That explains the high-budget-looking flood sequence.
Found the short story, by the way:
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html
MacGyver movie in the works
- Thread starter TheSeeker
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That explains the high-budget-looking flood sequence.
Found the short story, by the way:
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html
Dusty Ayres
Commodore
Seconded. I'm getting fed up about that too.
I don't recall offhand if other MacGyver episodes were built around stock footage -- if so, I don't think there were any after the first season. But there were other shows that did that as a money-saving move. The Incredible Hulk did it at least three times in its first season -- "747" was built around footage from Airport 1975, "Never Give a Trucker an Even Break" was built around footage from Steven Spielberg's TV movie Duel (which led to a lawsuit from Spielberg), and "Earthquakes Happen" was built around footage from the movie Earthquake. (The pilot of Galactica 1980 also used Earthquake stock footage to show a simulated Cylon attack on LA, matting Cylon Raiders and laser blasts on top of the footage.)
I think Richard Dean Anderson is well past the point where he could plausibly play an action hero. He's put on some weight in the past few years and is starting to look a bit decrepit. Hopefully he'll have a cameo or supporting role as a different character, though.
With the box office failure of MacGruber, I'd say a big-screen adaptation of MacGyver might be a bad idea...
^If the parody film has flopped, it would probably argue against bringing out a remake of the same property too soon. They may want to give it a couple of years for the memories to fade.
Actually, I would have thought that if the send up were a hit, it would be worse news for the straight-laced version. Like, could anyone have made a sequel to the Airport movies directly after Airplane? Or released a played-straight version of something like Dragnet after The Naked Gun? No-one would have taken them seriously, the spoof would have been too dominant in everyone's minds.
But if MacGruber flopped - well, it's not in the equation, is it, it's irrelevant? I can see the point you're making, but I don't think that the failure of the send-up necessarily dooms the affectionate remake.
Dusty Ayres
Commodore
Excuse me, but expecting a reboot/remake to be like the original is completely bogus. The Hulk TV show was a POS anyway, and needed rebooting to be more like the comic book (and that it got); Conan was also not done the right way and needed a reboot, and as for Robocop, it's been almost thirty years since the original anyway, there should be no problem with that. For McGyver to work no, some thing will have to be different-it can't be too slavish to the original.
As far as I can tell, the important thing is to keep the science relatively real. There's plenty of jokes about MacGyver making a nuclear reactor out of a belt buckle, but from what I've seen so far, they're doing pretty well at keeping things grounded.....albeit perhaps slightly optimistic.
*a-hem* Robocop was only 23 years ago
I graduated then, so please don't accelerate the aging process.
(Responding to Lindley) Yeah, MacGyver was generally pretty good with the basic scientific principles, although it took considerable poetic license with the effectiveness of many of Mac's builds (as the Mythbusters showed last season). But that's all right, because teaching about the basic underlying science is still a cool thing for a TV show to do. At least depicting a real principle and exaggerating it for dramatic effect is better than blatantly ignoring or contradicting how the real world works.
In later seasons, though, the show got somewhat more fanciful, particularly in the "dream sequence but maybe not" episodes that sent Mac to the Old West or Arthurian England.
I'd also say that in order to be true to the spirit of MacGyver, the hero of a reboot would have to be nonviolent -- hating guns, not killing anyone, blowing up things but not people, crying out and cradling his fist in pain when he has to hit someone. A thinking man's action hero rather than a gung-ho, macho type. And I'd like it to focus on the philanthropic, social-activist, eco-friendly Phoenix Foundation aspect of things rather than the spy stuff of the first season; I think that would be timely in the here and now as well as being faithful to the spirit of the original. (Though hopefully without getting as preachy about the environmental and social stuff as the show increasingly did over time.)
Oh, and bring back the voiceover narration. The show lost something when it dropped the voiceovers. Mac's builds got less frequent and less elaborate, which I always figured was partly because it was harder to explain complex builds without the voiceovers.
In later seasons, though, the show got somewhat more fanciful, particularly in the "dream sequence but maybe not" episodes that sent Mac to the Old West or Arthurian England.
I'd also say that in order to be true to the spirit of MacGyver, the hero of a reboot would have to be nonviolent -- hating guns, not killing anyone, blowing up things but not people, crying out and cradling his fist in pain when he has to hit someone. A thinking man's action hero rather than a gung-ho, macho type. And I'd like it to focus on the philanthropic, social-activist, eco-friendly Phoenix Foundation aspect of things rather than the spy stuff of the first season; I think that would be timely in the here and now as well as being faithful to the spirit of the original. (Though hopefully without getting as preachy about the environmental and social stuff as the show increasingly did over time.)
Oh, and bring back the voiceover narration. The show lost something when it dropped the voiceovers. Mac's builds got less frequent and less elaborate, which I always figured was partly because it was harder to explain complex builds without the voiceovers.
^ Yes and IMHO Michael Weston is a bit McGyver-esque in some ways, albeit a bit more violent.
Well, before there was MacGyver, there was Mission: Impossible. There were episodes where the IMF agents, particularly Barney Collier, cobbled together makeshift gadgets out of the equipment at hand, though they usually had more elaborate custom equipment to work with. So the association of that kind of inventiveness with spy stories was around before there even was a MacGyver. (And of course MacGyver essentially was a spy show in its first season.)
Actually, if MacGyver is the one who does the thing, then shouldn't the verb be "to MacGyve?" I MacGyve, she MacGyves, we MacGyved, they are MacGyving. 
Angus MacGyver got hit in the head when one of his contraptions went off, he forgot who he was when he woke up and also lost his aversion to guns. He then became Jack Bauer.
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