To be fair, lots of “MythBusters” episodes featured explosions — not just the mysterious, obliterated, and apparently dangerous episode in question. We’ve got the match bomb episode from back in the day that featured 30,000 match heads all lit at once, the MacGyver cement truck full of TNT, the toilet bomb episode that tried to recreate an exploding toilet from 1989’s “Lethal Weapon 2” (an objectively funny act), and loads more. In fact, by 2004 — just one year into the entire 15-year stretch of “MythBusters” — the show already aired a “best explosions” episode.
So what in the world could possibly be so dangerous about the mythical unaired episode that it was destroyed before it could be aired? After all, there’s no way to control whether or not a member of the public tries to reproduce any one of “MythBusters” bomb episodes provided they had the means. Well, Adam Savage gave a candid answer to this question back in 2016 at the Silicon Valley Comic Con.
Regarding the “easily available material and its supposed explosive properties” we cited, Savage continued, “What they found out was so explosive that we destroyed the footage and agreed never to say what we learned. … Like when DARPA just put out the request for civilians to design bombs that might be really hard for them to deal with. I wrote to them about this because I’m sure they already know about it — many bomb techs do. It was absolutely terrifying.”
[Featured image by Cpl. Michael A. Bianco via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled]
