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"The White Rabbit Project", Mythbusters "Build Team" lands Netflix show

The third episode, involving crazy WWII weapon projects, felt more Mythbustery than the second. It had two or three goofy historical segments, but it did have a few actual builds/tests that felt kinda like old times, although they took up too little of the episode. And the one thing that would've surely warranted a whole full-scale build on Mythbusters -- a rocket-propelled war wheel called The Great Panjandrum -- was disappointingly only shown through documentary footage without any attempt to recreate it. They even acknowledged it was just the sort of thing they'd build, but then they didn't build it.
 
The fourth episode, on scam artists from history, was weird. For one thing, there were no experiments/tests of any kind; the only build was a miniature town Grant used to illustrate a story about a famous rainmaker. For another, the opening segment was surprisingly adult -- it was about a gigolo who seduced rich women, and there were bikini babes and bedroom scenes and innuendo and Tory using the unbleeped BS-word. I'd expected this show to be aimed at the same family audience as Mythbusters, to be educational and accessible to kids, but apparently it's not suitable for younger viewers. It's getting increasingly hard for me to see who the intended target audience for this show is, or what its ultimate purpose is aside from giving Kari, Grant, and Tory something to do.
 
The show seems more aimed at older children and teenagers. Most of the information is stuff adults would already know or can easily dig up. Like the episode on G-forces, I didn't even need to watch the episode to accurately predict how each of the 6 activities would rank.

Unlike Mythbusters, no surprising fact or discovery would ever be uncovered with this show-and-tell format. There's no sense of excitement or even big explosions. This makes the show somewhat uninteresting to watch.
 
intrinsical said:
Unlike Mythbusters, no surprising fact or discovery would ever be uncovered with this show-and-tell format. There's no sense of excitement or even big explosions. This makes the show somewhat uninteresting to watch.
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Again, I wonder what the point is. I wish it were a more straight-up science show. They could use the builds and demonstrations and documentary sequences to talk about a featured scientific principle each week, and make it really educational, rather than just being "here's some weird stuff people did in the past."

The most important thing about the Mythbusters format, really, is that it taught critical thinking -- not just believing what you hear, but questioning it and applying reason and knowledge and empiricism to test its veracity. That's an important life skill, and the events of this year have shown how desperately lacking it is among Americans today. We need more shows like that, and this isn't one of them.
 
Yeah, it feels like a waste of talent. I mean come on, Netflix has got 3 popular people from a very popular show and this is the best thing they could come up with? Feels more like a passive show rather than an active one. I'd have expected something pushing the boundaries coming from Netflix.

I've been hearing that Netflix has been wanting to get into reality shows. There's already a Steampunk reality show that I've seen listed on there, and sadly, this show feels more like it belongs in that group.

I really wish they could do better with this. But the way it is now, it kind of feels a bit like if the TG/GT trio on Amazon decided to make a show without cars, which would make anyone ask, 'Why? What's the point?"
 
Owain Taggart said:
Yeah, it feels like a waste of talent. I mean come on, Netflix has got 3 popular people from a very popular show and this is the best thing they could come up with? Feels more like a passive show rather than an active one. I'd have expected something pushing the boundaries coming from Netflix.
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Well, Netflix is the distributor. The show is from Beyond Productions, the same people who made Mythbusters.
 
Yeah, I realized that. Still, it would have been nice to have Netflix push a little harder to create something a little more substantial.
 
Owain Taggart said:
Yeah, I realized that. Still, it would have been nice to have Netflix push a little harder to create something a little more substantial.
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I think that would've been the responsibility of the creators and producers, first and foremost.

It seems to me that the problem is that the idea behind the show was more about giving the trio something vaguely Mythbustery to do than about using them to present a concept that was valuable in its own right.
 
Well, I hope the trio and the show's producers can figure out how to tweak the format before they start work on the next season.
 
Christopher said:
I think that would've been the responsibility of the creators and producers, first and foremost.

It seems to me that the problem is that the idea behind the show was more about giving the trio something vaguely Mythbustery to do than about using them to present a concept that was valuable in its own right.
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Yeah, you're right. And another problem with the show is that it feels like it doesn't have much of a direction, not much focus and feels too random, like they're trying to see what sticks. I think the result is something that feels quite watered down and has neither of those qualities.
 
The episode on g-forces is the best, most Mythbustery one yet. Physics! Shop-built test rigs! Accelerometers! Data! A scientific topic covered in an entertaining way! The hosts actually doing the things themselves instead of just narrating! It wasn't perfect -- the "ranking" formula is still pointless, the science exposition was a bit too vague, and there was only one segment involving a build -- but this one's on the right track. I wish they were all like this, illustrating the various aspects of a specific scientific principle and focusing on the experimental process, rather than just talking about these broad, general-interest topics.
 
Saw the crazy WWII weapon show tonight. Nothing pisses me off more than a radical historical error concerning WWII airplanes. Tori said the Bat Bombs were supposed to be delivered by B-52s?!!?!? :brickwall: And then the graphic shows B-52s attacking Japan from the West?!?!!? :brickwall:

The first B-52, a swept-wing jet bomber, didn't fly until 1952, and entered service in '55. Too late even for Korea. It was the mainstay of the Viet Nam bombing campaign, and SAC's primary nuclear deterrent for decades, and is still in use today. But in WWII, our primary bomber force attacking the Japanese homeland was the straight-winged, prop-driven, Boeing B-29. And, although it initially flew from bases in China, it mostly flew from the Marianas Islands in the mid-Pacific. It is certainly the plane that would have delivered the bat bombs.

In the last weeks, the brand-new Consolidated B-32 joined the 29s for several raids. It too was a straight-wing, prop-driven airplane.

You'd think SOMEbody would have discovered this error before they not only said it out loud, but had animated graphics made!
 
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The "Tech We Love to Hate" episode had some good bits. The test of whether vehicle-backup beeps were effective was just the sort of thing they would've done on Mythbusters. And it was nice to get an explanation of why electronic beeps replaced older signal sounds like bells.
 
Forbin said:
n the last weeks, the brand-new Consolidated B-32 joined the 29s for several raids. It too was a straight-wing, prop-driven airplane.
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Never of the B-32 until today and read up on them. No wonder - 7 months of active service, 118 built and of those, the ones that weren't written off due to accident or battle damage, were very quickly scrapped.
 
The "Where's My Hoverboard?" episode was a little uneven. I hated the so-called "hologram" segment, because the stage illusion they showed has nothing to do with holograms, either the real kind or the fantasy floating-in-midair images of sci-fi; it's just an ordinary movie-style projection on a screen that's nearly invisible. There are some actual prototype technologies for midair images, like a device that sprays a fine mist as a projection "screen." That's closer to the fantasy than the trick they showed, so it's disappointing that they didn't include it.

Also, I think Kari was premature to say that "x-ray specs" seeing through clothes are an impossibility. I think I remember reading somewhere about a kind of digital camera component that had to be discontinued because it could be set in a way that made clothes appear somewhat translucent and was being exploited by voyeurs. I wonder if they deliberately avoided talking about that here, though, so as not to give people any ideas.

That actress's prosthetic arm was really neat, though.
 
Christopher said:
I don't know what that is.
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Have you heard of Top Gear? The three guys from Top Gear left and created a similar-type show on Amazon Prime called the Grand Tour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_(TV_series)

Christopher said:
The "Tech We Love to Hate" episode had some good bits. The test of whether vehicle-backup beeps were effective was just the sort of thing they would've done on Mythbusters. And it was nice to get an explanation of why electronic beeps replaced older signal sounds like bells.
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This is the only episode I have watched so far. The segment on beeps was definitely the most informative/interesting.
 
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