Discussion Series / MythBusters

Does anybody else think that the three main members of the "B Team" match to Beauty Brainsand Brawn?

Sometimes new policies get implemented but it kind of wallows as far as be enforced and it takes time for people to catch up. I've just found out myself that Did Not Do The Research is now explicitly an index and not a trope, thus it should never be used as a trope regardless if people can't find a trope that applies to their particular example. I've moved it all here so others can try and preserve the information by using a more appropriate trope. Also I feel that if any tropes are tested the results of the test (whether retested or the results are argued by the fans) should be listed on the trope example rather than a generic DNDTR page. For instance, the retest of Scope Snipe should be noted on that example.

• Did Not Do The Research: Occasionally, the experiments fail to correctly identify what's being tested, resulting in totally incorrect conclusions. However, for many of these cases, this may be a case of Viewer DNDTR as they Mythbusters often tape far more material than gets shown on the air. Thus while it may seem that they only do one test, they do in fact test many more times. For instance:
  • Testing Scope Snipe with a modern scope rather than a period one.
  • Concluding that a rifle barrel won't peel open based on testing of new barrels when the phenomenon only occurs with flawed or old ones.
  • Concluding that since a tiny boat produces no measurable suction when sinking, neither would a 4.6 million cubic foot ocean liner.
    • Tiny? It wasn't a dinghy, it was a nine-ton fishing trawler!
  • Concluding that a snowplow could not blow a car off a road, without taking into consideration:
    • Snowplows are usually used in icy (that is, slippery) conditions.
    • The myth claimed that the cars were blown off the road, not blown over (they tried to make the car roll)
  • Concluding that ancient stone arrowheads and sharpened sticks don't have enough of a difference in lethality to make the effort of making the former worth it... while ignoring the rather obvious factor of distance. (The same factor that somehow baffled them in "Helium Football")
    • Actually, the conclusion they reached was that they couldn't find any advantage to either.
      • The Stone arrowheads were 'slightly' better. The main issue was that a sharpened stick will fully decay over time, while a stone arrowhead will not. So we know they used stone arrowheads back then, but have no idea what the proportion of Stone-to-Wood was.
  • Busting the idea of someone catching an arrow in flight due to no human having the reaction time needed, while testing from point blank range instead of the distance at which someone would realistically be shot at, and using a much more powerful modern compound bow instead of a more period appropriate design (the myth was specifically about ancient Japanese ninjas being able to do it, and it ended up still being busted).
    • However, they did test someone attempting to catch an arrow shot at less than full power from a modern bow. The catcher was able to do it. They concluded that while it may be -possible- to catch an arrow, that was NOT the point of the myth. The point of the myth was catching an arrow in the middle of battle. And given the specific conditions that someone would be in to catch it, they may as well simply move to the side.
  • Fortunately, the Mythbusters are Genre Savvy enough to anticipate this, and welcome revisits of their older experiments, with the new information (or complaints) their fans give them; some results have actually been overturned, as a result.
    • They've even tested a complaint that viewers had regarding a misleading statement Jamie made about Newtonian physics. *
      ^{During the test of the "Compact Compact", Jamie claimed that two cars going 50 mph that hit each other in a head-on collision would be equivalent to a single car hitting a stationary wall at 100 mph. While somewhat true in that the impact has twice as much energy being released, that energy is spread out evenly between the two cars, so the resulting damage to both cars would still be equivalent to hitting a wall at 50 mph.}
  • An odd one when they tested a myth from Burn Notice: they test a car being bulletproofed with phone books and insist it's busted as it didn't stop a shotgun or an assault rifle... but the show itself says that one layer of phonebooks won't stop a shotgun or an assault rifle. It seems odd they missed that part.