When you put a TV show together for 15 years, you're probably going to have far more amazing memories than you can possibly recall on the spur of the moment. And that would seemingly go double for Mythbusters, for which co-hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage concocted some of the craziest, silliest and most explosive stunts on TV. But it wasn't any of the high-octane stuff that tops Savage's list of the best things that ever happened on the Mythbusters set. Here's his hilarious and so very juvenile story.
One of my closest friends - my producer Alice, who was our director on the show for more than a decade - we were filming the episode about farts. We were doing an entire episode devoted to the science of farts and in order to do that we had to capture some. So I built, designed and constructed a fart-catching machine. We spent the whole day like eating beans and drinking soda water and trying to get things moving, and it wasn't going. And Alice, the team player extraordinaire, said, 'Everybody out,' and everybody cleared the room. Alice got in the bathtub, and it was not warm water, and managed to capture three different farts. That's above and beyond the call of duty. And I don't think we ever mentioned in the show that these weren't ours.
The episode for which Adam Savage created the fart-catcher was Season 4's "Franklin's Kite," which also featured the segment "Facts About Flatulence." Unfortunately, the finished footage wasn't part of the episode's original airing on Discovery, though footage from that and another unaired fart myth have been shown by Hyneman and Savage when they've appeared at live events and Q&As. It sounds as if some of Alice's farts may have made it into the show itself, even if the machine didn't pass muster.
Savage has talked about constructing that fart-catching machine in the past, as he's labeled it one of his favorite builds. But I'm not so sure he's ever been so free to talk about just whose farts were being used during the episode as he was during this interview with TheWrap. I mean, we know it was his during the segment about setting farts on fire, as that would have been a weird transaction of gasses between them.
I can easily grasp why this would be Adam Savage's favorite thing that happened during the show's run. Don't get me wrong, it must have been extremely cool and gratifying to watch so many things blow up, and to speed around in a variety of amazing vehicles. But sometimes all the mind needs is just someone else voluntarily farting to assign favoritism.
You can check out Savage inside the fart-catcher briefly in the video below, which centers on the fart-MAKING machine that he built for a final season episode earlier this year.
There should be some kind of a "Clutch Moment" award to give to people who step up in situations like that to take control and blast that ass gas when need be. We salute you, Alice Dallow, for all your years of hard work and all your moments of soft flatulence. We also salute Adam Savage, but we've showered him with praise on this site for years already. Keep an eye out for future projects from Hyneman and Savage, since they'll definitely be a gas.
