Damn! This is just so awesome! There are rumours around the internet (read: digg and slashdot) claiming that a new MacGyver movie is in the making!
Fans of the old TV series (includes me) are going ga-ga over the news already! It would be so amazing to see our scientifically-inclined secret agent back in action saving the world using creativity, physics, chemistry and the MacGyver-touch.
For the uneducated, MacGyver was a very popular TV series running in the 80′s about a guy named Angus MacGyver who hated guns and could build handy and useful stuff out of easily-accessible material. The handy and useful stuff was generally used for escaping from tight spots, or building cool equipment, or diffusing bombs, or at times, complex machines like restoring airplanes.
I first saw this series when I was seven years old (before I watched Star Wars for the first time), and it was the coolest TV series EVER! It was what really got me interested in all kinds of sciency stuff in school – building electronics gadgets, mixing chemicals, etc. It made science look cool – something that’s severely needed in today’s world of “IT” crap (don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against software-developers and computer scientists being called “IT professionals” – but the loss of respect for the conventional sciences like physics and chemistry and mathematics does make me mad). MacGyver was, and still remains, a hero to many, many people.
Given this speech in what got me interested in science, MacGyver actually used advanced science very few times – mostly relying on common sense, creativity and logic to build stuff. It was something anyone could do with the materials available to them in the given situation, knowing what we know about the world. Only in very few cases such as when he uses the freon from a refrigerator to freeze his prison’s bars, or when he mixes ascetic acid and ammonia in gaseous forms to create a smoke screen to blind a motion detector, do we really feel we just wouldn’t have known those facts without an intense study of inorganic chemistry.
MacGyver, apart from being an inspiration, was also very very educational and kid-safe. All the dangerous MacGyverisms were certified by the creators of the series to be slightly altered to ensure they couldn’t be reproduced at home, while the cool tidbits were ensured that kids in fact could enjoy playing MacGyver at home. They could build these cool little gadgets from household waste without hurting themselves and learning a bit of science in the process.
So here’s a big fan looking forward to watching the great science-using secret-agent save the world on the big screen!
