"It was bloody and there were guts and crows eating eyeballs and skeletons and there was sex," he told the crowd at Wired By Design. "And I managed to convince my dad to take me to this movie twice."

The movie fascinated Savage, but not for the reason you might think. There was violence and triumph and a cast of beautiful movie stars. "What I knew is that I saw this armor and it represented some kind of transformation to me," he says. "I wanted a piece of it." After the movie, Savage came home and removed a slat of wood from a fence surrounding his childhood home. He went down to his father's workshop, shaped the piece of wood into a sword, spray painted it silver, covered it in aluminized tape and added a glass bead in the bottom of the hilt. Suddenly, he had himself a sword straight out of Excalibur.

Savage is most well known for myth busting, but he got his start making special effects models for movies, commercials, and photographs. This was before the boom in CGI; a time when movies required physical props, not pixels. In his years as a professional model builder, he created the  payload bay in Space Cowboys, guns for the Matrix and worked on Star Wars Episode 1.