"The stories that we love doing the most are always the ones where we don't know what the outcome is going to be," said Rees, who estimated that's about 60 percent of the total. "One of the ones that's probably the most frightening for Adam and I, and one that we firmly believed in, was, if you're on a ship and it sinks, you can be sucked down.

"The three of us stood on a tug in San Francisco Bay. It went down and it was incredibly frightening — but nothing happened."

And all the myths aren't busted. Savage estimated "about 10 percent of the myths we test turn out to be totally possible."

"The great thing about 'Mythbusters' is, for us, it doesn't matter what the outcome of the story is, it's still a great story," Rees said. "If we fail, that can be a better story than if we actually succeed."

"Our baseball hats say — failure is always an option," Savage said.

And both success and failure sometimes come unexpectedly.

"Often we'll think we know exactly what the results are going into the myth, and then we're completely surprised," Savage said. "We replicated the Alcatraz escape by building a rubber raft out of 24 rubber raincoats. And we had a positive. . . . We were shocked at how efficiently it happened. I mean , we made it from Alcatraz to the Golden Gate Bridge in less than an hour."

Which makes him believe the legend that prisoners did escape from the island prison. "They made it. They're out there," Savage said.

If they did escape and happened to make their way to New York City, at least they didn't have to worry about getting hit by coins falling out of skyscrapers.

"One of our favorite myths that we ever did was — will a penny dropped from the Empire State Building actually kill you?" Savage said. So, through math and a wind tunnel he built, they determined the penny's "terminal velocity" in such a circumstance would be between 30 and 60 mph.

"And then Jamie built this penny shooter, which fires a penny at 60 miles an hour," Savage said. But it didn't do much when it fired a penny at a person.

"It didn't even break the skin," Savage said. "Another myth busted."

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com