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Busting The Mythbusters

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS13) ― In the heart of San Francisco lies a nondescript, industrial building. It's so completely nondescript that even the sign on the outside, a rectangular metal sign that nearly blends into the greyish-tan color of the building, doesn't belie what goes on inside. The people who run the company, named simply "M5 Productions", are two self-proclaimed special effects geeks. The difference is, those two men, and the building in which they reside, are now world-famous.

M5 is a special effects company run by Jamie Hyneman; the mustached, low-key voice of reason for the television show Mythbusters.

"I know like David Hasselhoff's huge in Germany," says Adam Savage, Jamie's partner. "we're HUGE in Australia!"

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 WEB EXTRA: Mythbusters And The Hail Cannon
 WEB EXTRA: The Mythbusters' Big Gun
 WEB EXTRA: The Mythbusters' Relationship
 WEB EXTRA: Mythbusters And The Magnet
 WEB EXTRA: Mythbusters Tour M5
 WEB EXTRA: Coming Up On Mythbusters
 WEB EXTRA: The Celebrity Thing
 WEB EXTRA: The Blueprint Room
 WEB EXTRA: Bloopers
 Slideshows: Behind The Scenes At Mythbusters
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M5 has been around for nearly thirteen years and is still going strong. But before Jamie and Adam started busting myths, the duo were special effects masters, working on hundreds of commercials and movies.

"In the old days it was Top Gun," says Jamie, "Arachnaphobia, Flubber, Naked Lunch, Gremlins, and Enemy Mine." Add to that Adam Savage's resume with George Lucas' company, Industrial Light and Magic and you can throw in movies like Star Wars I-III, Galaxy Quest, and tons of commercials.

"Animating beer," says Adam, "making Hershey's Kisses dance, things no one else has tried before."

There are literally hundreds of leftover props and equipment, all proudly displayed in M5's offices. There are parts of the animatronics from "Nightmare before Christmas", along with robots, leftover Myth items and toy prototypes.

"We've turned out hundreds of them for a toy company called "Leapfrog", they're in Emeryville," says Jamie Hyneman.

But it's not just special effects that have put the Mythbusters on the map. A very long resume gives them knowledge in some of the most peculiar areas. For Jamie Hyneman, it includes things like speaking fluent Russian.

"It's been 20 years since I got my degree," says Jamie, "but you know, I studied Russian linguistics and literature; I've worked as a boat captain; I had a charter business in St. Thomas in the Caribbean for some years; I grew up on a farm; I've been a cook."

It was that movie experience, though, that lured an Australian production company to M5, turning this special effects duo into Discovery Channel's Myth-busting machine!

"I had no idea it was going to turn out like this and I'm delighted," says Hyneman. "I'm having more fun than I've ever had before."

"The excitement of doing something down a non-standard path," says Hyneman's partner, Adam Savage, "is really fun and Mythbusters is that on steroids."

The top floor of that 2-story building is home to the business offices, where desks for production reside, along with the spot the Mythbusters staff calls "the most dangerous place in the building": Jamie's office. Inside are toys . . . big-people toys, everywhere! The newest? A remote-controlled truck rigged with studded tires. The reason? So they could test a myth for an upcoming episode involving a monster truck, an Alaskan lake, and of course, explosives!

In the back of the top floor, just behind a display of the props from Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas", lies the heart of every Mythbusters episode: the blueprint room. Adam Savage proudly displays items from every myth they've ever busted, including the blueprints from the show.

"About every five months when we get enough crap in here it starts to get overly filled," says Adam. "A good portion of the stuff in here is stuff that I collect because I like it."

That would include his own personal model of the eye; a mouth that he says gives everyone strange dreams; an actual casting of his own hand with posable fingers; and dozens of other props that are either intact or blown to pieces.

Downstairs is the centerpiece of the building, their shop. One wall is completely filled with plastic containers, boldly emblazoned with signs denoting what's inside. Everything you can think of is here from mousetraps to turkey basters.

"Yeah, you gotta have your turkey basters," says Jamie Hyneman.

On any giving day of shooting Adam and Jamie are juggling anywhere from five to six episodes. On the day we visited they were working on an episode about tenderizing meat with explosives. For that reason, they brought out something called a pneumatic cannon. Well, cannon may be a bit of an understatement. It's actually a 40 foot barrel put together in sections, hooked to four high-pressure welding tanks. It's capable of shooting a baseball at over 400 miles an hour.

"You wouldn't want to shoot it at yourself," says Jamie.

They shot the cannon off for our CBS-13 crew. The ammo of choice that day was a baseball. Before they could fire, though, the tanks had to be opened, and the gun "primed", so to speak. The pressure had to be built up before they would use an electric servo to release the air and fire the cannon. The pneumatic cannon is one of the Mythbusters' favorite devices.

"This is San Francisco," says Hyneman, "and they don't like large amounts of gun powder and explosions, thus the air cannon."

Even so, they have to open the doors and require visitors and crew to wear ear protection because the pressure released by the cannon could easily blow out the windows, or even our eardrums, if not prepared properly. They placed a styrofoam cutout of a man in front of the barrel of the cannon and used a tan piece of PVC pipe to shove the baseball down its barrel.

"3, 2, 1 . . . " shouted Jamie, "fire!"

The resulting explosion of air shot the baseball through our styrofoam man not once, but twice as the baseball bounced against the background and hit the foam from behind again. Most interesting is the fact that since the ball wasn't positioned all the way to the back of the cannon's barrel it wasn't traveling at full-speed. Hyneman says at its full power they could shoot pieced of piano wire through quarter-inch thick pieces of steel!

While they're known for their "explosive tendencies", for Adam and Jamie it's more about the process, though, not the end result. The best myths, according to Adam Savage, are the ones they don't solve because they learn something in the process.

"The amount that we've learned doing the show is astonishing," says Savage.

"We like what we're doing, we like working with each other and it's cool," says Hyneman. "Except for Adam and Me, we're not friends," he quips. "We don't really like each other."

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