The New MacGyver

The Eighties was something of a Golden Age for me, we had Knight Rider, The A-Team, Airwolf, Stingray, The Equaliser, Hardcastle and McCormick, Streethawk and, of course, MacGyver. And I loved them all from ages 7- 12 you know the period you absorb the stuff you love. It may be that love is a little too uncritical but I don't care. Since then there have been shows that I’ve loved as much The Pretender, Vengeance Unlimited, Relic Hunter, The Sentinel, Bugs, Leverage, The Librarians, Arrow, The Cape, Burn Notice, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Person of Interest and I could keep going... And as is the way of things there have been attempts to revive some of these properties Knight Rider seems to get a new pilot or series every few years Knight Rider 2000, Knight Rider 2010, Team Knight Rider and Knight Rider (2008). There was an A-Team movie in 2010. Two Equaliser movies starring Denzel Washington. And I’m sure there are more to come. Which brings me to MacGyver. Richard Dean Anderson has revived the character a few times for commercials – Mastercard and Citan spring to mind.

He even appeared as MacGyver in a MacGruber skit as MacGruber’s dad.

Then there was the unaired pilot, MacGyver where a pre-Supernatural Jarod Padalecki, played Clay MacGyver the original’s nephew. This seems to be universally referred to as Young MacGyver Which brings me to the current MacGyver or NuGyver as I like to call him. The show is now at four seasons with a fifth on the way. I watch the show and my wife asked me what I thought of the show and I told her I still wasn’t sure about it. “You’ve watched how many seasons?” She asked. “Three” I said (before the fourth came out) “And you’re not sure. Riiiiiiight. Three seasons, you like it” So a little history would seem to be in order A pilot was shot in 2016, featuring a longer haired Till that was scrapped and reshot, I’m still curious about what was in that pilot (It’d be a nice special feature in one of the DVD sets – just saying) But they retooled it and reshot it and I’m not sure of the end result – many of the characters are callbacks or versions of characters from the original series which I can live with. Mac is still improvising his way out of situations and really that’s all I want but here’s the thing about the classic MacGyver – the show was about him, other characters came in and out and aside from Mac’s boss Pete Thornton there were no regular characters and a handful of recurring characters. In this iteration, Mac is part of a team. His boss was initially Patrica Thornton who was replaced by Maddie Weber, which I’m fine with (I won’t spoil why the change happened but they keep trying to hint of the same fate for Maddie which is an annoyance because I know they wouldn’t go to the same well twice). My big problem is the team and the size of it. Initially the team was Mac, Jack Dalton (Mac’s bodyguard) and Riley (a hacker) and I thought that was a bit big. Then they added Bozer, a childhood friend of Mac’s who initially didn’t know about Mac’s job at the Phoenix Foundation but soon joined the team. Then we got Samantha Cage an Australian psy ops expert but she left after one season, then Bozer’s spy school girlfriend Leanna Martin who lasted about the same time, Jack left and was replaced by Desi Nguyen and then in season 4 the Phoenix Foundation was bought by Russ Taylor.

If you think that’s a lot of characters you’d be right and the show has to give them all something to do which means that we get B plots of Bozer at spy school, Riley and the issues with her father, Jack Dalton find the guys who robbed him. Some episodes Bozer just stands there in the ready room with Maddie as the team is on a mission. I suspect that Cage and Leanna left because they had nothing to do but they keep trying to shoehorn in new regular characters. Riley’s hacking is almost as important as Mac’s improvisation and in a recent episode centred on Riley and her hacking had Mac stopping a nuclear meltdown with two jet skis relegated to a B Plot. I repeat the guy with his name in the title is relegated to a B plot doing the very thing we want him to do. And it’s not every episode but to give the characters space it means that the title character gets less space. In the next episode, Mac is out of action and Desi, Riley and Russ Taylor take on the brunt of the adventure with a showdown with the villains and a few “What would Mac dos”. Look there might be a reason why Lucas Till is taking a smaller role – I recall reading that there were on set issues which lead to health issues and I can’t begrudge him that. BUT his name is on the Title, I’m watching for MacGyver if he isn’t fairly consistently driving the A Plot then what’s the point? Knight Rider 2008 suffered from the same problem. Look, MacGyver is successful enough that it’s been renewed for a fifth season and I keep watching because of my love for the classic MacGyver but I don’t love it in the same way. It’s not MacGyver using his brains and ingenuity to save the day. Jack, or Desi, might punch the problem or Riley might hack it or Bozer, er Bozer might do something and Macgyver doesn’t feel the same. Back in the day MacGyver hated guns and when he punched someone he shook his fist afterwards because the punch hurt – it made the punch seem like a last option. Now Mac is okay with people using guns and he’s just as happy to hit someone. This a point Richard Dean Anderson made when he turned down a guest spot (I do wonder if the plan was for him to be Oversight, Mac's Dad.) I know I should judge it on it’s own merits but the producers want to trade on my nostalgia inviting the comparison. Perhaps if they called it Phoenix Foundation I wouldn’t be so hard on it. I watch the show and I may be part of the problem – the show gives me enough to remember being a boy watching the original to keep me coming back but It’s not the same. The nostalgia may give the show an extra notch or two in my ratings it’s better than Scorpion that had me hoping for some MacGyver/A Team style builds but never quite did. (A Scorpion/MacGyver crossover would have been fun) (A quick aside NuMac and Scorpion are in the same universe as NuMac crossed over with NuHawaii 5-0, who in turn crossed with NCIS LA. NCIS LA crossed with Scorpion.) There’s a story when Oasis released Wonderwall, a very 1960s Beatles inspired tune, someone asked George Harrison what he thought. George said that it would have been an average song back in the 60s but now it was a pretty good song. And that’s how I feel about NuGyver, it would have been an average show in the 80s but now it’s okay

Code of Vengeance 1985 TV movie

So Knight Rider is quite the franchise the orignal series ran from 1982-1986 for four seasons. In 1991, we got the TV movie and failed pilot Knight Rider 2000, this was followed by the in name only Knight Rider 2010 in 1994. 1997 saw the one season Team Knight Rider and the 2008 season of Knight Rider with Justin Bruening as Michael's son driving a new KITT. But what tends to be forgotten is the short lived spinoff Code of Vengeance - In season 2 episode 21 "Mouth of the Snake" (a two part episode) had Michael and KITT meet and team up with David Dalton (Charles Taylor), martial artist and government agent. I do wonder if Glen Larson or anyone in the Knight Rider team read the Destroyer series? The intent was to spin Dalton off onto a series called "All that Glitters" where he would be paired with Joanna St John (Joanna Pettet) All that Glitters was the title given to the fourth Knight Rider novelisation, and David and Joanna are mentioned to be married in the 5th book. Reportly the netwrk felt the concept felt too close to another Larsen series "Cover Up' so the decision was made to retool the series with a pilot called "Code of Vengeance" I'll talk about the new premise when I talk about the movie. It was followed by a second TV movie Dalton: Code of Vengeance II. The show then went to series called Code of Vengeance (although I have seen it referenced as Dalton's Code of Vengeance) and it ran for a whole 2 episodes. "Rustler's Moon" and "The Last Hold Out" Recently the Youtube channel Knight Rider Historians posted first Code of Vengeance TV Movie.

So Dalton is no longer a martial artist who works for the Department of Justice, here he is a Vietnam veteran who is wandering the country in his campervan. In this movie he's in a border town in Arizona where he is gets work building a room for a single mother - the only person in town who will talk to Dalton. Dalton discovers that the woman's brother is missing and he finds the body and that there is smuggling of guns across the border. In many ways Dalton reminded me of Billy Jack, a peaceful man who can kick much ass and has intervene when there is injustice. I'm also sure that Shane was an influnce as the woman's young son becomes attached to Dalton and follows him during the final fight (I was yelling at the kid to run AWAY from the gunfire) It almost feels like a prequel to the Knight Rider episode where we see how Dalton came to the attention of DoJ but the show never got that far. Interestingly in a meta moment, one of the characters is watching Knight Rider in the movie. It's an enjoyable enough 90 min TV movie (and I don't why but the original video that Knight Historians have loaded is a studio original and has several points where it says "Insert ads here" which made me smile - even though youtube just ignored them and put ads whereever.

Goldtiger.

I am a big fan of Modesty Blaise and following through some of the series that she inspired through several generations has lead me to several interesting series – The Baroness, The Seekers, The Girl Factory, Black Swan, Conversant USA, just off the top of my head. So I am searching ebay for Modesty Blaise when Goldtiger pops up. A supposedly forgotten series from the sixties crested to rival Modesty Blaise dropped from the paper because the leads were gay. The book reprints the first story and some behind the scenes interviews. So I order the book and the damned pandemic means I have wait months for the book to arrive. It finally arrived and it's a trip. Lily Gold and her partner John Tiger are former mercenaries turned fashion designers who trouble shoot on the side their first adventure has them tracking down disappearing ships on the Thames. There's a master villain with a plot that would make a Bond Villain blush. Hench men and women who are memorable. Interspersed with the strips are behind the scenes interviews, letters and articles with the writer Louis Schaeffer and artist Antonio Barretti. The relationship between the pair is strained as the artist is crazy and prone to ignoring the scripts and inserting himself into the strip. There are portions of the strip missing and we get sketches of strips, rough outlines from the artist and an extract from the novelisation. At one point Baretti inserts himself into the narrative as what Schaeffer has written is too boring and he wants to draw Rio. The ending is so audacious and meta that I can’t even. Of course, the truth is Goldtiger was never a real strip, Baretti and Schaeffer never existed and Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton made the whole thing up and was published by 2000AD through a Kickstarter. The strip is a nice companion to the lovely Modesty Blaise strips collections that Titan books had been putting out indeed it’s almost a satire of them. Throughout are plent of wnks and nods to Modesty Blaise - the aborted Goldtiger movie had Terrance Stamp as John Tiger, Stamp had played Willie Garvin in Modesty Blaise. A letter to the editor of the paper that runs Goldtiger is written by Jim O'Donnell a reference to Jim Holdaway and Peter O'Donnell the artist and writer for Modesty Blaise. You know for all the hubbub about the characters’ sexualities there is almost nothing of it in this book – John Tiger tells a female assassin, Farina Karesh, he’s picky about what he lets people stick in him as she tries to stab him with her talons. And Lily Gold asks Anouska, the Russian Doll of death – what appears to be a large cloaked woman is actually three thin women “Where have you been all my life?” Sadly the fight between them is lost but we are told that it is as sexual as it is violent. Part of the gag is that Baretti keeps trying to revive the strip I get the feeling that I may have to reread this a few times to really get the story

Bruce Lee against the Supermen (1975) starring Bruce Li

Aka Superdragon vs Supermen, Call me Dragon, and Meng Long Zheng Dong. I saw this movie must be 30 years ago now, I rented it from The Plains Video and the tape had "Stamp Day for Superman" Back then I knew little about The Green Hornet, Bruce Lee or Brucespoitation. I'd mostly forgotten this film until I was listening to Derrick Ferguson and Percival Constantine on the Superhero Cinephiles podcast - for fans of superhero cinema I cannot recommend it enough. They did Doctor Mordred and mentioned that they had watched it on Tubi. I downloaded the app and scroll through their catalouge and find Bruce Lee against the Supermen. So a bit of back story Bruce Lee first found fame as Kato in the Green Hornet TV series. After that show ended he moved to Hong Kong where he made a handful of films. His last full role was in Enter the Dragon, He died tragically soon after the end of filming but before the release of the film. Enter the Dragon was a major success and his earlier Hong Kong films were released in the west. But there was still hunger for more. Episodes of The Green Hornet were cobbled together as two movies "the Green Hornet" and "Fury o the Dragon" and a few minutes of footage for Bruce's final film "Game of Death" was cobbled together with outtakes from other films, footage of Lee's real funeral and some dodgy doubling. But still people wanted more and Brucespoitation was born and actor who if you squinted might be Bruce Lee were given names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee and thrown into martial arts films - basically the first mockbusters. Which brings us to this movie starring Bruce Li. I think this wants to be a Kato film. THe movie opens with bank robbers on the run and tossing the money out the window. A young couple find the money and a masked chauffeur appears and drives them to the station in a black car.

The Chauffeur who we later learn is named Kata (or Carter) then meets with The Green Hornet and they are wearing some red tights

Continuity is not a strong suit of this movie. I should mention the dialogue mentions that this is the Green Hornet at least twice. Later in the movie The Green Hornet looks like this

After getting his tights on to mention that Kata's friend Angela is traveling with her father Professor Ting. Kata goes in plain clothes to visit a friend who doesn't get name and mentions that The Green Hornet is injured. He looked fine in that scene. Professor Ting has made a mcguffin formula that the bad guys want, who just happen to be the bank robbers. Kata and his friend cause so much trouble for the gang that they hire Superman and his students. And there was Kung Fu fighting, their hands were as fast as lightning because of the undercranked camera. While Kata is fighting the supermen, the bad guys kidnap the professor and his daughter who now drive the black car that Kata was driving earlier. The now Asain looking Green Hormet is following the bad guys in a blue car. Ropes and gags appear and disappear from the hostages. Weapons appear from thin air. Look it's a cheesy Green Hornet knockoff film, with some interesting fights but this does not hang together well at all. It's a curiousity and nothing more. You can watch it for free on youtube as part of the Wu Tang Collection