‘MythBusters’ Will Air a ‘Simpsons’-Themed Episode Next Month

The Discovery Channel’s hit series MythBusters returns for a 13th season next month, and hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that the premiere will be dedicated to busting some myths from the world of Springfield. “Several people were like, ‘This is a cartoon! What can you do with this?’” Savage said. “We looked through many, many, many different bits on The Simpsons, but I think that we found stuff that really is entertaining and not totally outside the realm of physics — unlike, say, Wile E Coyote stuff might be. We reached out [to The Simpsons producers], and they were totally into it.”

So which Simpsons myths will the guys tackle? One comes from the 1990 episode “The Crepes of Wrath,” according to Savage: “We set out to test Bart throwing a cherry bomb into the toilet that makes all toilets in the school act like geysers. And then there’s one [from season 5’s “Sideshow Bob Roberts”] in which Homer’s house is about to be destroyed by a wrecking ball and Homer places his body between the wrecking ball and the house to keep it from being destroyed.” The second stunt involved the team creating two Simpsons house replicas as well as a life-size 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. It’s a very elaborate process that we went through using three or four different technologies that we’ve used over the years in special effects. But there’s a weirdness to standing next to a 5’11” tall Homer Simpson proportioned correctly to the cartoon in real life, it’s really peculiar. I can’t describe it any other way than that.