MACGYVER: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION: Blu-ray (Paramount, 1985-94) CBS/Paramount Home Video
Angus MacGyver: the only man alive
who could take a stick of chewing gum and a tampon and make a nuclear bomb.
There’s no doubt about it. Throughout its ‘seven season’ run, MacGyver
(1985-92), in the embodiment of Richard Dean Anderson’s resourceful super spy,
was an intriguing man of action whose utilitarian skill set could seemingly
diffuse any grave situation with a little bit of ingenuity and more than a
light smattering of scientific know-how. That virtually all of his
resourcefulness owed much to ‘science fact’ rather than ‘fiction’ made the
series all the more appealing to novice MacGyvers everywhere who, ostensibly,
hoped to duplicate the results, should they ever find themselves in similar
circumstance. Don’t try this at home, folks! The series’ popularity was perhaps
all the more startling as its star hailed from six years on the long-running
(and still going strong) soap opera, General Hospital; not usually the
best proving ground or springboard for any actor’s lasting career aspirations outside
of daytime TV. And, indeed, after hanging up his doctor’s duds, Anderson’s
prospects nose-dived fairly quickly, appearing in two failed CBS shows: a
reboot of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982-83) and in a ‘reoccurring’
role on Emerald Point N.A.S. (1983).
As such, producers, Henry Winkler (yes, TV’s Fonzie) and John
Rich were taking a considerable gamble on Anderson as their star. Created by
Lee David Zlotoff, MacGyver was not an immediate ratings bonanza for
CBS, although it had a very loyal following in the U.S. and abroad – ‘MacGyvering’
unofficially entering the popular lexicon as code for anyone capable of getting
themselves out of a sticky situation.
Like most TV serials spawned during
the 1980’s (a great decade for television, by the way), MacGyver now
appears to have been conceived, not just in another time, but to have come from
another planet entirely. Then, as now, the idea of an earthy wunderkind, left
to his own devices – mostly – and able to bend the rules of physics to his own
purpose to escape any squeeze between the proverbial ‘rock’ and ‘hard place’,
played like a stripped down/summer stock James Bond, but one who actually made
all his own gadgets from scratch. What can I tell you? It was the eighties. Audiences were less
likely to question the immensity of such knowledge encapsulated in one
superman. And Anderson, to his credit, always played Angus MacGyver as a quiet
and slightly countrified every man, devoid of the uber-suave sophistication or
steely-eyed intellectual austerity that his analytical and constantly computing
brain would then uncannily reveal. Better still, Anderson had sex appeal to
bolster interest from female audiences too – his lanky frame, rocking a pair of
perpetually weathered blue jeans and the eighties’ affinity for awfully big
hair (in later seasons, to resemble a lion’s mane). Reviewing MacGyver from
an absence of thirty years, it is rather refreshing to see how well the show
has held up. Anderson’s performance has not dated one iota, even if some of the
situations Mac’ finds himself in – ‘cold war espionage’ – have. And the stunts, then considered state of the
art, while not exactly pushing the boundaries in today’s overblown realm of
pyrotechnics, nevertheless look authentic to the period and add to MacGyver’s
vintage quality as a quaint action/adventure franchise. Interestingly, given
the popularity the show has maintained after all these years, no ‘big screen’
reincarnation has emerged, although CBS rebooted the franchise again on TV –
with a much younger cast and flashier production values to compensate for their
lack in overall maturity (a nauseating trend in Hollywood these days).
MacGyver’s first Season
is an enjoyable blend of the light and fantastic, following the exploits of our
secret agent/troubleshooter, employed by the fictional L.A.-based Phoenix
Foundation (an undercover offshoot of the U.S. Dept. of External Services). For
back story, Mac’ was schooled in Physics at Western Tech and served his country
in the Army Special Forces as a Bomb Team Technician/EOD during the Vietnam
War. Quick-witted with encyclopedic comprehension and a photographic brain,
Mac’s specialty is mastering the complex by using whatever ordinary objects are
at hand. Have Swiss Army knife, duct
tape, and a book of matches…watch out!
Despite his affinity for demolitions, Mac favors non-violent
resolutions; gun shy, since the tragic death of a good pal. Mac’s split-second
practical application of scientific knowledge, vetted by a small army of
scientific consultants on the show, and implemented in life-or-death situations
from episode to episode, had major appeal. Although the basic principles behind
these stunts (mixing common household cleaners to create a bomb, as example)
were grounded in fact, producers openly admitted that a good deal of luck and
timing was also required under ‘normal’ circumstances for any of Mac’s feats to
be properly executed. They also deliberately muddled the particulars of their
hero’s chemical engineering, lest some enterprising MacGyver ‘wannabe’
attempt to replicate the experiment at home and blow himself to smithereens. The
first 3 seasons of MacGyver concentrate almost exclusively on our hero’s
involvement with the U.S. government and his eventual coming under the
microscope of the Phoenix Foundation. However, as the series moved into its
mid-series run, MacGyver began to take on more social issues, eventually
to lead him away from international espionage into a sort of goony, crime
fighter for hire, dealing with domestic problems instead of those to involve ‘national
security’.
In the eighties, I suppose, it was
possible to flimflam the public with depictions of the Grand Canyon and Mojave
Desert subbing in for the likes of North Korea and the Middle East. Today,
alas, these substitutes ring with the tinny penny-pinching of producers trying
desperately to tell their tales of globe-trotting adventure on a shoe-string
budget. And the results are even more laughable when various episodes focus on ‘then’
state of the art technology, employing lasers and holograms, along with endless
banks of colorfully lit consoles to suggest hi-tech gadgetry and artificial
intelligence run amuck. For those with exceptionally keen eyes, Seasons 3-6
were actually shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to keep ever-rising production
costs at bay. Odd, on the surface at least, for a show with only 3 reoccurring
central cast on the payroll to rack up such a price tag. Apart from Richard
Dean Anderson, the returning cast included avuncular, Dana Elcar as Pete
Thornton (actually, Andy Colson in the pilot episode), an operative at the
Department of External Services, to morph into the Phoenix Foundation several
years later. In Season 6, Pete developed glaucoma, a wrinkle taking its cue
from Elcar’s real-life affliction. Finally,
Bruce McGill was brought in later on as MacGyver’s comedy sidekick, Jack Dalton
– a bush pilot/soldier of fortune whose ‘get rich quick’ schemes frequently
result in some perilous situation Mac’ must become embroiled in to save the
day.
As the series moved from L.A. to
B.C., Mac’ relocated from a waterfront apartment in Venice Beach to a houseboat
in Coal Harbor. Ironically, given the unabated issues of rising production
costs, the show would return to California for its 7th and final
season. Casting MacGyver proved a considerable challenge to Winkler and
Rich who quickly discovered virtually all of the aspiring actors auditioning
for the part took on an uber-butch quality, hoping to ‘hulk’ their way into a
long-term contract. Richard Dean Anderson’s laid-back approach proved a
refreshing anathema to the rest, with Winkler and Rich predicting he would
become a major star in the title role. Better still, the athletic Anderson
insisted on doing his own stunts, a decision, eventually, to force Anderson to
rely on a team of stunt doubles after he severely injured his back and foot,
the latter requiring major surgery. It is saying a lot about a series when it
becomes rife for parody. And MacGyver has been repeatedly made the
figure of fun by some of the best, including Saturday Night Live and The
Simpsons; Anderson, getting into the act as a voiceover talent, and even
appearing in a MasterCard commercial spoof made for Super Bowl XL. While Mac’ would refrain from using any
firearm in the conventional way throughout the series, he had absolutely no
compunction about dismantling, then reassembling more than a handful to be
employed in a more resourceful manner. He is also seen firing an AK-47 during
the pilot episode and holding a pair of kidnappers at bay with a rifle in Episode
10. In later years, MacGyver’s skepticism, regarding guns would extend to
his pacifist’s view of war and general contempt for the U.S. military’s
involvement at home and abroad.
Timing, as they used to say, is
everything, the producing team of John Rich and Henry Winkler coming together
under the unlikeliest of circumstances to create this hit. Indeed, at the time
Winkler had just come off Happy Days’ (1974-84) eleven-year run as TV’s
favorite greaser with the proverbial heart of gold, while Rich found himself
unexpectedly out of a job when his sitcom – Mr. Sunshine – suddenly
tanked and was cancelled by ABC. Meanwhile, Lee David Zlotoff was a producer on
NBC’s runaway hit, Remington Steele (1982-87). Together, Zlotoff,
Winkler and Rich pitched MacGyver to Paramount’s television division –
the concept gaining momentum at ABC. The
template for MacGyver’s early exploits took a cue from the James Bond
franchise, featuring a pre-title ‘action sequence where our hero is already
embroiled in a bit of hair-raising espionage from which he must escape,
employing only his wits and the most sparsely assembled of resources. From
here, each episode segued into Randy Edelman’s marvelously high-octane
MacGyver theme, and the main titles, followed by a commercial break, and
then, the time-honored 3-act structure of hour-long TV writing at its best.
The pilot wastes no time setting up
this actioner premise: Angus MacGyver atop a vertical rock face encampment on a
mission to liberate a downed Air Force pilot in Central Asia. Returning home,
Mac is recalled into service to rescue scientists trapped in an underground New
Mexico laboratory after a major explosion. It is a race against time as
sulfuric acid is leaching through the wreckage, and Mac later discovers the
incident was no accident, but actually perpetrated by one of the scientists to
destroy his own ozone research files, as most certainly they would be used to
create a doomsday weapon. Herein, we pause to doff our caps to the writers of Season
1; their best ‘feet’ forward and thinking caps on for an ingenious spate of
‘globe-trotting’ adventures. Henceforth, MacGyver gets involved in all manner
of mayhem: intercepting top-secret missile launch codes, retrieving deadly
toxins from a downed jetliner in Burma, recovering a valuable horse from an
Arabian tribesman, saving a computer hacker from arms dealers, intercepting
coded messages from a Russian double-agent and a gypsy thief in Hungary,
retrieving a downed satellite in Afghanistan, infiltrating a terrorist cell in
the Middle East, rescuing an American journalist caught behind enemy lines in
Central America, becoming embroiled in a diamond-smuggling operation,
liberating a kidnapped scientist from foreign mercenaries, diffusing a hostage
crisis, protecting a mob witness, escaping Bulgaria with secret microfilm,
outwitting a professional assassin out to murder him, diffusing a bomb aboard a
packed cruise ship, destroying a Middle-Eastern nuclear reactor, discovering an
antidote for the hallucinogenic drug he has been poisoned with, and escaping
East Berlin assassins in a coffin. And this is just a glimmer of the harrowing
exploits to arise in the first season. Indeed, the writers threw everything but
the proverbial ‘kitchen sink’ at the screen, MacGyver, densely packed
with enough thrills to fill at least two or three ordinary franchises at a
time.
Arguably, the cleverness of these
early episodes was never again to be duplicated throughout the series’ run. In
fact, after Season 3, the party was pretty much over – MacGyver,
lingering on its reputation with many of its story lines merely regurgitated
but only slightly altered as the franchise lumbered through its final years
with far less originality and energy. Viewed today, it’s rather amazing MacGyver
lasted as long as it did. While Seasons 1-3 maintain a superb and breakneck
pace in ‘must see’ TV, the later years are awash in some fairly idiotic and
meandering plots – the 2-part ‘event’ episodes to kick off each new season, giving
way to just another ‘more of the same’ 1-hr. episode, with Mac’ retreating from
super spy status into just a resourceful guy who turns up now and then to help
the common folk out of their uncommon problems with the ‘bad guys’. Television
in the 1980’s was awash in such pre-processed goodies. Even so, MacGyver retrospectively
remains unique among these offerings for several reasons. First, its hero is a
questioning individual, imbued with superior intelligence and an ever-evolving
pacifist’s streak, eventually to undo his blindly-valued loyalties to the
state. Also, MacGyver plays very much like an anthology series.
Re-setting the locale of each episode, ostensibly, in a different part of the
world, MacGyver’s production values are impressive to say the least -
the credit here, owed production designer, Stan Jolley, and, in later seasons,
Rex Raglan, who would take over these duties.
Over the series run, a small army
of cameramen contributed to the stylized look of the show. But in Season 1,
credit is due to four men: Frank Raymond, Donald H. Birnkrant, Jules Brenner
and Tak Fujimoto. Cumulatively, these four skilled cinematographers set a tone
for the franchise, heavily weighted on exotic landscapes culled from the
California milieu, to create a James Bond-styled globe-trotting actioner on a
chewing gum budget – no small feat. In Season 1, composer, Randy Edelman
shares his underscoring duties with Dennis McCarthy and Michael Melvoin, a
triumvirate to achieve remarkable continuity. In later seasons, Edelman’s main
title would be re-orchestrated several times by other composers with a synthesizer-influence
to bludgeon much of its orchestral appeal. But it’s still Edelman’s
exhilarating theme we hear, and, an integral part of what primed the audience
weekly for another invigorating tale of intrigue and espionage. Since its debut, MacGyver has been
reconstituted as a catch-all to explain anyone who can seemingly pull off an
impossible feat. Indeed, as late as 2007, a popular poll suggested Anderson’s
chemistry-inclined spy was the one man most anyone would vote for to get them
out of a terrific plight. While in production, the show’s writers came up with
the gimmick of offering prize money to anyone who sent them in an ingenious
‘trick’ their fictional hero could perform in an upcoming episode. And while
one fan’s suggestion Mac’ could use an egg to patch a radiator was eventually
featured in the episode, ‘Bushmaster’, very few unique concepts were
actually exploited by the series’ creators, perhaps out of concern the ‘creator’
of the trick would later sue or demand big bucks to have his/her idea used.
Given the show’s longevity and
afterlife, MacGyver was not all that popular during its first season
run. Only in summer reruns did it begin to gain steam with audiences, becoming
a bona fide sleeper hit for ABC during Season 2. Exploited as a lead
into ABC’s Monday Night Football programming, MacGyver steadily
built its solid fan-base, despite Richard Dean Anderson’s complaints the
network only thought of the show as ‘filler’ for its popular time slot. The
clashes between Anderson and the network reached their crescendo when ABC
unceremoniously pulled MacGyver midway through its seventh season after
only twelve episodes, suspending it from December until April, and then
cancelling the series outright on May 21, 1992.
It was probably just as well, since Anderson later admitted he had
pretty much burnt himself out and the writing was getting stale. Nevertheless, MacGyver
today remains a fondly recalled part of television history and rightly so.
In the interim, Richard Dean Anderson would move on to do other series TV including
Stargate-SG1. And while finding lucrative work elsewhere has kept him in
the public spotlight, he will likely, forever, be known to fans as television’s
most hands-on super spy.
MacGyver’s home video
history has been muddled to say the least. Owing to an oversight, it was long
thought all original negatives of this popular series, originally shot on film,
were lost for all time. As such, Paramount’s endeavors to bring MacGyver
to home video on DVD left much to be desired; the image culled from digital
tape copies, severely plagued by chroma-bleeding, digitized artifacts and an
atrocious softness that made any attempt at enjoying the series’ once lush and
evocative cinematography a thoroughly painful experience. Well, you can
officially retire those DVDs now, because a little over 3-years ago, Paramount
announced it had successfully re-discovered MacGyver’s original film
elements and was engaging in a restoration effort to bring the luster of one of
its most bankable franchises back to life. They have since made good on this
promise with this new to Blu release of MacGyver: The Complete Series…almost. In
addition to the entire series receiving a mostly ‘ground up’ restoration, this
set also includes the two follow-up MacGyver made-for-TV movies: Lost
Treasure of Atlantis, and, Trail to Doomsday (both made and released
in 1994) – alas, each only represented in standard def! The image for the
franchise proper is so vastly improved over previous home video incarnations, and,
bears no earthly comparison to the former DVD fiasco, except to say that fans
of MacGyver are in for a robust visual treat. Colors, previously faded
and muddy, are now rich, fully saturated and properly balanced. Contrast is
superb. Age-related dirt and other artifacts have been eradicated. And best of
all, the disastrous nature of all that color bleeding, inherent in digital
tape, but not a part of film stock, is GONE! It should be noted, however, that
the results throughout are NOT perfect. For starters, the main titles are a
curious hodgepodge culled from OCN, dupes, and one shot – Anderson’s title
card, leaning on the wing of a biplane -- looking as though derived from the
aforementioned digital tapes, with mild digital combing to bump it to 1080p.
Why this signature introduction could not have been recombined from raw film stock
with a recompositing of Anderson’s credit to achieve a true 1080p upgrade is
beyond me. Perhaps, no raw footage exists any longer. And, in later seasons,
Anderson would recreate this screen credit sporting his new, mullet-esque
hairdo, now fully remastered in 1080p and razor-sharp too.
Also, several episodes sport heavier
than usual film grain, occasionally to take on a very gritty, almost digitized
quality. Finally, sporadically scattered throughout the series, though more noticeable
in Seasons 1-4, we get snippets of scenes, presumably culled from 2nd
or even 3rd generation dupes. Not entirely certain how or why this happened,
unless someone at CBS/Paramount, in their infinite wisdom, when the show’s
episodes were being trimmed for cable syndication, merely decided the trims no
longer mattered and discarded original film stock for an archival, if visually
inferior, digital tape master. Hey, folks - it wouldn’t be the first time such
shortsightedness found its way into Hollywood history. Overall, and barring the
pointless inclusion of the 2 movies in less than stellar standard def, MacGyver
here looks solid, colorful and magnificent on Blu-ray. Owing to the limitations
in its original mono audio, it doesn’t sound nearly as good as it looks. Still,
the remastering efforts have managed to stabilize any inherent audio
distortions for an adequate, though not as remarkable, home video presentation.
Point blank: it sounds like a series made in the early 1980s. Bottom line: MacGyver
is required viewing. Fans and newbies to the series should find this a most welcomed
throwback to a simpler era when primetime TV viewing was fun-filled and
fantastical. Highly recommended!
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
Season 1-3 - 4 (overall)
Season 4-5 - 3
Season 6-7 - 2.5
Lost Treasure of Atlantis - 3
Trail to Doomsday - 2
VIDEO/AUDIO
Series 4
Movies 2.5
EXTRAS
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