Pasadena, Calif. -- When word got out last August that the MythBusters Build Team - Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci - were leaving the show, fans went up in arms.
“We were sad to see them go,” said MythBusters’ cohost Adam Savage Thursday at the 2015 TCA Winter Press Tour. “I mean we love Kari, Grant and Tory.”
Savage, who was joined on stage by fellow cohost Jamie Hyneman, added that changes to the show’s format have been necessary to keep things fresh and that as stories got more complex they had to make sacrifices, cutting the process out.
“We were able to put that process back,” said Savage, citing more investment in post-production and the switch to strictly Black Magic cameras.
MythBusters has been on the air for 12 years but Savage and Hyneman still find new myths to investigate.
“When you start to look closely at things, you find stuff,” said Hyneman. “There’s nothing that we haven’t taken on and that we haven’t even considered as far as a show where when we start to dig in deeper that we don’t find interesting stuff.”
Other highlights from the panel included:
—Hyneman on the heart of the show: “At it’s core, what we do on MythBusters is is we turn science into an adventure.”
—Savage said that the original story isn’t as important as how they go about investigating it: “The idea of what we think might happen and what actually will happen is the tension that builds every narrative of every MythBusters episode.”
—Fielding a question about what myths he found most surprising, Hyneman mentioned the discovery that elephants are actually afraid of mice.
He added: “One of the most interesting things to me about all of this in the show is that we’ve actually become who we are on the show. The whole science thing. That was simply us wanting to do a good job at trying to answer these questions.”
