Grant Imahara, part of the Discovery Channel's
MythBusters Build Team for 10 years, once
told Machine Design,
"When I was a kid, I never wanted to be James
Bond. I wanted to be Q, because he was the
guy who made all the gadgets."
Throughout his career, he did exactly that,
a career which ended with his death on Monday,
July 13, of a brain aneurysm. He was just
49 years old.
Imahara was more than just a TV host. Born
in 1970 in Los Angeles, Imahara graduated
with a degree in electrical engineering from
the University of Southern California, as
Rolling Stone reports. For a time he had considered
switching majors to screenwriting, but fortunately
for all of us he kept to that childhood career
path, becoming that Q figure for big-budget
films across the spectrum of science fiction
and fantasy. His electrical engineering expertise
expanded to robotics, serving him, and the
entertainment industry, very well.
"I started out playing with Lego, and so the
idea of building things was ingrained, it
was something that I loved to do."
As The Hollywood Reporter tells us, he first
landed a job with Industrial Light and Magic
and THX Labs, the Lucasfilms special effects
companies founded by George Lucas in 1975.
There he worked as an animatronics engineer
and model maker. Besides designing light displays
for R2-D2, he operated the droid in the Star
Wars prequels.
His engineering expertise, combined with a
love of entertainment and storytelling, also
shows up in his work on such films as The
Lost World: Jurassic Park, Terminator 3: Rise
of the Machines, and the sequels to The Matrix,
among others.
He struck his career arc early, telling Machine
Design in 2008,
"I liked the challenge of designing and building
things, figuring out how something works and
how to make it better or apply it in a different
way. I guess you could say that engineering
came naturally."
Imahara started stepping in front of the camera
in 2000, when he competed on Comedy Central's
BattleBots. His middleweight entry in the
competition, which he built himself, was christened
"Deadblow." The first season "Deadblow" was
the runner-up in its category, and was the
first-ranked robot in the series' third season.
Both Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman worked
on BattleBots as well. Proving that show business
is a small world after all, history took a
turn for the delightful when Imahara joined
MythBusters, becoming part of the Build Team
in 2005.
The program set out to do exactly what it's
title suggested: take on legends, myths, and
Hollywood setpieces to see which fanciful
ideas might actually work in real life.
As a member of the Build Team, Imahara worked
with Kari Byron and Tory Belleci. Belleci
had been one of his colleagues at ILM and
is credited with recruiting Imahara for the
show. Imahara did more than lend technical
expertise and practical experience to the
episodes; Imahara brought with him a remarkable
fearlessness as well, participating in some
of the experiments. If a myth test was judged
too dangerous for actual humans, Imahara's
team designed machines that would take the
place of a person.
Besides his MythBusters work, Imahara worked
behind the scenes to create a skeleton robot
sidekick for Craig Ferguson's late-night talk
show, a creature dubbed Geoff Petersen. In
front of the cameras, he portrayed Hikaru
Sulu in the fan-made Web series Star Trek
Continues.
In 2014, the Build Team was removed from the
MythBusters equation, but two years later,
the three experts reunited for a Netflix series,
The White Rabbit Project. In that program,
Imahara and his colleagues investigated not
only inventions, but also crime history, a
kind of "how did they do that?" approach.
Imahara's co-workers issued statements of
appreciation for his presence in their lives.
Adam Savage of MythBusters tweeted,
"Grant was a truly brilliant engineer, artist
and performer, but also just such a generous,
easygoing, and gentle PERSON. Working with
Grant was so much fun. I'll miss my friend."
The Discovery Channel said in a statement,
"Grant was part of the Mythbusters team for
10 years, where his dedication to his craft
and his ability to bust myths with the best
of them brought tech to life for his fans."
He became engaged to costume designer Jennifer
Newman in 2016, who wrote,
"He was so generous and kind, so endlessly
sweet and so loved by his incredible friends.
I feel so lucky to have known him, to have
loved & been loved by him."
