MythBusters and White Rabbit Project host Grant Imahara died suddenly on Monday, the cause of death being a brain aneurysm. He was 49 years old. Imahara joined the Mythbusters crew in the Discovery Channel show’s third season. He continued to appear until 2014. In 2016, he joined fellow former Mythbusters Kari Bryon and Tory Belleci in launching White Rabbit Project on Netflix.
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“We are heartbroken to hear this sad news about Grant. He was an important part of our Discovery family and a really wonderful man. Our thoughts and prayers. We are heartbroken to hear this sad news about Grant. He was an important part of our Discovery family and a really wonderful man. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family,” a Discovery spokesperson told THR.
Imahara, a long-time Hollywood visual effects professional and electrical engineer by trade, joined MythBusters by invitation of series co-host Jamie Hyneman. No stranger to Hollywood, Imahara got his start at THX and Industrial Light and Magic, two subsidiaries of Lucasfilm.
While there, he focused as an animatronics model maker and worked on all three Star Wars prequels in addition to The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Galaxy Quest, Van Hesling, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Imahara, Byron, and Belleci all announced they intended to leave the series in 2014. The streamer then recruited the trio for White Rabbit Project, a show similar to that of MythBusters that launched in 2016. The series only ran from one season before being cancelled. All ten episodes of the series are now streaming on Netflix.
The engineer-turned-television personality most recently consulted with Walt Disney Imagineering with a project that resulted in a robot that was able to perform acrobatic stunts. Authoring a paper called Stickman: Towards a Human Scale Acrobatic Robot, the prototype Imahara helped to create eventually evolved into a product called Stuntronics, something used in most Disney parks around the world.
Cover photo by Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic
