Snow Special

Season 5, Episode 13, Aired

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8.2
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Can Yodeling Cause an Avalanche? Can A Machine Gun Cause an Avalanche? The team tackles the best ways to drive on Ice. Can you really freeze your tongue to a pole? And does it have any future ramifications?
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Fan Episode Reviews (5)

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  • Poorly researched 'myth'

    6.1
    "Fair"
    By ElmerFud, Oct 18, 2007
    You missed the boat on this one. Spent much time and effort debunking something that was NOT the actual premise of the 'Myth'.

    Actually the 'legend' I have heard for some 60 years is IF you can NOT get up a traction compromised hill (ie. snow, ice, loose gravel) going foreward while driving a Front Wheel Drive (FWD) turn around and BacK Up ThE HilL. This was taught to me by grandfather and father who had driven FWD and RWD vehicles from the early 1900s through the early 1940s when their were few paved roads and, every time it rained, froze or snowed, many really slick hills. Horses pulling buggies could climb them easily but early autos did not fair so well.

    This legend has NothinG to do with driving all over town or all around a cone course in reverse....... That can not be done at any decent speed by even fairly good drivers on clear dry pavement without several weeks of high intensity training and extensive practice........

    The flip side of this 'legend' is a rear engine, rear wheel drive (ie. VW or Porsche) or front engine RWD (ie almost all american cars up to 20 years ago) can not BACK up a traction compromized hill. This I learned the hard way (Naturally forgetting what my dad had told me) back in 1957 trying to turn around on a very narrow gravel road with steep shoulders. I pulled my VW Karmin Ghia nose down onto the steep shoulder and could not back up onto the road due to weight shift, lost traction and wheel spin. Took me almost 20 min inching back and forth to turn around on the side of the shoulder, then easily drove foreward up the steep shoulder and away I went, late, but much wiser!

    That experience ranked right up there with inching back and forth for over a half hour to get my 'Ghia' out from between two concrete benches on the High School lawn where the football team had picked it up and placed it.moreless

  • i loved the snow myths! i live where there is a lot of snow, so i had a pretty good idea about what was going to happen before they tested something.moreless

    10
    "Perfect"
    By silent_medium, Jul 09, 2007
    first of all the being stupid enough, even though you know what could happen, to stick your tongue on a cold pole... i think i did that once what i was really little. i don't remember it very well, but i do remember that it hurt! the whole driving backwards on ice is safer/ better than going forwards myth... totally busted and insanely stupid!!! it is hard enough to go forwards sometimes, but attemping to go backwards just because the traction is a bit better screams "please kill me now, and help me kill a lot of other people in the process."! lol i had heard about yodling causing an avalanche, but i was pretty skeptical. i hadn't heard about the machine gun thing. i think you might be able to if you had enough people shooting and were close enough.moreless

  • One of the worse episodes I've seen of this show.

    3.0
    "Bad"
    By HogggWild999, Jul 05, 2007
    There have been poor Mythbusters shows, and there have been bad Mythbusters shows, but this one has to be the worse I've ever seen so far. It was not only boreing to death, but the tests were all lame and done incorrectly. The whole show should be scrapped. First, flour is nowhere near the same in properties as snow so what the heck were Jamie and Adam thinking with the lab test on this one. Second, as Jamie alluded to at the end, no matter how they tried, they could never find the perfect conditions to test the myths. So it begs the question, why did they even bother? They could have gone to 12 different potential places and tried the same yodel and gunshot experiment and its still a game of chance, a crap shoot, as to wheither they would ever happen across the perfect situation where the yodel or gunshot would in fact trigger an avalanche. So this myth was not busted or confirmed because its impossible to test. Second, I think Grant and Salvator are pretty good characters, and especially Grant who is very intelligent. These two can usually some up with a plauseable plan and execute it and see what happens. Kari gets on my nerves. Why is she even in there? She's not that good looking, she is a wimp and a whiner. Every time its her turn to test something she starts with her whining and wimpering about it not being safe. The producers would do us all a big favor by dumping this worthless loser. Back to the myths. Their first myth was wheither you could pull your tongue off a frozen pole after attempting to lick the frozen pole. They go through all of this stupid rigging to test this with an animal tongue then they go out and do it anyway. This was stupid. The animal tongue test was stupid. It was an old decaying tongue and of course its going to lose some skin when pulled off, and it could not produce hot breath, DUH!!! Then Kari with her tossing up and grossed out act, ugh its SO annoying. Another boreing myth they neither confirmed or busted. Actually, it is a confirmed myth as there have been plenty of idiots who've put their tounge on a frozen pole and had it freeze there and got it off by breathing on it for a few minutes and pulling it off slowly. Third is the over the top methods to cause an avalance. Of course this was not what the myth was all about, it was about people doing ordinary things they would do on or near a mountain slope capable to having an avalanch. Tossing or launching mortars and dynomite on the slope are not ordinary things that may accidentally cause an avalanch. I wish they would stick with the myth and not go off on these tangents. I too wondered what would happen if the idiot dropped the dynomite as he was trying to get it out the window.

    Fourth is the car in reverse on snow/ice myth. This one was handled by the inept team again, and was the complete downfall of the entire show. Not only did they not stick with the parameters of the myth, they didn't even test it right. The myth was that driving a front wheel drive car backwards would afford you more traction. This is TRUE. Its a simple matter of physics. When a front wheel drive car is accellerated backwards, the momentum pushes the front end down, which causes more downward pressure on the front or drive wheels, and thus creates more traction. On a rear wheel drive car this is not true as the front wheels are not the driving wheels and what actually happend is the weight is lifted from the back wheels during reverse. The four wheel drive should have shown no difference if it were tested correctly. But these morons do this stupid test in the lab, which although it did confirm the myth, they had it set up wrong. The car should have been perfectly level, and they should have measured the pull of the car in each direction. This would have clearly showed he diffrence thus confirming the myth. This idiocy with the driving track and trying to drive a course backwards was just the most idiotic and stupid thing I've ever seen. All it proved was how many cones they could destroy, and that no one, even on dry pavement, can drive backwards. Assnine test by the C team. I really expected Grant to know better than this. They said it was busted, it was actually confirmed in the lab and screwed up in the field.moreless

  • snow - that's the white stuff that falls from the sky, right?!?

    9.5
    "Superb"
    By xblvr, Jun 28, 2007
    So living in Vegas snow itself is a little of a myth to me. Ok kidding about that. The snow myths were cool. I have heard the avalanche ones not to yodeling one, but some of the others so that was cool to find out that sound, no matter how loud won't trigger an avalanche. You need more pressure type stuff to do it so a skier could do it, or dropping bombs out of a helicopter could too. Just like Adam got to do. And you could tell that he was a bit scared about lighting the bomb inside the helicopter. The car one was just funny. And I think that it would have been fun to test too.moreless

  • Finally episode in low temperatures! Jamie and Adam process nicely with the avalanche but what's up with Kari, Grant and Tory? Some mindless tests that make up OK television.

    7.6
    "Good"
    By snild, Jun 21, 2007
    This episode will definitely start a series of myth submissions regarding cold, snow and other winter related stuff.

    Jamie and Adam investigate the myth whether you can cause an avalanche by yodeling. Now because their scaled test showed that you might get some results on close range with a megaphone, maybe they should've tested with big speaker system in the wild as well. Maybe even take a remote speaker very close to the breaking point! Oh well at least the idea was OK and it was semi-good television. As a long term MythBusters fan I was kinda hoping taking it to the next level, though.

    What about the other build team then; Kari, Grant and Tory? Now why build a fancy warm Franken-tongue with saliva and stick it to the pole, once, if you're not going to test various methods to get it off the pole? They surely know some of these methods (Kari even mentions one, peeing on it). I hope there will be a "revisit" about this one.

    They tested the traction of the tires wrong. They should've driven the car over the ice completely and measured the traction on a flat field. The reason why it gives you wrong results on the slope is because the weight is not distributed evenly when you move upwards (forward) on the slope or downwards (backwards). The car has to try and pull the weight of the car + the forklift to either direction and it is way easier downwards, this is very basic physics. When you think about it's weird that they've missed even as simple matter as this.

    Driving the track backwards proves the point that none of them can drive the track backwards. But can they drive that track backwards even when it's not covered by ice? Why didn't they test this too so that the results could be compared with ice and without?

    Maybe the cold was blocking their brain activity. :) Well regardless this episode is a great leap towards new type of myths. However I wouldn't recommend this episode to someone who wants to know what MythBusters' all about.moreless
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