TVSquad

As any child of the 80s knows, there is a slew of great mini-cartoons and animation shorts from Sesame Street that belong on yesterday's list of the greatest shorts. Unfortunately, word space and time are cruel mistresses.

There was a sixth I wanted to include but had to go: the famous Baby Climbs the Stairs short. It deserves special mention because it's more emotional teaching than just concrete concepts like numbers or letters. It was also created by W. Lee Savage, the father of Mythbusters host and special effects guy Adam Savage.

The Mythbusters crew aren't scientists, but they sort of play them on TV -- submitting everything from movie stunts to common household sayings to proven analytic methods.

Of course, it's more fun to determine whether you can cut a tree in half with a machine gun than it is to test the effectiveness of a new polymer, so Mythbusters gets a TV show -- and your average scientists don't.

To celebrate Mythbusters' completion of its seventh series of episodes on Discovery Channel, series stars Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage hosted a set visit of their testing and production facilities in an industrial park just outside San Francisco's Mission District.

Hyneman led the tour himself through M5 Industries -- a former visual effects house turned production shop for the popular debunking series.

I imagine a lot of stalkers must love a place like Comic-Con. All of their most sought after celebrities are together in one place for easy pickings. It must be their Costco.

One star, however, decided to turn the tables on his fans and used his own costume to stalk and hunt down a few of his fans on the floor of this year's convention.

To make it even creepier, he dressed up like a clown. That slurping sound you hear is my spine falling out of its socket from uncontrollable shivering.

Ever gotten a bill in the mail so ridiculously high that it makes you wish you could rally together a ragtag army of disgruntled miscreants and take down the corporation that charged you "Viking style"?

Sure, we all have. So why don't you? Gathering an army takes time and most of us don't have many friends willing to take an arrow to the chest for us, much less a check. Arrows, while cheaper than bullets, can add up and aren't tax deductible. And I'm pretty sure that any looting and/or pillaging is a federal crime.

Mythbuster Adam Savage, however, has both the manpower and weaponry to pull just such a caper and he didn't have to bury one friend in a fiery ship at sea to do it.

The team at TV Squad scours all the corners of the net looking for interesting junk, so you don't have to. And that's how I found my way to The Christian Science Monitor. Not one of my usual haunts, but they have a really good article on Jamie and Adam from Mythbusters. I'm a fan of the show, but I never really knew much more about the two of them than what they have revealed on the show.

While not an in depth bio, we do learn some more details about the backgrounds of the pair. A couple highlights - Jamie ran away from home for six months when he was 14, making it halfway across the country. Previous to the M5 effects shop he also owned a pet store and a boat charter business in the Caribbean. And somewhere along the line he got a degree in Russian literature. Adam has worked as an animator, graphic designer, set designer, and actor. His father did animation for Sesame Street.

The article also gets into just how different the two are. So much so that Jamie comments "I wouldn't spend five minutes with Adam outside of work if I didn't have to." But it's clear that the two are enjoying what they are doing and respect each other for their unique talents. Worth a click if you are a Mythbusters fan. The new season of the show will begin airing in January.

[ via digg ]