Adam Savage proves Star Wars blasters can't be lasers

You don’t read much online then, do you? Contractual issues that had nothing to do with Jamie or Adam and everything to do with Beyond Productions, who owns Mythbusters.

Savage has spoken obliquely about it in interviews and I think you have the causality backwards. They changed the format to more like they used to do it based on feedback but also because the B team had gotten themselves axed in a contract fight with the owners/producers of the shows. Savage has even said he and Jamie supported the team in the disagreement but is unwilling to give details because he feels that if anyone should or can, it is the people that lost their jobs. Since they aren’t talking, he’s not going to reveal information that they may not want public, that’s on them. (Note: I listen to the Tested podcast and tend to also listen to interviews Savage does with other podcasts but I don’t recall where I heard him discussing this more than the piece you mentioned.)

My working assumption is that the three of them demanded more money and/or profit sharing (syndication residuals) and were told “no, you’ll take what we give you” by the producers, which they chose not to do.

7 Likes

Yeah that’s what I heard as well. Seems like a straightforward contract dispute to me.

1 Like

1 Like

I do find the hyperfocus some people have on Kari (and I’m not really pointing at folks here but making a general statement) to often be a little creepy.

4 Likes

She’s good with a cutting torch. Nothing wrong with that. :smile:

1 Like

Good old West End Star Wars. They really nailed the tone for the movies, at least the original trilogy.

1 Like

You’re aware that your sniper-assailant also has a bolt gun. This will not be an easy fight. More like Sniper Chess.

(Good luck, soldier!)

My working Assumption was that they have such a back catalog of episodes that their new episodes don’t really outperform the old ones anymore so they cut the budget for new ones and Jamie and Adam said no pay cuts for us please.

And the B team kinda got the shaft. Which was their place in the whole thing. Hopefully they got some nice severance and some royalties for the reruns in exchange for their NDA.

1 Like

Turbolasers exhibit similar characteristics, albeit on a larger scale.

Dude, the TIE fighters sound like lions. They are not city-sized.

As to why use beam weapons, the basic conceit is that beam weapons run less risk of causing a hull breach. Though to be honest, the only franchise I can think of where this is explicitly so was Babylon 5 where Garibaldi reveals that he still has a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver that belonged to his grandmother. And Babylon 5 is not Star Wars, so it doesn’t count.

Oh, and to be fair to the hapless storm troopers, we see them incapacitated whilst in their armour, but that does not mean they are all killed when hit. Even as a kid back before Empire Strikes Back came out I thought the suits were more designed to protect against hull breaches, allow the trooper to survive for days (I thought the greebles on the back were waste management and water reclamation like a Dune stillsuit!).

I suspect the main advantage of the blaster was simple logistics: they never seem to need a recharge or a reload, which does give them a huge advantage over slug throwers. Well, above and beyond looking cool, that is.

1 Like

The show probably waned in popularity, got its budget cut, and so they needed to reformulate.

Women drink for free. Law of the land, man. Always has been, always will be.

Still creepy.

Dudes think about sex at least twice as much as women. Just The Way It Is.

Can we get this guy to work on the Zapruder film …?

Maybe all the sounds heard in the Star Wars universe are the result of space boredom.

So they’ve been zipping about in space for a long effing time in the Star Wars Universe, right?

Maybe in the first hundred or whatever “years” they were doing that, they realized how much it sucked to have space battles in zero sound.

They tried everything. Humming. Conversing. All forms of music. Foot tapping. But it still sucked. For the people having the space fighting, or even just cargo vessels, anyone in space.

So some latter-day Star Wars universe version of Elon Musk pipes up with an idea!

Firmware, maybe somehow shoved into the silicon by The Force itself, that utilized all of the sensory equipment of these awesome plug n play space ships they have, to create a aural directional augmented reality overlay to any and all spaceship interactions!

It worked great! Right away, instead of either deep effing silence, radio chatter, television, music or you’re goddamed co-pilot, you got to hear ZOOOOM PHAT PHAT PHAT PEW PEW WHOOSHING NOISES while being doing your space thing!

Perhaps that’s how the large galaxy empires were initially united. The first space armadas to utilize the augments probably rolled right the F over any fleets they encountered, WHIZZING and ROARING around a bunch of space dudes so space crazy from silence or the sounds to replace silence that they just slobbered a bit and said “uhhm?” when attacked?

Eventually every ship manufacturer, eventually without even knowing what they were doing, were auto-installing the firmware or maybe it’s just a dongle, a dongle every ship has and everyone knows you can’t fly in space without your dongle because ancient galactic wisdom? Eventually they all actually believe there are sounds in space.

Except for the really smart well connected sort. Like ol’ Darth Vader, who knew he would need an update to include “Planet Blowing Up” sound added to the death star, whereas before the best anyone had was “Space Station or Capital Vessel Blowing Up” sound.

There.

Problem Solved.

7 Likes

Thinking about it and salivating publicly over female TV stars whenever they’re mentioned are not the same thing.

Like I said, creepy.

No comments on Grant or Tori but thread ogling of Kari including pics…

4 Likes

Right, you can’t hear everything but probably not nothing is all I am saying.