A 'MythBuster' gets ready for some 'Punkin Chunkin'

This Thanksgiving, Discovery and Science Channels serve up a kind of pumpkin pie that nobody wants.

On Thursday, Nov. 24, the networks simulcast "Punkin Chunkin," the annual event in Delaware in which mechanical masterminds create a variety of giant contraptions whose sole purpose is to hurl a pumpkin as far as the laws of physics allow.

If the pumpkin evaporates into a seed-speckled orange mist, that's called "pie" -- and nobody's going to win a competition that way.

Hosts for the special are Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci of Discovery's "MythBusters."

For Imahara, it's a chance to get back to his roots.

"All the engineering efforts going into these chunkers," he says, "it's something that's familiar to me, because I used to build fighting robots for two competitions every year. You make a lot of sacrifices.

"You have all these problems that you have to solve with your machine. Everybody's got a different approach, even within the same category. There are air cannons, centrifugal machines, torsion, human power, trebuchet.

"Even with these very specific categories, the ideas that people are coming up with -- some are off the wall. It's really cool to see that variety."

And they're not small.

"It's not a tabletop event," says Imahara. "it's not even really a back-of-a-truck kind of event. These are giant, semi-truck-sized machines that people assemble on set. The scale of it all is incredible."