Can shooting an oxygen tank make it explode? Can a shark ram through a shark cage? Can a shark truly ram a hole into the side of a boat like in Jaws? Does punching a shark in the nose really make it go away? These are all myths that derived from the famous movie Jaws. The MythBusters – a band of experts in various different fields including science, animation, and more – are here to reveal whether these myths are in fact true, or fictional.
The MythBusters team consists of the two hosts: Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Both of these men have done incredible effects for popular companies such as Nike, and movies such as Star Wars and The Matrix. Adam Savage also teaches advanced model making at the San Francisco Academy of Art.
You may remember the Nike commercial on television in which a Nike show is being remotely controlled. The shoe is moving by wheel, and at the end it kicks a football through some goal posts. If you do remember it, that was the work of Jamie Hyneman.
One plot hole in Jaws is that the great white shark in the movie had ‘supernatural powers’, and was way too strong. In the movie the shark is also 3000 pounds and 25 feet long in length. No sharks that large, or heavy, have been discovered.
Other members of the MythBusters include Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, Tory Belleci, Scottie Chapman, and Christine Chamberlain. While these are all members of the MythBusters’ crew, you generally only see Adam and Jamie, and occasionally Kari and Grant.
From what the MythBusters have found, many of these myths are in fact false. Shooting an oxygen tank makes it fly sporadically in the air, but not blow up. They found this out by shooting an oxygen at point-blank range. Of course safety is their top priority, so they did this through remote control and put the oxygen tank into a specific sort of cage.
The shark in the MythBusters lab was made to be a sort of replica. The shark made only had the regular head, and had tubing as the rest of the body. With the supernatural weight of the shark from Jaws, the shark cage broke dramatically. However, the hole made in the ship was incredibly minimal.
Another myth that the MystBusters conducted was one that is even more widely known. If you punch a shark in the nose, will it go away? At first they created a mechanical robot to punch the sharks, but after awhile they learned next to nothing since it was inaccurate. Eventually they went down to the bottom of the ocean floor somewhere that was shark infested themselves. The sharks here weren’t horribly large, but they seemed to be as big as an average human. After Jamie punched a few sharks in the nose (not too hard, either), they found that doing this made the sharks go away, and they didn’t become aggressive either.
The Jaws special on the MythBusters rendered many myths fictional, as well as fact. For more information on the MythBusters in general, and to submit your own myth, go to http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html.
