MacGoofus fail

Golly, Richard Dean Anderson's car broke down, and he couldn't fix it with a paperclip and whatever bits were lying by the roadside.  Surprise!

I watched the pilot episode of that show, and a couple of others at random, and, well...

Not only was the tech completely wrong from beginning to end, often dangerously so (as in: not only will this trick not work, but if you try it in real life you'll blow your hands off), but such improvisations as didn't violate any laws of physics were still Infinitely Improbable.

Think: MacGoofus needs to improvise a gizmo.  He grabs a few random bits that happen to be lying around, and they all fit together just so.  You, on the other hand, order a replacement water pump for your truck, specifying the make, model, year, and engine type, wait three days for express delivery, go to install it, and discover that halfway through the model year they changed the bolt pattern and nothing lines up.

And what's with never using guns?  Right near the beginning of the pilot episode, as I recall, he used a cheap glass hand-mirror to make a high-powered laser self-destruct.  This Doesn't Work; the laser will destroy your cheap mirror long before its own high-quality optics are damaged.  What does work for sure is breaking the laser's output mirror, e.g., with a bullet.  (Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!)  A proper go-everywhere fixer ought to have a pistol and a few demolition charges with him at all times.

(No, I'm not in the habit of lugging around a pistol and a pocket full of explosives, but my style of fixing doesn't often call for that sort of thing.  I'm more likely to need a soldering iron, an oscilloscope, a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, a variety of small pointy objects, and of course duct electrical tape.  If the job calls for a milling machine, I'll just have to take it home to work on it, as the inflatable Bridgeport remains elusive.)

Comments

[Jose Camoes Silva]

I liked that MacGyver made "smart and knowledgeable" appear useful rather than nerdy or elitist (as many other shows do; notice how many villains are scientists). Also it didn’t harm that the smart and knowledgeable guy (even though both were an artifact of the screenplay) tended to get the girl.

Reblogged/commented here: http://josecamoessilva.tumblr.com/post/14244075577/

Cheers,
JCS