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(More customer reviews)I grew up with MacGyver, watching him in two different households on two continents (one with subtitles!) as I was growing up. For about three years, after having watched shows like 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel on DVD, I wondered when they would release MacGyver on DVD. I raced out in my car this past week when this DVD set was released and prepared myself for a MacGyver marathon.
As I plowed through the first two discs, however, my enthusiasm began to wane a little. The first thing that made me wary was the DVD menu. This is without a doubt the single laziest DVD release I've ever seen -- no chapter selection menu, no commentary tracks, no appreciations, no cast/crew comments (even in written form), no interviews, not even episode histories or a booklet. See, MacGyver had existed for so long in my world that I had wanted to know exactly how the show began, when, and in what context. You will get *nothing* of the sort on this DVD. This DVD set redefines "no frills" -- each episode is divided into six chapters that aren't accessible by chapter menus, only by pressing track forward and back keys. Six chapters per one-hour episode! Do the math -- each episode is 46 to 48 minutes long, so each chapter is eight minutes. In TV terms, enough for four to six scenes.
The picture and sound quality are pretty bad as well. On some episodes this is not noticeable, but on others, I notice degraded sound quality, film scratches, and worse still, shots that look like compressed Avid outputs, where even colour correction appeared to have been skipped. Sure, it's an old show and some degradation may have happened to the original film and tapes, but geez, the Rhino releases of The Transformers, Celestial Pictures' release of even older Shaw Brothers films, and the Criterion Collection's restoration of Fritz Lang's M (a film over 70 years old) all had far more impressive restoration jobs. This MacGyver DVD set didn't seem to have any restoration at all. For a show like MacGyver, as close to my heart as a grade-school trophy, this was disheartening to see. Paramount Home Video seems to have taken the garage-sale approach to this release -- sell it like it is, warts and all, and with the show's loyal fan base, it'll probably get bought no matter what. I certainly bought it without batting an eye, but I'm not entirely happy with the product.
The content is fairly erratic. The pilot was exactly the MacGyver I'd remembered and loved -- fast-paced, enjoyable, with a lead character who's become a towering pop-culture icon, the ultimate boyscout, the most wholesome of action heroes, who despises guns, is not that great at melee fighting (sore fists after punching -- a MacGyver trademark), and relies on wits rather than brawn. Richard Dean Anderson is the lovable, boyishly handsome hero we remember, and his work holds up well; not too hammy, charming, quite subtle with both his comedic and dramatic work. I was also glad to see ubiquitous '80s actress Darlanne Fluegel in the episode, playing a sidekick who isn't just a wallflower, and the credits held two major shocks -- I had never known that it was Randy Edelman who had written the opening theme (one of my favourite TV themes), and the fabled Tak Fujimoto (The Silence of the Lambs) was the cinematographer on this episode!
A couple of things in this set of episodes, however, don't hold up well. One is the general acting. Especially in the first 10 episodes or so, I was shocked to see some of the worst acting I'd ever seen on TV, especially on the part of many of the villains and a few of the love interests. Most glaring are Peter Jurasik as Dr. Charles Alden in the episode "Trumbo's World" and Christopher Neame as maniac Quayle in "Deathlock". The directing, writing and editing varied wildly as well -- "The Heist" was often positively amateurish in execution. It's no wonder on this episode we find the DGA's long-standing pseudonym "Alan Smithee" in the director's credit, a rarity in television which happens when a director refuses credit on a film or show. Sometimes the acting and dialogue are almost cartoonish. These elements in combination suggested to me that maybe this show was better for younger audiences than myself, which may account for why it's held the imagination of so many of us years ago.
But a large part of the problem was because the first chunk of this first season was an anomaly among TV creations. For reasons unknown (this is where I wish they'd included some bonus materials to account for this), the pilot aside, the first shows just don't resemble the MacGyver I've known and loved. The MacGyver I loved has Dana Elcar as the indispensable Pete Thornton, the terrific villain Murdoc (Michael des Barres), and a certain kind of character dynamic that helped ground the central conceit of MacGyver as super-boyscout hero. Somehow, the first episodes of this season dispensed with what most TV shows call their "franchise", which is a core group of developing characters, familiar settings, and throughlines which extend beyond each episode to arc the entire season. Maybe the creators of the show were going for something different, but on the first third of the season captured on this DVD set, the only constant character is MacGyver. And I love the guy, but I couldn't watch just him, and having no other recurring character meant that there was little room for MacGyver himself to develop emotional relationships either. Gradually, however, the show's producers seemed to recognize this problem and Pete Thornton is introduced -- Murdoc wouldn't appear until Season 2, if my research proves correct. Dana Elcar is a very good actor and his perfect straight-man turn helped Richard Dean Anderson and the show immensely, and the show began to grow wings.
I feel bad giving this DVD set this low-ish rating, because MacGyver is one of the holy grails in my TV experience. There was no show I'd watched for longer, reruns and all, and rewatching something I'd first seen nearly 20 years ago is just mind-blowing. However, given the poor restoration job, the lazy packaging, the lack of bonus materials, and the story problems outlined above, I just didn't find rewatching these DVDs to be as much of a kick as I'd imagined it would be. However, there are still gems I remember from my MacGyver journey (Murdoc please! And who remembers a young Jason Priestley, playing as a youngster who tries to get a gun as protection?) that have yet to appear, so I'm hoping Paramount will still continue releasing MacGyver episodes from the vault. Even more so, I hope they will do a more comprehensive, in-depth job on the next batch of DVDs. This is a seminal show, a personal favourite of mine, and it deserves a royal DVD treatment, which it isn't getting right now.
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Angus MacGyver is a secret agent who refuses to carry a gun with him, but fortunately never needs one. Drawing on a vast practical knowledge of science, MacGyver is able to make use of anything around him to create solutions to any problem he faces. Underestimating MacGyver is a major mistake made by his enemies and always results in the destruction of their plans
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