MacGyver

I bought the first season of MacGyver from a sale last weekend.

It totally holds up! It's sillily awesome, and awesomely silly.

Discuss.

Well, it may seem silly these days, but think of what else was going on at the time. You had The A-Team, where episodes would have lasted maybe five minutes if you left out the gunfire. You had a series of ridiculous military operations, including a pointless "invasion" of Grenada to "rescue" a group of students from "insurgents." On the other hand, if you were paying attention, you had proxy wars going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central America.

It was refreshing to see a fellow, armed with only a Swiss Army knife, who could think his way out of nearly any situation.

I think I've only seen one episode, the one where Mac goes looking for Atlantis and ends up in a room of lava.

The premise of MacGyver is still very unique. You have a guy who hates guns and avoids killing people whenever possible, yet also isn't all that good at hand-to-hand combat (he hurts his hand every time he knocks someone out), isn't particularly macho, masculine or promiscuous (although he has his fair share of love interests and old girlfriends) and is generally a casual, down to earth kind of guy. Despite all that, he survives entirely by his own wits and intelligence, however exaggerated or implausible some of contraptions may be they still bear the mark of ingenuity.

Funny thing: As a kid, I never thought of MacGyver as a secret agent. He was just MacGyver to me. His own entity, undefined by other characters out there.

Yes, it was always unclear to me what exactly Macgyver was supposed to be.

The intro has him standing under a black light with creepy tanning goggles, so lord knows what we're supposed to infer from that.

Mac Gyver rules. I love the improvisation and the optimism, it's over=the-top but endearingly so.

I think Burn Notice was partly inspired by Mac Gyver - although Westen likes guns and is a lot more willing to use violence, his ingenuity and improvisation skills are on par with Mac Gyver's.

But Mac Gyver did it first, and better. Everyone loves Mac Gyver.

I recently found out that the local library has some of this show on DVD. Is it worth watching?

Yes :P

Yeah, it's worth it.

Mac's a problem solver. That's all he needs to be. As for the gun stuff, even his actor doesn't like them. Richard Dean Anderson's views on firearms are that the military should have them, civilians shouldn't.

Funny then that he ended up in a show with guns. Lots of guns. HK MP 5, FN P90, M9 pistols and so on and so on. Stargate SG-1.

Well, the people who have the guns there are military. Mostly.

edited 18th Apr '14 5:27:24 AM by 3of4

I loved especially the first seasons when he was still going on missions instead of just accidentally end up in trouble. And his constructions are still fun to watch...only half of them would actually work in real life, but that half is awesome!

And the other half was meant to go boom, so there you have it.

Right about the military part. Anderson managed to reconcile his job with his views by playing a soldier surrounded by soldiers. Other than bad bad men, you never see an armed civilian in SG-1. Maybe aliens, but the fact that they're aliens makes an allowance for it.

Well, that and Daniel Jackson, technically

He's a contractor going on dangerous missions. He counts as support personnel.

I guess the number of times Daniel Jackson died could be some kind of karmic punishment.

But anywho, as for MacGyver, while the only lasting memory I have is also of that one where he discovers Atlantis (I think it was actually a TV movie), I think part of the appeal is that pretty much anybody can be the MacGyver style of hero. Lots of shows try too hard to shill their protagonist by making him just far too overqualified for anyone to imagine themselves as them...although the number of little boys who believe they are special forces material is incredibly high. Yet still MacGyver did the sort of thing people would love to imagine themselves as being particularly good at and used an internal skill that you couldn't see on a person so you could believe that deep down you had what it takes to escape from a Siberian prison using only the contents of your laundry basket, a pack of playing cards and an old can of Tango.

Anyone can be a Mac Gyver type. It takes knowledge, just a little bit of athleticism, and a calm reserve you can fall back on when you need the other two traits. Knowledge can be learned, and athleticism can be trained if you're determined enough to do the work. The calm reserve is harder, but if you enlist the help of others and put yourself through Hell it's possible to either break yourself of panic or drive yourself insane.

We've got the show on DVD, so we're watching it from start to finish. I forgot just how much voiceover work there was in this one. It's looking like Burn Notice drew more inspiration from Mac Gyver than I originally thought.

It's a very nice homage, and the Fridge Logic between the two shows is awesome. Mainly that Mac's childhood was mostly great, so he has a lot of personal anecdotes he shares with us, while Michael Weston's childhood was horrifying, and he'd very much rather not talk about it, so he doesn't make his speeches nearly as personal as Mac does.

For Michael it's just a job. Which is what his life mostly is: Just a job. For Mac, it's his life. His job is living and doing what he enjoys doing best: Fixing things and helping people.

You can look at Trumbo's World for proof of that. He could very easily have left Trumbo to die fighting for his plantation, but he doesn't. He sticks around and comes up with a three stage defense for the place that keeps Trumbo safe and the core of the Plantation standing.

Is it just me, or did a lot of late 80s/early 90s shows turn on the hokeyness with the spiritual world and the magical realism? I know this one started delving into it a lot more when it hit season five in 1990.

Added a characters page for this which needs love.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/MacGyver

So...I am watching the pilot of the remake...and wow did they get this wrong. The voice over is one of the most insulting things I have ever seen. But even worse: They apparently didn't understand the appeal of Mac Gyver as a character. It wasn't just his ability to put together crazy stuff, it was also the fact that he was humble. He wasn't for fancy stuff and preferred to live in an eclectic neighbourhood (or on a house boat) over some fancy apartment he certainly was able to afford, too, and a lot of his appeal was his abilities to make friends pretty much with everyone. And they went and turned him into an arrogant little sh...

Yeah, they bombed hard on that one by not reading the old characters right. They could have finagled a few changes here or there, but they completely derailed the old show.

At least the reboot featured a rare FaceHeel Double Turn between two female characters, Nikki Carpenter and Patricia Thornton.