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I miss these guys (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/Tumblr@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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[–] 9 points 9 months ago (12 children)

I will say, at least in the early episodes, they used a ton of human remains. Call me old fashioned, but I'm not sure it was a respectful to punch actual human skulls until they crumble for pure entertainment and the sale of ad time.

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  • [–] 57 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    If my skull getting punched until it's dust is what it takes to get even one American to get interested in science I would consider it an honor.

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  • [–] 20 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    They used a lot of ballistic gel people and the crash test dummy (Buster). Don't remember any real human remains. Fake bones are cheaper and easier to get, i dont think using real human remains was within their purview.

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    They used ballistic gelatine dummies for a while, then decided that they weren't a good model of most injuries, so had an episode where they designed a new dummy by buying human bones and breaking them to see how much force they could take, then picked out a material with similar properties (which surprisingly ended up being wood), and from then on, built fake skeletons to put in the gelatine dummies.

    IIRC, the bones were bought from a shop that just sold human bones. They'd ended up there nominally because their previous owners' wills had permitted it. E.g. lots of people want their skull to be used in productions of Hamlet, so drama groups often end up owning real skulls. I'm not sure whether Mythbusters was buying things from a general-use shelf or if they counted as medical science due to doing some kind of experiment - the US military counts even if they're just using corpses for target practice.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I'm almost positive I remember that episode where they made the new dummy and they used pig bones lol.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    Human remains are not humans. I think we obsess way too much about what happens after a human dies, mostly due to historical reasons (i.e. it makes sense to be afraid of dead bodies or consider them sacred, because interacting with them could make you sick).

    If you make sure that the remains are not identifiable to anyone, why not use them for anything you like?

    If anything I am more annoyed that at some point they stopped bothering about only buying corpses of pigs which died from natural reasons, and started supporting the meat industry more directly by buying from the regular butchers/supermarket. Even then, I'm only very slightly annoyed.

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