Then, of course, we had to make a Homer-this was the first time we made a non-human crash-test dummy because Homer is human, but he’s also a cartoon character, which means his proportions are totally not human. We built two replicas of the Springfield house. We ended up building our two houses out at a landfill. It’s very difficult to find things that are about to be destroyed.
In all of California, and we expanded our search to Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada, and really couldn’t. We put Eric on finding us a house in which we could say take a wrecking ball to two of its sides, a house that was about to be destroyed, and we could not find one. When we needed 60,000 ping pong balls to raise a boat from the bottom of Monterey Bay, he found us 60,000 for free. We have a researcher, Eric, who is just a genius at finding things that should be impossible to find. But I really feel like when they see what we’ve been producing this year, they’ll see a program that we still love to make. When we were looking down the barrel, as it were, of Kari, Grant, and Tory leaving, Jamie and I totally expected a vigorous response. You’re totally right-any change, even a change in the narrator, was something that they considered totally not okay.
The fans were so protective about the structure. We thought that would be hilarious-and it was hilariou-but I made the mistake of introducing the segment by being faux-serious, saying, “We’re toying with a new narrator for Mythbusters,” and the crowd watched the whole trailer angry! There was not a lot of applause and I had to say that was a joke. At Comic-Con a couple of years ago we thought it would be really great to cut a trailer for the new season of Mythbusters, but get Randall to narrate it. Do you remember that viral video about the honey badger? The guy who narrated that, Randall, he’s a friend of Mythbusters.