[via Anita's LOL] TeeVee.com interviews catapult builder and “Junkyard Wars” guest expert Ron Toms. He describes the trade-offs the producers of the show have to make for safety and playablity: the experts have each team’s approaches vetted by outside engineers before the show, a third party performs saftey checks and in some cases rebuilds each team’s contraptions before the testing part of the show, and the experts check the rubbish heap before the building starts to make certain nothing critical is missing.
Even with these ‘tweaks,’ “Junkyard Wars” is still a lot of fun, and one of the only good things to come out of the ‘reality’ TV craze.
We can only hope that one of the upcoming challenges on the show will be to build something to replace the people who come up with crud like “Boot Camp,” either that, or something to pitch Rupert Murdock into the North Sea.