I think the advent of movie theaters killed it. With today's special effects you can see trains or boats or spaceships crashing into each other in close up for a reasonable price. It's not "real" of course, but probably fills the need.
It grows a need in me to see the real thing - because I know the special FX crashing is invented, and I'd like to know how it would look (and sound, and smell, and feel) in reality.
I remember watching the twin towers collapse on 9/11, and the part of me that wasn't thinking "Oh God!" was thinking "Wow, that looks just like a special effect".
When I first stumbled upon reports from 9/11 when channel surfing (I think it was before the second plane hit), I thought I'm seeing some weird thriller movie, and continued switching channels. Only later that day I learned it was all real.
I would love to see a slow-motion recording of such a crash.
Special Effects are cool, but the interactions between different materials, pressure waves both in the structure and in the air as well as the influence of heat are fascinating and hard to model, and Hollywood has little incentive to even try. Only in the last two decades have we even started to properly simulate cgi explosions (the helicopter crash from Matrix is the earliest example).
Basically cinema and YouTube have me spoiled to demand more than what I can perceive. But special effects can't mimic the real thing.
Speaking of the Matrix, the first time I remember I started paying attention to what you mention was a collision scene on the highway from the second Matrix - the CGI there pictured a pressure wave moving through the two colliding trucks.
Movies didn't kill it, rather the Great Depression:
> By the 1930s, staged train wrecks were starting to lose their popularity because wrecking old but otherwise useful locomotives was seen as wasteful at the height of the Great Depression.
Also:
> ...staged train wrecks were a popular—albeit destructive—event at fairs and festivals across the U.S., long before anyone ever thought of wrecking old automobiles at a demolition derby or monster truck rally.
Not to mention the various incantations of robot wars. People still want to see things in real life go boom.
No doubt you can find contemporary journalists saying "wasteful in this depression!" if you look. And probably others saying "wasteful!" in every decade... how can we tell whether this was the reason?
I know stunts with WWI surplus airplanes were a common attraction in the 20s, maybe trains just started to seem old-fashioned?
Movies also sounds likely, to me, they were coming of age. In fact IIRC booming, as cheap entertainment.
I don't know, there are experiences that just can't be replicated on video. Even something as simple as fireworks are a completely different experience in person than in a theater (even IMAX). One of the spectators described the crash as more frighting than Gettysburg! Granted that crash was far more dangerous that would every be permitted today, but I'd imagine that even smaller ones were more earth shaking than you can get in a theater.
There was a much-hyped recreation of a train crash at last year's Burning Man. The crowd that turned up to watch it was massive. The actual crash was a bit anticlimactic; To avoid generating a bunch of debris, the crash happened at very low speeds.
That's about a low as you get... I wonder why did they even bother with that?
The very point of a train crash, or any crash, is to seriously total the equipment and see debris flying, and also the theoretical possibility of a memorably injury, isn't it?
What does anyone get out of a couple of locomotives playing bumper cars, with fireworks to give it at least some dazzle to go with it?
I might be in the minority here, but I thought Mythbusters was a much more compelling show before it turned into outright destruction porn.
I pretty much lost interest after the episode where they blew up the concrete truck. I don't know much about mining or blasting[0], but I think even the most basic honest attempt to answer the question of "can you remove cured concrete from the drum of a concrete truck using explosives?" would have involved drilling some holes, filling them with explosives, and using the explosives to shatter the concrete. You know, the way miners use explosives to shatter rock.
For those of you who haven't watched that episode, they throw a stick of dynamite into the drum, observe that nothing happens, pack the remaining space in the drum full of ANFO, and then basically obliterate the truck. Adam picks up a fragment of the truck and delivers his catchphrase "Well there's your problem".[1]
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for myths involving guns and explosives; those aren't things the general public has a lot of experience with[2]. But let's not sensationalize them, let's look at what they actually do, under realistic (if unusual) circumstances.
[0] I've toured a couple deactivated mines and read a couple of books. In every case, the basic process of "drill holes, fill with explosives, removed broken up material" was covered. I'm not an expert, but I find it hard to believe they couldn't have found one for the purposes of science.
[1] Haven't seen it in a while, don't care to re-watch it. There might be some bits missing, but that's basically how it goes.
[2] In the case of firearms especially, I firmly believe if more people had an understanding of how they work and their effects, even in extraordinary cases, we might be able to have a semi-intelligent conversation about them.
Even as a teenager I was aware of the applicability of controlled demolition to that problem. It would be theoretically possible to do so with the right research.
However, that wasn't really the point of the Myth. The myth was the guy blew up his truck with a stick of dynamite. The employment of the ANFO was to show the required investment of effort to create a result commensurate with the Myth's outcome.
If anything, it was very educational in terms of demonstrating how much effort and oomph it takes to create a catastrophic failure of modern equipment; and instilling somewhat of a sense of security in that that sort of oomph was not necessarily something someone would just find laying around.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. They decided that blowing up the truck would be more entertaing than actually teaching how to go about resolving the problem. I think it's a missed opportunity in hindsight to introduce some fairly esoteric skills into the public consciousness; but the time (War on Terror in full swing) would have likely condemned doing so as reckless no matter how much you and I may disagree. People would have pointed their fingers at "teaching impressionable, unstable youths the finer points of controlled demolition and explosives handling" as a contributing factor in every subsequent explosives related incident.
Don't get me wrong; I hate ratings hunting programming, and the swill broadcast television has become today. That episode was legit though.
Plus the sound of a cement truck being annihilated by ANFO will forever be associated with the concept of the universe momentarily unzipping. That was a hell of a spectacle.
It would draw a big crowd, but it's also hellishly expensive, and would be even more so today with people insisting that you do it safely (somehow) and clean up afterwards.
I walked inside these buses [0, 1] a few days after the accident, as part of a 'dont speed or drive tired' lesson from a relative police officer who attended the scene of the crash (he was never the same after). All I can say after seeing this is that you would want to do your crash test with remote controls from a distance.
