His first name was Angus. Just in case anyone was wondering.
So here’s a guy who could make bombs out of shoes. Honest to God, SHOES!!!
I remember one where he had to hack into some giant supercomputer mainframe (I think it was called, “blue ice”). So he has to get into the top floor of a mansion. But see he’s at a party (invited) as a guest. So what does our resourceful Tom do? Easy. Dude takes a rake, unscrews the top of the rake (seperating shaft from rake) and then, using the squirt end of a long garden hose, screws it back on. He uses this as a climbing rope that he swings on the top of a balcony, and hoists himself up.
Two things:
1# Conveniance that the rake fits exactly into the garden hose hole. Must be magic.
2# The rake actually supports his weight, for some mystical physical reason. Not only does it anchor to the top of the balcony, but it can seemingly carry him with no resistance whatsoever. Must be magic again.
I know your examples are gonna be tons better than mine.
But could anything good old Mac did (in the series) ever work in real life?
I remember watching an episode where he was trapped in the Phoenix foundation. Apparently one of the guarded doors leading to the front exit was locked using a New York “deadbolt”. This little device somehow uses it’s weight adjusted disproportionately on the door to, in effect, lock it shut.
According to my cousin this sort of thing really exists.
I think alot of it was crap. In one of the later episodes, he used a pressure washer to lift him up into the air and out of some pit or something. I’ve since used pressure washers similar to the one shown, and I assure you that at no time was I in danger of being propelled through the air by it.
If we’re to believe the A-Team, it’s possible to lift a human being with a bunch of plastic garbage bags filled with hot air from a hair dryer. Hair dryer air doesn’t have enough lift for one bag by itself!
So, maybe that’s not possible, but it is possible to lift some signal flags with a large plastic bag (dipped in water so that it is airtight enough) filled with helium. At least if I am to believe MacGuyver.
I think that a lot of MacGuyver’s little contraptions would actually work in real life. At least the simple ones. Certainly, there is a lot of stuff that is pretty unbelievable/ridiculous in MacGuyver, but not everything. Two weeks ago my little brother bought the first and second season on dvd and I have since then done some pretty extensive watching of MacGuyver (although, I knew that he was called Angus already). For example, stuffing some paper in a lock to prevent it from locking the door shut. So, basically I would think that most of the simple® stuff Mac makes does work, and as for the big contraptions we will just have to accept that MacGuyver is obviously superhuman and can save any situation. I mean, in one episode he managed to put out an oil well fire with a friend and some dynamite and a thermos.
I will give some better examples when I come across them as I plan on continuing my MacGuyver watching this weekend.
Man, I just saw that one not too long ago. Just a classic 80s television moment, where about 40 minutes of the show seemed to consist of footage of the fire looking more and more threatening, interspersed with pictures of the heros looking more and more nervous.
Then, 20 minutes of MacGuyver slowly wheeling up some type of refigerator with a big metal slab attached to it, followed by footage of the fire, followed by MacGuyver slowly moving the refrigerator.
IIRC, when the guy who played MacGuyver got cast as Colonel O’Neill on Stargate: SG1, one of the agreements he made with the producers was that O’Neill should avoid coming up with any “MacGuyver” type solutions to problems.
One of the other actors on SG1 (the one playing Major Sarah Carter) got the job because when she read for the role, she ad-libbed a line about “MacGuyvering” a device to control the Stargate using three Cray supercomputers.
I think it was the swamp gas episode (Macgyver captured it and used it for some type of explosive) that prompted the producers to stop showing so many details about how he was making it work. At least, that’s what I heard.
A gun will also function as a wrench to release the pressure which will cause a nuclear meltdown at a power station. (I believe this is from the same episode GotN refers to with the Hershey bar stoppping a leak in a nuclear reactor, but I’m not sure because MacGuyver is kind of one meta-episode in my head now after watching too many of them back to back). This must be one of the more ridiculous episodes full of all kinds of crazy stuff that would never work. Mac also manages to easily blow a hole in a very thick concrete wall in just minutes with some pretty basic stuff in this episode.
As for guns, MacGuyver has even pretended to have one in his pocket once to intimidate the bad guys. A low point, I thought. A tacit acknowledgement that a gun could be useful to him. Although, a gun would perhaps be better than his insistance on making crazy canon-like objects out of mufflers and other various pipes. I have seen him do this on at least two occasions.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to figure out how he turned pine cones into high explosive “grenades” and picking a lock with just the awl blade of his Swiss Army Knife. :rolleyes:
I only watched the show intermittently for the first two seasons, but of all those episodes I saw, there was only one technical improvisation I saw that came close to being credible; in some Central European country he breaks into a traffic light control box and uses plastic inserts sliced from credit cards to drive to trip the system on and off irregularly, blocking traffic and (I guess) preventing his pursuers from catching up to him. Old control systems did in fact use a clocking-type timer and it’s conceivable they might still be in service at that time and place.
Everything else–from using quarters as welding electrodes to building a hang glider in a few minutes from a used parachute, duct tape, and some random junk–was such an egregious stretch of imagination that it eliminated any credibility the show might have had. They did do a pretty fair rip-off of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear in the first season, though.
Oh, that is truly sweet. MacGuyver, who is at his worst when prepared with reasonable tools to solve a problem, versus Batman, who is at his worst when unprepared.
I came in here to mention that exact thing! I believe it is my duty to have chocolate around in case a nuclear reactor is about to leak really, really bad acid into some nearby groundwater. And then I can save everyone in the greater metropolitan area due to my MacGyver-knowledge.
I love all the stuff I learn on MacGyver: how cigarette smoke will show you where the lasers are, and how you can redirect said lasers with either a mirror from a woman’s compact or the lens from a binocular; how you can tell who the villain is by his thick, bushy mustache; that you should always have a woman around because her Purse[sup]TM[/sup] is the mother of all accesssory kits; and how there are only two accents in the world: American and Notamerican. It’s funny how the people from Burma sound just like the people from Prague, who sound just like the Russians. And how Burma, Prague and Russia all look pretty much like Southern California. These documentaries should be required watching in school. They are life lessons, my friends.
Oh, and MacGyver over Batman, hands down.
Campion
Proud owner of seasons 1 and 2; eagerly anticipating the release of season 3.
