User Thoughts: another great show from the 80's

21 September 1999 | by Dan Grant – See all my reviews

When I think of the 80's, shows like the Dukes of Hazard, Dallas, The A Team and MacGyver bring back memories. They were fun and with the exception of Dallas, the three others all had one thing in common. They all solved things with very little violence. Even though it may seem that there was some, The A Team always made contraptions that would get them out of trouble, but no one died. The Dukes always fought their way out of trouble just long enough for Roscoe to come arrest the bad guys and with Mac, well he would just make a radio receiver out of a paperclip grass and a shoelace or he would make a dart gun out of bubble gum and toothpick. I honeslty believe that this this was the toughest man in the world. Put him up against the Terminator and he would have found a way to dismantle his CPU without ever touching it. He would make something to shut him down. And that's what was so pure about MacGyver. He never really used violence to solve problems, always his head. And he never got carried away either. He never panicked. He just stayed cool and he always managed to save the day. I love this show and I wish they would bring it back, even in sydication where I am, but we don't have it here and that is a shame because it is a great show and one that I miss.

MacGyver

Trivia: There are 22> entries in the trivia list - like these:

• The "MacGyverisims" shown in the series are all based on scientific fact, but not all of the steps needed to create the experiment were shown. This was done to prevent children who were watching the show from duplicating the experiments themselves and possibly getting injured.
• The first two seasons of the show were shot entirely in the Los Angeles area. However, as an adventure series, ABC was ready to cancel, due to the price of location filming and time spent moving the production crew over a six-day shoot schedule. With threat of cancellation, the producers, including Henry Winkler, decided to send the show to Vancouver, where location moves could be made within an hour. In one day, an episode could move from an ocean scene to a forest scene to a metropolitan scene. It allowed writers to put the character of MacGyver into a faster paced action and adventure series. For season seven, production returned to Los Angeles.
• Dana Elcar's stunt double was Don S. Davis. Davis became "General George Hammond", Richard Dean Anderson's superior officer on Stargate SG-1 (1997).
• In the late 1980s, two teenage boys made a bomb in their garage which went off, killing one of them. The surviving boy said they learned how to make the bomb from an episode of the show. However, the show was quickly exonerated after it was discovered no such episode existed.
• Richard Dean Anderson won the role of MacGyver when the casting director noticed he was unafraid to use his glasses during his audition, showing a lack of pretension that the creative team wanted in their lead.