Mythbusters vs Brainiac

Mythbusters like, totally rocks, man. It's a show dedicated to the scientific testing of Urban Myths such as:

• Can a person receive third-degree burns if he or she lights a cigarette while inside a port-a-potty?
• If an elevator suddenly falls, can you save yourself in the nick of time by jumping just before it hits bottom?
• Does a duck's quack echo?

It's very entertaining, and well produced.

Brainiac, on the other hand, is a Sky One effort which seeks to research such questions such as:

• How many women with large breasts are required to blow up a washing machine?
• How many times can a cameraman look straight down the top of a woman with large breasts pretending to be Tina Turner while she blows up a car?

While there are some interesting and entertaining spots, most of it is typical MAXIM-style 'Laddy' humour, i.e. sexist, lowest common denominator rubbish.

Mythbusters is essentially creative - they build and modify machines and design experiments to test their hypotheses. The other show merely destroys things. OK, crash test dummies get a hard time in both, but at least Mythbusters dummy is a real crash-test dummy, while the Brainiac crew just destroy mannikins. (And the mannikins frequently have large breasts, too. It's something of a signature element to the show. I think the creator was probably bottle-fed as a child.)

This is not to say that stuff doesn't get blown up or destroyed during a Mythbusters investigation - dropping an elevator ten stories to see if your crash test dummy will survive the fall is destructive, but in the course of that investigation they:

• restored the elevator to semi-working order by modifying a soda-throwing robot vending machine!;
• designed and built a mechanism to make a crash-test dummy jump in a rough semblance of a human jump;
• and designed and built quick-release mechanisms for both the elevator and the dummy jumping device.

Compare this to the regular "Tina Turner and her Bunsen Burner" spot on Brainiac, where a short woman (with the obligatory large breasts) cavorts around in a red dress blowing up cars with dynamite, petrol or some other schtick, while the cameraman does his best to look straight down her cleavage.