For a science show...you'd think someone there could count. Discovery and Cinedigm have released Mythbusters: 10th Anniversary Collection, a strangely-titled 10-disc, 50-episode gathering--"strange," since the hit Discovery Channel science/blow sh*t up series has been on the air since 2003. Featuring 10 supposedly hand-picked favorites from the five co-hosts, Mythbusters: 10th Anniversary Collection is yet another cool-but-frustrating release for the popular show: "cool" because it gives a big chunk of outings for the fans, but "frustrating" because it's not a complete season offering, in proper air date order. No extras for these okay widescreen enhanced transfers.
I picked up Mythbusters: 10th Anniversary Collection because it's been a few years since I had seen the show, and several since I was a regular, set-the-DVR viewer. I'm always curious to see why a viewer trails off on a show they used to catch like clockwork, and Mythbusters seemed to fit that bill for me. Back when it premiered in 2003, my eldest daughter, already set on an engineering career, was still at home, so Mythbusters, with its science/physics/chemistry experiments wrapped up in a Jackass prank-like framework, was a good show to catch together (and it didn't hurt that my eldest son was a fifth grader who liked to see things squished and smashed). For a couple of years we never missed it, but eventually, once the formula was set--Adam's the spaz and Jamie's the grump and the various "other three" are all jumping around to prove to us how exciting everything is--we got it, and moved on. I would tune in occasionally if I happened to see a promo for a new episode, but frankly, I checked out permanently when I saw these champions of science education for America's youth do an episode at the White House with the guy who changed a gutted NASA's primary mission while making sure our astronauts fly around on Russian rockets (and a few years later, when their show came mighty close to killing some people with a cannonball and the producers put the lowly "B Team" on-screen to apologize and not Adam and Jamie--no doubt to minimize damage to the brand--I pretty much laughed them right off my radar).
Now I read that for the upcoming season, the B Team is gone, and the show is "going back to its roots," with just Jamie and Adam busting myths. That's probably a good thing...if anyone still watches. I went back and looked at about half of the episodes here, trying to get a sense of where the show started, and where it has wound up (annoying, since all the episodes' order are jumbled up here), and definitely the show was stronger at the beginning. The first pilot episode, Jet Assisted Chevy, is one of Adam's picks (at least that's what's listed on the episode guide: there aren't any new intros from the hosts, explaining this collection or how episodes were chosen). Trying to dispel the infamous "Rocket Man" urban legend in Arizona, this cheap, grungy-looking, tech info-heavy episode shows how appealing the format was when it was new. Adam and Jamie get their hands dirty while we see the whole process of the experiment, with everyone adopting a laid-back, bemused attitude that fits the essential silliness of the endeavor. Yes, Mythbusters may be giving very broad, generalized science lessons (in shorthand) to receptive viewers, but its primary function is to entertain with outsized stunts and explosions and cool destruction delivery systems that appeal to every kid who smashed his old metal Tonka truck with a ball-peen hammer. And there's nothing wrong that goal.
A second season outing, Pingpong Rescue, hit all the buttons for me as a quintessential Mythbusters episode: the boys sink a boat, just to raise it with ping pong balls, while the B Team (with my favorite line-up of Scottie Chapman, Kari Byron, and Tory Belleci) tries to recreate The Red Balloon by lifting a small child with a mass of helium balloons. Perfect. We have land, sea, and air, we get destruction and resurrection, as well as whimsy (the little girl seems alternately delighted and scared to death) and a solid glimpse at that much rumored-about friction between Jamie and Adam (listen to how genuinely nasty a sneering Jamie sounds when he insults Adam: "Ah, you big baby. Stop whining. You're always whining about something. You want to waste time on all sorts of crap," before a shaky Adam gives a pissed-off, "F*ck you!" and walks off). After those first few seasons, though...repetition begins to set in. Too much time is given over to the B Team, who are often laughably bad at "conversationally" getting over exposition information that sets up the experiment. The production values inch up, more time is spent on goofy filler, and the grunge feeling of guys banging sh*t together in a warehouse to blow stuff up gets lost. By the middle seasons we have episodes where dead cockroaches are counted after getting blasted with radiation (there's some visually exciting TV) and a car is filled with foam, over and over again, until someone jumps up and down and exclaims how amazing that "prank" is...in case we fell asleep. By the time I got to episodes like Breaking Bad Special, a ponderous shill for the cable series, I was convinced the producers had the right idea of going back to the show's basics this upcoming season. Taken in quick little bites--which is hard to do because of all the cross-cutting between the competing experiments in an episode--these later episodes are still mildly diverting, but 12 years is a long time to blow up beat a formula into the ground. I enjoyed this big helping of Mythbusters, and I suppose it made me curious to see the rebooted series whenever it premieres...but it had better be different in substantial ways from the last six or seven seasons to get me tune in more than once.
The anamorphically-enhanced, 1.78:1 widescreen transfers for Mythbusters: 10th Anniversary Collection look okay, with the later episodes faring better in terms of video noise and color, and sharper image detail.
The Dolby Digital English 2.0 stereo audio tracks are solid, with no hiss and discreet separation effects. English close-captioning is available.
No extras for Mythbusters: 10th Anniversary Collection.
Blow up the format. I hadn't watched Mythbusters in years, so it was fun to look back at some of these host-favorite episodes--particularly those from the earlier seasons. Clearly by this point, though, some changes are needed in the long-running show's format, which sounds like what's happening in the upcoming 2015 season. This collection primed me for checking out that evolution, so...I suppose it did its job. I'm recommending Mythbusters: 10th Anniversary Collection.