MythBusters/Awesome

The MythBusters are well-known for not merely testing myths, but also pushing said tests to ridiculous extremes. Here are some of their most impressive achievements:

You know that link up there, the external one? That is a Clip Show of the Top 25 MythBusters moments for Discovery's 25th Anniversary. The fact that they organized them for us is nice, but to put a link up for the whole two hour episode? Awesome.
The Mythbusters built a lead balloon and made it float. The made a rocket out of meat. In two days. With a BOX of SCRA- ...Ahem. Sorry.
- Also, anytime something is utterly destroyed, Adam's line "Well there's your problem!"
- Anytime they utterly destroy something. Especially explosively.
Jaime Vendera got his CMOA on Mythbusters by shattering a glass with just his voice.
How awesome was waterskiing behind a rowboat?
- Not even a tenth as awesome as waterskiing behind an OCEAN LINER!
- And about as ludicrously awesome as wakeboarding with an EXCAVATOR.
Adam finally beating Jamie for a change in the Concrete Glider episode.
- Adam had previously beat Jamie in the Paper Crossbow competition. While proving that you could kill a man with rolled-up paper.
The Cement Truck incident is their Crowning Moment of Explodiness. Oh noes! You can't dislodge the dried concrete with a cherry bomb? How about a big cherry bomb? How about a stick of dynamite? How about packing the cement truck to the brim with plastique, clearing the area within a 5-mile radius, and frakking VAPORIZING it?! WIN.
- Then they topped that with the 22,000 foot fall myth... a bomb big enough to where the shockwave is visible on camera and managed to wrap a couple inch thick steel rod around a sapling tree (without destroying it).
  - And after that, their test on making diamonds with explosives. 5000 pounds of explosives. They made an absurdly large crater (which is hard to do, because that essentially involves vaporizing the ground, and doesn't happen IRL as much as it does on TV), had an even bigger visible shockwave, and when you look at them from inside the bunker, you can tell that the shockwave actually knocked them back.
  - Yes those explosions were bigger in raw tonnage, but they weren't visualy as cool. Blown up a cement truck? What cement truck?
  - It's the sound, the cement truck explosion sounds awesome.
In the golf episode, Grant gets one just with what he says:

Grant: This one involves thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening.

Or building working versions of the two functions of Batman's grappling gun?
Jamie Hyneman. Sitting inside a Tesla coil. And shooting million-volt bolts of lightning with a squirt gun.
The lie detector episode, when the team go to have an MRI scan which is supposed to tell if they're lying or not. They each have to steal either a ring or watch from a drawer, then undergo MRI while being asked questions. Anyone who can beat the scan gets $1000, anyone who fails has to go back from South Carolina to California by bus. Kari and Tory take the ring, Grant the watch. When the results come, the scan says that they all stole the ring, so Grant gets $1000. Amazing.
Kari Byron, sawing a tree in half with a minigun. A CMOA and sexy as hell, too.
In the golf episode, the team did an investigation into how many balls will get through if you hit them into a tree's foliage - and Tory, under his own power, got more through than Grant's robot, built for that specific experiment, did.
- As Kari put it, "You're better than a Robot!"
The myth? Shooting fish in a barrel. Jamie, who previously fired a bullet down the scope of a sniper rifle, actually missing the fish, even with a shotgun? Funny. Discovering that the pressure wave caused by the bullet would kill the fish anyway? Educational. Deciding to fire at a barrel with a minigun that fires 3000 rounds per minute, to the point where the barrel is cut in half and the fish within disintegrates? This trope.
Water heater rockets. Especially the high-speed footage.
The entire Seesaw Saga episode, especially when they launched "Ariel" 130 feet into the air!!!
- Also featuring the most masculine Grant countdown, a Crowning Moment of Funny from the Mythbusters' reactions and a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming as the Adam radios the people above him; "Tell me everybody's okay." and high-fives only begin after it's confirmed that everyone's fine.
The entire episode they spent ~~debunking~~ ~~annihilating~~ tearing various Moon-landing conspiracy claims into pieces and stomping them to bits was just a thing of beauty. For this NASA-phile, anyways.
In the most recent season, they tried to simulate a car being flattened between two semis. When "merely" placing a car between two trucks in a head-on collision didn't produce awesome enough results, they attached 24 solid-fuel rocket engines to a one-inch-thick piece of steel, accelerated it to the speed of sound, and hit the car with that. There was nothing left. ("What car?") Adam has been impressed many times throughout the show, but this was the first time he was completely struck dumb by what they had just done.
- They shot a high-speed film of the impact, showing it in super-slow-motion. The car hit the wall so fast that the chassis didn't even have time to crumple. It basically disintegrated from front to back. As awesome as the impact looked at normal speed, the super-slow-mo shot was awesomeness on steroids. Steroids that enhance awesomeness!
  - So, we should send the Mythbusters a few sets of Kamina glasses?
    - Pfeh. We should send Kamina a few sets of Mythbusters glasses.
- Topping that, the build team tried to see if a snowplow can cut a car in half. After busting it at normal highway speeds, they built a rocket-powered superplow, sent it down the track at over 500 mph, and managed to split the car in half! Including the engine block! Not only that, but the superplow disentegrated!
They built a shark-punching robot. That's just so awesome, it singlehandedly justifies the entire medium of television.
- Indeed, the Discovery Channel picked a shot of that bot in action, as a part of a series of network promos based on It Makes Sense in Context moments.
If building and driving a speedboat made of frozen newpaper doesn't qualify as awesome, what does?
- One upping it by making a sail boat entirely out of Duct Tape?
  - Hey, don't forget the duct-tape cannon. That's right. They made a working cannon, completely out of duct tape.
  - For a second episode involving the wonders of Duct Tape, the build team tests how well a car holds up when being held together with the stuff. And we're not talking about a busted bumper or a broken off side-mirror, the destruction involved calling the San Francisco Fire Department to borrow the tools they use to cut open cars to slice off the roof. The test ends with the engine giving out and the Duct Tape remaining intact, including the hood ornament.
  - Duct tape's final success: the Duct Tape Island challenge. Jamie and Adam manage, with duct tape and bamboo, to: Signal for help, get water, catch food, build shelter, start a fire, go surfing, play chess, and finally build an oceanworthy canoe.
The Build Team skipped a car across a lake. And the car still ran afterward.
Mythbusters + Ask a Ninja = pure awesomeness.
How about when the Build Team recreated the ancient Korean hwacha arrow launcher? For those familiar with modern weaponry, it's like a 15th century Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), and it's just as spectacular to watch when it's fired. (For those more familiar with Tropes, it was basically the first Macross Missile Massacre.)
- Also, the hwacha only missed because the fake army was too close and no big enough. Against a force of a thousand, ti would be a massacre.
In the Chinese Invasion Alarm experiment, Kari does better at hearing Jamie and Tory's digging than Adam... and Grant's fancy geoscopic technology.
The YouTube special, where Adam and Jamie not only confirmed that lighting 30000 match heads at the same time creates a large fireball, but they also lit a million match heads and created an even bigger fireball. Then they used 60000 match heads as gunpowder for a cannon. And it worked.
In their holiday special, the Myth Busters spend the entire episode building a huge Rube Goldberg machine. It's difficult to describe in words, so a video is necessary.
Sawdust. Road flare. Air pressure. Large metal cylinder. That is all.
- Not quite, you forgot one part: non-dairy creamer. The fireball was so massive it freaked out the whole build team.

Grant: We should destroy this, because it's too dangerous to have in our shop!

While testing whether it was possible to escape a car that had driven into a lake, the Mythbusters found that if you didn't open the car door immediately, then you had to equalize the pressure between the outside water, and the inside of the car, in other words, let water into the car through a window or otherwise, but discovering this wasn't the crowning moment of awesome. No, the crowning moment came several months later (as revealed on the Top 25 greatest Mythbusters moments) when Adam and Jamie received a letter from a fan. He said that he was a truck driver, who had a seizure while he was driving over a bridge. He came to in the middle of a lake, his cab slowly filling with water. Remembering what the Mythbusters said about escaping a sinking vehicle, he opened up his air vent, let the cab fill with water completely, opened the door, and swam out. The Mythbusters saved a person's life.
- Four other people wrote to them saying that what they showed saved their life.
Dedicating an episode to not just busting moon landing hoax Conspiracy Theories, but rhetorically stomping them flat, setting them on fire, and pissing on the ashes. They also evaporated a car. Not with explosives, mind; that's what they did to that poor cement truck. No, this vehicular vaporization was caused by a hunk of metal crashing into the car at transonic speeds. Awesome in a classical sense.
"The cement truck went away..." The true Crowning Moment of Awesome of the show, however, may be the end of the "Top 25 Mythbusters Moments" special, in which they show all of the best explosions (a few dozen of them), including the cement truck going away, in one massive montage set to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. It's breathtaking, to say the least.
- It must be seen to be believed, enjoy!
Cutting a car in almost perfect halves with a rocket powered snow plow going 500 mph. The sled then disintegrated upon impact with the barrier.
The Build Team and Adam and Jamie each have their favorite myths as their personal Crowning Moments. The Build Team's fav is "Racing Gravity," where they did Exactly What It Says on the Tin, dropping a car from a helicopter and then racing it to the impact point with a sportscar from the same distance away from the drop point horizontally as the falling car was vertically. Adam and Jamie's favorite is "Lead Balloon," where they were able to disprove the old idiom about the topic by constructing and floating a balloon made out of lead foil.
Their appearance at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, where they tested to see the force of 150,000 people jumping at once, and tested to see if men or women did the wave faster.
President Obama himself gave the Mythbusters another angle on the Archimedes Death Ray, saying that the thing that the Mythbusters missed was manpower; the Mythbusters gathered 500 students to help them pull off the myth. It was still busted, but seeing that many people out there was a CMOA.
- Heck, meeting the President in person and having him say he's a fan of the show and personally wants to request a myth is a three-fold CMOA. The rest is gravy.
Creating fire by using a power drill to spin a stick, with the hole in the board below surrounded by gunpowder. It's breaking every single rule involved in the process, but their sheer audacity has to be applauded.
It turns out that in his spare time Jaime has been helping the military! He's making them armor and robotic dummies.
The Build Team making a functioning airplane out of ductape!
A recent show showcased the Mythbusters top 12 favorite locations. Number one was the bomb range, so during the credit sequence at the end they had a montage of all the explosions that have taken place there. It's BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.
- Harsher in Hindsight: And now they can't use it anymore. Damn.
Perhaps the first show's first CMOA, wherein they not only figured out how the legendary escape from Alcatraz, widely thought impossible, could have been done, but then went out and actually did it themselves.
Surviving on a desert island with only duct tape.

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