December 6, 2014 1:03 pm

A Note about this Sunday’s Extended Classic Episode, MythBusters (Part 1)

Nobody likes repeats.

You turn on the TV, hoping for Jon Stewart to bring you a little comic perspective on the day’s events, only to find a repeat from two weeks ago.

Or you jump in your car, turn to NPR for Radio Lab, only to find them playing the episode on toxoplasmosis you’ve heard already… more than once.

But the fact is, repeats are a fact of media life.

TV seasons used to be longer, and unbroken; now we have “Mid-Season Finales” followed by, you guessed it, repeats.

As we draw near the end of Season 5 of StarTalk Radio, we have entered our own period of repeats. But rather than just re-run some of our more popular episodes as they were, we’ve gone ahead and added new content to each of our “Extended Classics.”

For the last two weeks, we’ve added 10 minutes of new interviews of Neil and Chuck chatting with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Elise Andrew of I F***ing Love Science to our Reporting on Science episodes.

This week, we’ve added 10 minutes of new Cosmic Queries to the end of MythBusters (Part 1). (And yes, if you want, you can just fast forward to the new stuff at the end, the way you fast forward through our commercials. We know you do it. Lots of people do it. It’s what the fast forward button is for.)

But here’s the thing. These shows are great the first time you listen, and they’re just as good the second time we post them. Some of you, many of you, listen to our episodes more than once or twice anyway.

So with our Extended Classics, it’s like going to a favorite restaurant and ordering a favorite meal, and then getting the evening’s dessert special thrown in for free.

In this case, after Neil talks about experiments, physics and urban legends with MythBusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, you get a tasty 10 minutes of Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice answering new Cosmic Queries submitted by our fans.

By the way, after one of you suggested that we be more explicit about naming these episodes, we’ve gone ahead and moved “Extended Classics” to the front of the name of this week’s show, and all future shows like it.

Please join us for Extended Classic: Mythbusters (Part 1) this Sunday, December 7 at 7:00 PM ET on our website, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn and SoundCloud.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up.
–Jeffrey Simons