Can two phone books with their pages interlaced support the weight of a pasty TV personality in glasses? How did robot-on-robot combat lead to one of the best TV shows of the past decade? Can a medieval suit of armor stand up to a barrage of paintballs fired from a massive gun turret? These questions and more can be answered at the Mythbusters ‘Behind the Myths’ live stage show, which I had the pleasure of viewing at the OnCenter in Syracuse, NY, Wednesday night. I’m a huge fan of the show Mythbusters, and it was a blast (sometimes literally) to see the stars Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman on stage joking and performing for the audience. Their star power really sells their live tour.

Unfortunately, the name is a little misleading. Whereas I was hoping for a real science-based spectacle full of anecdotes and stories about working on Mythbusters, the performance was actually more geared towards wacky hijinks and silly, but simple, science demonstrations. Little of it would actually qualify as peeking ‘behind the myths’, as it were.

Show rating: 4/5: Good.

If they had brought that much anger to the stage, it would have been a very different show

That’s not to say the live performance by Savage and Hyneman was not entertaining. The two-hour show was often very funny, and the two stars were obviously having fun on stage. They interacted well with the audience, both those who joined them on stage and those who remained seated. But on a TV show dedicated to weighty scientific pursuits, I was hoping for more of the same to sink my teeth into. I wanted more science and less silliness.

Join me for more after the jump.

For those unfamiliar with the TV show Mythbusters, it’s about these two mad scientists Savage and Hyneman using their extensive careers as Hollywood special effects artists to try and either prove or debunk old wives tales, longstanding rumors and other myths. The show has been on the Discovery Channel for close to a decade now, and each episode is devoted to different handmade experiments. Savage, the wacky jokester, and Hyneman, the mustachioed sourpuss, lead their team to explore such myths as whether or not elephants are really afraid of mice, whether you can jump off a building and land safely in the awning over the front entrance, whether diving underwater will keep you safe from bullets, whether you can survive a falling elevator, and many, many more. Mythbusters is reality TV at its absolute best.

'Dancing with the Stars' can burn in a fiery hell!

Their ‘Behind the Myths’ live tour, however, was mostly just quaint comedy obviously geared towards pleasing kids and fans — and both were in large supply Wednesday night. If you weren’t already a huge fan of Mythbusters, I doubt the live show would hold much interest. But for fans like me, it was at least a lot of fun to see Savage and Hyneman on stage. Even if they weren’t really challenging themselves or the audience, we were all having a good time.

The majority of the show was actual science demonstrations, most often with volunteers from the audience. They weren’t really ‘experiments’, per se. There were also a few video clips from the show, like a montage of the best explosions, most often used to cover the time it took to set up the next demonstration. The best parts of the show were the Question and Answer sessions, and both Savage and Hyneman each got a moment to talk directly to the audience and answer questions. That’s what I really wanted to hear. They didn’t tell enough anecdotes about working on the show as I would have liked, but both men were very good about taking dumb questions and expanding on them to actually tell some interesting stories.

For example, one kid asked how often Savage has dressed up like Hyneman and made fun of him. I guess that happened in one episode, and Hyneman said it was only that one time. But then he launched into a story from when they were just starting the show, where one of the cameramen suggested that they pick one style of clothing and stick with it at all times. It not only established a ‘character’, but also maintained continuity in case the producers needed to edit shots from different days together into one clip. So Hyneman chose a white shirt because his wife said he looked good, but now he regrets that decision because white does not stay clean.

Yep, that's a white shirt

Those are the stories I wanted to hear, and we got a few of them. Savage told the audience about growing up and acting in commercials, because his dad was in the business. But he got out of acting because he just didn’t like it anymore. He said two of his greatest loves as a kid were Legos and Star Wars, and his dream was to work with George Lucas and the Star Wars special effects crew – a dream he went on to accomplish after an old friend of his told him he had a lot of talent but no ambition. Savage said he picked himself up and went on to work on Episode 1 and Episode 2, which was a fun story. They also talked about the business friendship they had (as opposed to a genuine friendship), the time their crew accidentally shot a cannonball into an actual person’s house, and other similar stories, though not enough to appease me.

Hyneman at one point told the story of how he used to be in Robot Wars, and had designed a spinning robot that used its low weight to spin its blades at about 80 mph or so. This would decimate other robots, and Hyneman started to get a bad reputation for being so good. He met a documentary filmmaker during the robot fighting circuit, and that guy later came up with the idea for Mythbusters. That was the only story we got about creating the show.

The randomness of this story is a perfect of example of just how slapdash the stage show seemed. They would jump from demonstration to demonstration to talking segment to goofing around with the audience. Out of nowhere, the big screen lowered and some girl who I didn’t recognize from the show asked an obviously taped question to Hyneman about Robot Wars. It was the only time during the whole show that they had this taped question thing, so it was just weird. Then Hyneman told the story and showed off the robot…but he didn’t actually demonstrate the robot. It was just sitting on a pedestal. Two seconds later, we moved on to something else.

I really got the impression that these guys didn’t really know what to do for their stage show, so they just threw together all the cool things they could think of and just kind of put them in random order.

What sorcery is this?

The science demonstrations were a mix of lame and alright. Savage demonstrated the old bed of nails trick, and explained about how the body disperses your weight over all the nails so that none of them will stab you. But do kids really encounter the bed of nails trick anymore? And is there anybody out there who doesn’t know how it works? At one point, they had some volunteers interlace two phone books together, which creates an unbreakable friction engine between the pages. Then Savage hung himself from the ceiling by the two phone books. That was kind of cool.

One of the weirdest segments was trying to prove or break the myth of catching an arrow. They explained that in the ‘ninja episode’ of their show, they debunked the myth that a human being can snatch a flying arrow out of the air. But then they heard from a trained ninja who told them it could be done, they were just doing it wrong. So they explained this guy’s technique, and then had Hyneman load a crossbow while Savage waited at the target. They fired two shots, and in the second one it looked like Savage took an arrow to the arm!

But then a split second later, before the audience can even grasp the possibility that Savage had been shot, the two men walk to the front of the stage and reveal it was a joke with a fake arrow in the arm. They explained that in earlier shows on the tour they used to play it out, with Savage crying out in pain and the lights going out. But that scared the kids at their earlier shows, so they don’t do it anymore. So I have to wonder…why do it at all anymore? They didn’t even tell us if the trained ninja’s technique actually works, or if they’d be willing to revisit the myth. It was just them explaining a gag. That fell very flat.

Admittedly, orange jumpsuits are funny

The main point of the show would probably have to be the audience participation. Savage and Hyneman had a lot of fun interacting with the audience, whether it was bringing them on stage, answering questions or just talking directly with the whole crowd. Whenever they looked for a volunteer, they’d mention that they were looking for a little girl, or a big strong guy – so then one woman shouted “Let me know when you’re looking for a fat, 50-year-old woman!” That got a lot of laughs from everybody. Then later in the show, when they were looking for more volunteers, one of the two guys thought to ask that woman after all because she had such a good sense of humor.

The audience demonstrations were a mixed bag. Twice they did the same trick with a tug-of-war, in which they had a little kid on one end looking like they were holding their own against a great pull from the other side. At one point they brought out a giant contraption with two bicycles and had two guys pedal against each other, with the pedals pumping water into a balloon over the other person’s head. That just seemed to be an exercise in having something splash on somebody. Fun for the kids, I suppose. One semi-funny gag involved dressing one guy up in a massive, medieval suit of armor and then shooting at him with paintballs fired from a massive turret. That was cool enough, but was mostly just shooting at a guy with paintballs with some fancy set dressing. The only real sciencey thing with the audience involved the old hammer/bell carnival game. A big, strong guy couldn’t ring the bell while using a little hammer, but then they gave a massive hammer to a little girl and she hit the bell just fine.

Science! I suppose. Force = Mass x Acceleration. But do kids of today really know what this thing is?

Some kind of love tester, perhaps?

One of the funniest bits of audience participation was using the high speed camera to film people making funny faces. They showed a clip of the time Hyneman slapped Savage on the show, and the sight of skin on Savage’s face getting all smooshy and floppy was both horrifying and hilarious. So they had the audience members do raspberries and stick their tongues out and other weird actions, then replayed those to show just how stretchy and weird the skin looks in super duper slow motion. Funny stuff.

Sadly, the show ended on the dumbest gag of them all. They brought out Buster, their famous test dummy from the show. And Buster was sitting in a barrel surrounded by cartoonishly painted boxes of ‘TNT’ and other explosives. They invited a little girl on stage to hit the plunger, and pretended as if they were going to blow up Buster. Instead, the plunger just set off the smoke machine and some pathetically lackluster lights around Buster’s barrel. Then the dummy disappeared down into the barrel (obscured by the smoke), while a separate dummy that had been hung in the rafters fell to the stage. As if Buster had traveled through the air across the stage. It was eye-rollingly lame and over in a matter of seconds. Then Savage and Hyneman abruptly walked up to the front of the stage and said their farewell catch phrase about not trying this stuff at home.

And that was the show. Like I said, overall, it was good fun. Nothing laugh-out-loud hilarious, but generally enjoyable. The two stars were obviously having fun, and their star power easily carried the show. The audience was great, the volunteers were excited. Everyone came together to make an enjoyable 2 hours. I would have liked more behind the scenes stories, and some more science-heavy experiments, but then I’m probably not the target audience.

I’m sure the kids had a great time, especially the two big kids on stage.