Hacker Cinema
MacGyver
1985 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Lee David Zlotoff
He's everyone's favorite action hero... but he's a hero with a difference. Angus MacGyver is a secret agent whose wits are his deadliest weapon. Armed with only a knapsack filled with everyday items he picks up along the way, he improvises his way out of every peril the bad guys throw at him. Making a bomb out of chewing gum? Fixing a speeding car's brakes... while he's riding in it? Using soda pop to cook up tear gas? That's all in a day's adventures for MacGyver. He's part Boy Scout, part genius. And all hero.
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24 comments on Hacker News
I first learned about it through the Season 1, Episode 6 MacGyver episode Trumbo's World.
> Is this kind of facial reconstruction from a skull legit?
What did you search for when you tried to verify this yourself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klxUyd3CgrE
Aside, a similar approach was used in a MacGyver episode nearly 40 years ago ("The Secret of Parker House"):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638792/mediaviewer/rm1193210369/?ref_=tt_ph_1_2
TNG was lit much like other action/adventure shows when it debuted in 1987, e.g. MacGyver, Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, The A-Team (which ended that spring) -- the Bridge and hallways were much brighter than even a sitcom, I'd bet as a specific aesthetic choice of The Future Is Bright.
When DS9 debuted a few years later, it was stepping into a cultural mindset that had embraced Dark And Gritty in broader entertainment. That series is still much brighter than many shows today, but that's because of a technological revolution (including costs) rather than a change of "TV as an art form rivaling movies".
Yes, there is a mindset within Hollywood circle(jerk)s that so-dark-I-cannot-see is "more sophisticated, serious, and artful", but viewers broadly think it is idiotic. (Also, 2-and-a-half or 3 hour movie runtimes.)
One of my introductions to engineering was watching MacGyver as a kid.
Now watching it, knowing what I do, it's comical. But it had a big part in getting me interested and in the door.
It's the with any media or entertainment. You can't take kids to space, but you can make a book, movie or comic book where they can dream about doing it when they grow up.
Put another way, it's better that kids read this comic book and not one that does nothing to develop their futures, right?
Yeah, I spent years being frightened of stuff like Jurassic Park, Critters, X-Files, and even a MacGyver episode(!) That last one is where MacGyver gets lead poisoning and starts hallucinating; I must've seen that when I was, 4, 5, maybe? I remembered it when I saw it years later at the age of 12 or so (at which point it wasn't scary at all).
But around that age I did see Jurassic Park, and I spent months scared in bed – every time I heard some rumbling noise (usually just a car) I worried it might be some T-Rex or whatnot shrug. X-Files was also all the rage at the time and I always imagined aliens and whatnot peeking through my window.
It all seems profoundly silly even to me who lived through this to the point of mental illness, but kids can be really silly and have a kind of over-active imaginations that can make things scary that you or I have trouble imagining.
And all of that was before the internet. Even back in the 90s some more parental controls wouldn't be a bad idea, tailored to the personality of the child.
Ah, OK--that was quite a cultural thing at the time too, right? Isn't that where the Columbo episode "Columbo Goes to the Guillotine" got its inspiration? It starts out with a fraudulent remote-viewing scam, with the pentagon brass as marks.
I think there was a MacGyver episode with remote viewing, too...GX-1 or something.
This reminds me of an 80s tv show called MacGyver which impressed on me as a kid that you can use what you got to get out of tricky situations. I've done loads of different things as a result of this attitude. The only time I stopped to think about the show's wider influence was when I was at University (some time ago) in the Engineering building with my best friend (an Engineering student) and a phone went off with the MacGyver theme. When I told my friend I thought that was cool (these were the days when you had to pay for novelty ringtones) he casually remarked that a lot of the Engineering student body had the MacGyver ringtone and MacGyver had a huge influence on students enrolling for Engineering.
After reading this article I wonder if there are MacGyver-esque influences on younger generations? I haven't come across any YouTube channels or shows on Netflix, Prime or Disney Plus that would interest my 7 year old son and capture his imagination like MacGyver did for me as a kid.
Having said that, in true MacGyver fashion I started teaching my son Chemistry last weekend using a whiteboard, YouTube and some Minecraft analogies.
The Secret Life of Machines - Tim Hunkin - TV Series, now on the web
Connections - James Burke
The Origins of Precision - Machine Thought - Youtube
MacGyver - 1980s TV show
They need to have a MacGyver episode where they're trapped in a cave armed with just a blue LED light and they need to figure out magnetic north to get out.
Thanks. The pattern isn't perfect but the trend is clear. These are Season 1, excluding pilots.
A-Team (1983): 49m
MacGyver (1985, original): 48m
Quantum Leap (1989): 47-48m
X-Files (1993): 43-44m
Monk (2002): 44m
Eureka (2006): 44m
MacGyver (2016, remake): 42-43m
It's more than Homer. Nuclear and radiation being scary is absolutely pervasive in pop culture, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to MacGyver to Spiderman to HBO miniseries.
Part of the problem is that nuclear PR wing is run by utility companies that have a bunch of fossil assets that they don't want to make look bad by pointing out what's good about nuclear (no air pollution, no carbon emissions)
> MacGyver episodes
See my other post for a substantive reply.
I watched MacGyver quite a bit as a teenager, it was fun.
But...how does MacGyver the TV show relate to violence in southern California? Thanks. (:
To add unbounded credence to this idea, it's basically what Macgyver did using nitroglycerin to put out a wellhead fire in the 1985 episode "Hellfire"
Check out "parametric speakers".
Amazon has an assembled kit for sale: http://amzn.to/2AxtPBS
Also, more info from soundlazer.com, here: http://www.soundlazer.com/what-is-a-parametric-speaker/
Also, reminds me of the MacGyver (original) episode "Soft Touch"- where a Columbian drug cartel tortures a federal agent in a garage using high-decibel noise.
A little bit of watered down dawn in a hand sprayer would fix that...
Coincidentally this reminds me of a really strange MacGyver episode from the 80s
When I grew up, I was influenced by media like Knight Rider, A-Team, MacGyver and other TV shows. Oh and documentaries about the Great Canyon and other beautiful areas. I loved (american) English. I always had a dream to visit the USA. Not to live the "american dream" and get rich but just to experience the culture and scenery. During the past 10 years though this desire has completely gone away. This is due to the political climate and disrespect for foreigners privacy. I never went there even though I could do so easily. I travelled all over Europe (easy, being a EU citizen) and now traveling a lot in Asia.
I know of several businesses that have chosen not to send their staff to the USA anymore to trade shows or clients. My company used to send someone to a media summit every year. Last time they declined the visa for that person without providing any reason. It makes no sense. The focus is shifting: the US used to be the biggest market that everyone strived to cater to. Not anymore. Banks are more and more reluctant to use USD, Euro is preferred. When I go to a bank anywhere in the world I suddenly have to fill out a questionaire about not being a US citizen, having no phone number there, never having lived there and on and on. I have nothing to do with the US so why are they bothering me with this crap? Imagine if every country requested such a thing, you'd sit there a week answering questions. Oh and banks in Asia are starting to not take on US customers at all from what I heard.
When even people like Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) are having issues obtaining visas (https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/10/shamir/), something must be completely wrong with the way immigration is handled.
I hope the USA can turn this ship around, right now it looks like it's heading directly for the iceberg with full throttle.
It also hosted a Eastern European military camp in the MacGyver movie _The Lost Treasure Of Atlantis_
Lots more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station_in_popular_culture
:-)
I remember an episode of macgyver where macgyver gets past a handprint scanner by sprinkling baking soda over it; it adhered to the oil left on the scanner by the previous user and he got in.
Im not sure how it is today but when I grew up in Finland in the 80s all the most popular tv-series for kids where in English only. Of the top of my head: The Transformers, Inspector Gadget, M.A.S.K., He-Man, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Care bears, Smurfs, Postman pat, DJ Kat show, and then non-cartoon shows like like MacGyver, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Quantum Leap, Rescue 911, etc.
We also watched some some non-English tv shows like the Swedish "Bjornes magasin" and the Finnish "Pikku Kakkonen". But these shows where not as cool and not as plentiful as those English tv shows.
Ah Shenzhen! Such a wonderful and interesting city. If you are there, make sure you get to the Lo Wu Baby Factory AKA The Luohu Commercial City. I jest, it's actually not a baby factory, that's just what we called it for some reason. It's a humongous mall where you can buy pretty much anything in any quantity, of the lowest or highest quality, you just have to know what you are doing. I bought a 64 GB USB drive there in 2007. I knew it was fake, but I wanted to see how they were doing it. There was also the memorable time when I found a DVD shop, all pirated stuff, where they literally had every movie and TV show ever put on DVD, Like The Complete MacGyver . You peruse through a CD binder to find the DVDs you want and then a few minutes later a little kid pops out of the ceiling with your DVDs and the scampers back up into the ceiling. There are legit products there, don't get me wrong, but I was fascinated with the fake and knockoff stuff.
Nothing is truly tamper proof, but you could make it an order of magnitude harder to diffuse.
There's a MacGyver episode from 1986 ("Countdown") that involved a bomb extortion plot that was, in retrospect, almost certainly inspired by this event.
OTOH, if you're TOTALLY into a four-hour MacGyver movie, you may be interested in this book by Raymond Malewitz where he breaks down a recurring theme of "object misuse" in contemporary literature that he calls "Rugged Consumerism." The book looks at things like Apollo 13, MacGuyver, Fight Club, the Whole Earth Catalog, Sam Shepard, etc.
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=22814
Here's an article just about No Country for Old Men:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v050/50.4.malewitz.html
Just to offer a counter-point: I got about halfway through the book and lost interest.
I'm really happy for the author's success, and I don't at all think it's a bad book. But I found it to be basically pure "survival porn". I like MacGyver too, but I don't think I could watch a four hour episode of it, and that's what the book felt like to me.
The characters and writing are solid, but the constant peril and clever solutions just got tedious after a while.
If you "How is he going to get himself out of this?" is enough to keep you going for an entire book, you'll probably love it. But if you need a bit more than that, it may lose your interest.
Have you ever actually watched an episode of MacGyver? I feel like if you have, this "AppGyver" project sounds like it has just about the right amount of duct tape.
http://macgyver.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_problems_solved_by_MacGyver