STANFORD – Excerpt from Scott Scotley’s exclusive interview with Adam Savage of TV’s Mythbusters
SCOTLEY: Mr. Savage, rumor has it that you and the Mythbusters team have chosen Stanford University as the focus of your next episode. Can you bust this myth?
SAVAGE: Ha ha, very funny Scott. But in all seriousness, yes, we have chosen Stanford. In fact, we’ve already finished filming.
SCOTLEY: Splendid! So, enlighten me. How do you choose the myths that you showcase?
SAVAGE: Well, an episode like this one requires some hard research: street interviews, digging into archives.
But we ended up with even more material than we’d thought we would. You ever hear that Ultimate Frisbee was invented on Wilbur Field?
Here were some more common ones: 70 percent of Stanford graduate will marry other alumni, there are more bikes on campus then people, if you crack an egg on the Mausoleum at midnight it’ll fry, the specter of Jane Stanford still haunts the steam tunnels.
There are tons.
SCOTLEY: Which one did you choose for the show?
SAVAGE: We settled on the myth that Meyer Library was originally constructed to hold books, but that mistakes in the construction led to a building that wasn’t up to holding more than a few computers.
Testing it was easy, though it led to some problems.
SCOTLEY: And the verdict?
SAVAGE: You’ll have to watch the show.
But it’s quite the ride. The student volunteers were almost killed.
SCOTLEY: And were there any other myths you managed to bust on your trip to the Farm?
SAVAGE: To really bust a myth we use scientific principles of testing that require time, focus and a whole lot of work. We chose what worked best for our methods, and the myths we didn’t have time for will have to…well, remain myths. Though there are some myths that are so obviously true or false that there’s no need for a testing process. There’s obviously more people on campus than bikes. And President Hennessy is a vampire.
