May
7
For Christmas last year I got “MacGyver: The Complete Series” — all seven seasons of the thinking-man’s adventure series from an age when heroes wear mullets, Russian badguys speak to each other in heavily-accented English, and everyday household items are used by Angus MacGyver (played by Richard Dean Anderson) to save his bacon at the climax of each episode. Being somewhat responsible for the shooting death of a childhood friend, Mac never carries a gun. He’s typically armed with only a Swiss Army knife, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of physics and chemistry. Never is he held captive in a room where he can’t find something to cook up his means for escape. And that’s the series’ charm.
A few years ago, a pilot for “Young MacGyver” (starring Jared Padalecki) mercifully died on the vine before it was picked up by a network. Now the Internet is buzzing with a rumor that series creator Lee David Zlotoff is trying to get a MacGyver film off the ground: http://joblo.com/macgyver-movie. I’m not of the opinion that a movie needs to be made about every television series that ever brightened a picture tube for more than a season. But, I did watch the film version of “The Fugitive” so often as a teen, the tape came off the spools. Still, that film’s about 15 years old, and with the only extremely successful movie franchise based on a TV series being “Mission: Impossible” (now with movie four in the works), it’s very possible that the cinematic version of MacGyver might be MacGyver-in-name-only.
If I were given the opportunity, I’d bring back Richard Dean Anderson to play the title role. The umpteen seasons of “Stargate: SG1″ have kept him in fighting shape. And in a world where Harrison Ford can don the Indiana Jones fedora after hanging up his whip for 19 years, Anderson can certainly cobble together one last MacGyverism since the show left air in ‘92. Need more proof? Check out the YouTube clip.
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