men or women did the wave faster.
  • President Obama himself gave the MythBusters another angle on the Archimedes Death Ray, saying that the thing that the MythBusters missed was manpower; the MythBusters gathered 500 students to help them pull off the myth. It was still busted, but seeing that many people out there was a CMOA.
    • Heck, meeting the President in person and having him say he's a fan of the show and personally wants to request a myth is a three-fold CMOA. The rest is gravy.
    • One of the best things about this retest is that the MythBusters finally found that grain of truth that exists at the center of most myths: the light reflecting off the polished mirrors dazzled Jamie's eyes, and this could have been an effective distraction or even deterrent used by the Greeks against the Romans.
  • Creating fire by using a power drill to spin a stick, with the hole in the board below surrounded by gunpowder. It's breaking every single rule involved in the process, but their sheer audacity has to be applauded.
  • It turns out that in his spare time Jamie has been helping the military! He's making them armor and robotic dummies.
  • Linda, the first test subject for the myth that women multitask better than men, managed to complete the multitasking obstacle course with three seconds to spare, getting the only perfect score out of everyone there.
  • The Build Team making a functioning airplane out of duct tape!
  • An episode showcased the MythBusters top 12 favorite locations. Number one was the bomb range, so during the credit sequence at the end, they had a montage of all the explosions that have taken place there. It's BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.
  • Perhaps the first show's first CMOA, wherein they not only figured out how the legendary escape from Alcatraz, widely thought impossible, could have been done but then went out and actually did it themselves.
  • Perhaps their ultimate CMOA occurred off-camera: After the errant cannonball incident, the MythBusters promptly accepted responsibility and went to the (almost) victim's houses to deliver a sincere and personal apology. No lawyers, no weaseling, and no posturing for the cameras.
    • What makes it even better, as Adam related during a Q&A during a stop on their "Behind the Myths" stage show, is that the Discovery in-house lawyers wanted them to take baby steps with the situation, and the MythBusters basically told them to go pound sand.
    • And then there's the fact that when the time came for the myth to air, the hosts clearly explained what had happened, made no attempts to make excuses, and explained how they had tried to make amends for the incident.
    • And it took so long for them to think about touching the myth to finish it that Tory was able to grow a full beard in the interim.
  • Adam was able to rip a phone book in half and Jamie couldn't until Adam showed him how. It's so rare that Adam unequivocally knows something that Jamie doesn't, so this victory is great to see.
  • Alton Brown's guest appearance on the 2012 Thanksgiving episode, cooking a perfectly decent Thanksgiving dinner on the engine of a moving car. Now all we need is Bill Nye and Paul Zaloom to show up and all us nerds can die happy.
  • The Crossover with Storm Chasers that pitted their TIV2 and Dominator against tornado force winds not just up to EF-5 but beyond that into a (fictional) EF-6. The worst that happened is that the TIV2's anchoring spikes deformed and the Dominator slid around for a bit but never got sent flying because the bottom was never exposed. This means the cars will actually be safe if they were caught in an EF-5 tornado and that's exactly what they want to happen.
  • Tory managing to split a lead musket ball on an axe with his first shot at that particular distance.
  • It took three tries over ten years, but the JATO rocket car finally got off the ground. And it was spectacular.
  • Riding a motorcycle 50, then 100, then over 300 feet across water.
  • When the Mythbusters are testing a car hood-mounted machine gun, Adam is skeptical. He doesn't think that the fixed machine gun seen in the movies will be able to hit anything (he has better hopes for a moveable one, though). And for the first part of the test, it performs exactly as he expects. And then he discovers that he can use the car's controls to 'steer', using the brakes to aim up or down. He starts nailing Jamie after that, and the moveable gun performs even better.
    • During that test (if memory serves) one of Adam's paintballs actually impacted the back of Jaime's (helmeted) head. Had this been an actual weapon used in a real situation, it would have scored a kill on the driver. It doesn't get more Confirmed than that.
  • When testing out the different methods to make paper armor, they throw one of the layered-paper-squares and the corner pierces an object and gets stuck in a shuriken-like fashion.
  • Putting a cowcatcher wedge on the front of a dump truck and plowing through two lines of cars in 'Hollywood Crash Cliches'. The truck barely slows down, there's cars flying everywhere (several doing full rolls), and Adam and Jamie are left in adrenaline-fueled hysterics. As Adam describes it afterwards, the cars behaved almost exactly like the wake of a boat - but instead of water, it's a wake of 60,000 pounds of steel.
    • Non-Explosion Division. The gargantuan nature of the build, the simplicity of the concept, the utter totality of the experiment's effectiveness... as the boys themselves point out, it's absolutely stunning that we haven't seen it used before or since in a Hollywood action movie, or even in real life. There's a reason they're re-visiting it for the series finale.
  • They managed to accelerate a ping pong ball to 1,100 mph (or Mach 1.4!) using a vacuum cannon.
  • Have you ever seen a cartoon where someone makes a sailboat go by blowing an electric fan at the sail, from inside the boat? It only works in cartoons, it's impossible in real life. Except that the Mythbusters actually made it work. According to a strict interpretation of Newton's Third Law, it shouldn't have worked... which means that they may have discovered a new law of physics.note 
  • Jamie, who is notoriously acrophobic, agreed to bungee jump into a pool while testing one myth. Repeatedly. Which Adam was too terrified to do more than twice.
    • It wasn't because Adam was too scared, it was because the bungee jumping triggered his (legendary) motion sickness. Jamie may not like heights, but they weren't making him physically ill the way they did for Adam.
  • Movie and TV-based myths are usually pretty unrealistic, but all of the Indiana Jones myths they tested got at least a "plausible". Adam finally managing using a whip to swing over a chasm was especially epic.
  • In The A-Team special, they create a machine that effectively uses blocks of wood as projectiles using only basic tools and materials that would be in a lumberyard, in an hour.
    • Not only that, but it worked better than the fictional one - It was fully-aimable and magazine-fed, had a lever-action reload system, and was surprisingly accurate considering its ammunition - Jamie was landing headshots with it. And despite all this, it was much simpler in its fundamental operation than the A-Team design.
  • It's a credit to Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan's imagination that Walter White's "machine gun-in-the-trunk" booby trap actually worked in real life with only one modification required (the addition of a bicycle chain and gearbox to reduce the speed of the garage door opener's motor).
    • Arguably even more awesome is Vince being so devoted to accuracy that he was as irritated about the spread of bullets in the show not matching the test precisely as he was ecstatic that his work finally natched a Plausible from the MythBusters.
  • Adam, after going through a week-long Air Force training program, got to fly in a U2 plane 70,000 ft above the earth. (Jamie also qualified, but let Adam go because he wanted it more.) The only people higher than them at that point are on the Space Station. Additionally, the view from the plane was absolutely stunning; they were high enough for the curvature of the Earth to be easily visible, and the sky above was extremely dark because so much of the atmosphere was below them.
    • Neil Sutherland's Awesome Music makes the sequence even better. Sutherland always does good work, but his majestic score for this scene is just beautiful.
  • From their Finale Season:
    • The Mythbusters manage to lift a car with nothing but a standard vacuum.
    • The Mythbusters take on the idea that a super-heated train tanker if sealed when hot and cooled by rain will collapse in on itself. After demonstrating just how powerful the vacuum force created by tightly sealing a metal container with boiling water inside can be by showing it imploding several 55-gallon drums, Adam and Jamie test it on a full tanker car. While the force inside came to about 27-mercury-inches, meaning there is several million pounds of force pulling the walls inward and just shy of a total vacuum inside, the two train cars, one new and one old and rusted, do not bend, do not break. They maintain their form. The busters only manage to implode the older tanker car by denting the train tanker car with a 3,200lb concrete block dropped on it.
    • Managing to get within 800 feet of a standard rocket fuel's altitude of 4,133 feet with gummy bears as their rocket fuel.
  • In the show's final episode, the Mythbusters decide to give Buster the Mythbusters equivalent of a Viking Funeral: Dress him up as a superhero, put him on a rocket sled, and fire him into a wall at 800 miles per hour. The high-speed footage shows Buster disintegrating on impact. Or rather, ascending into Valhalla. Before they reviewed the highspeed, it looked for a minute like we were headed into Never Found the Body territory.
    • And let's not forget the buildup to Adam's official plow down Mythbuster Memory Lane: Adam slowly building up to speed in the Ultra Wedge Truck as the opening to Europe's "The Final Countdown" plays proudly and dramatically. Longtime fans likely got chills up their spine as the truck got ready; too bad it didn't play through the whole sequence...
    • How over-engineered was the Ultra Wedge Truck? At one point its ram scooped up the backwards Porsche 928 and sent it hurling into the cab, where it simply blew away like a leaf or a piece of newspaper.
  • Mythbusters + Explosions + the 1812 Overture = Concentrated awesome. You could be forgiven for aggressively conducting the music...
    • Kudos to the editor(s) for timing the BOOM BOOM BOOM perfectly according to Tchaikovsky's tempo!
  • Mythbusters Jr. continues the original's smashing of the stereotype that science is for men/boys and the three girls are routinely shown to be clever, capable, and vital team members, just like Kari.
    • Also Cannan is a 12-year-old college student who's double-majoring and intelligence clearly runs in the family as his 16-year-old brother is already in grad school.

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