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Ever since creating the MacGyver quiz a few weeks ago, I’ve had the urge to write an article about all of the clever ways MacGyver was able to get himself and others out of potentially life-threatening situations. There’s no way I could ever cover all of them, though, so I’ll just go with 10 I thought were particularly… interesting.
10 Problems Solved by MacGyver
1. You know those MIT students who used their genius to make lots of money in Vegas? They’ve got nothing on MacGyver. He makes a pair of trick dice by rounding some of the edges, but my favorite part is how he gets them on to the craps table. He ties some string to a paper clip, attaches the clip to the dress of a woman walking by and then steps on the string, pulling the woman’s dress down. When everyone is staring at her, he swaps the dice out.
2. Mac attaches a piece of wire to a blood pressure machine and runs it to an alarm clock. He says that when the man sweats, the alarm goes off. Questionable.
3. I like this one because I envision a bunch of hammered guys sitting around a bar trying to duplicate this. To repair a soda gun (the kind that bartenders use to put tonic in your vodka tonic or Coke in your Jack and Coke), MacGyver sticks one of those little plastic pirate swords that usually impale cherries or olives in it. Using the sword, he opens the CO2 valve, fills a pipe with acetylene and sticks another chunk of pipe in to use as a missle, thus allowing him to escape from some bad guys.
4. Don’t let anyone tell you Mac doesn’t love the environment. To incubate some eagle eggs, he uses chair padding and some vegetable oil, claiming that the oil plus the padding fibers generates heat.
5. If you go into cardiac arrest with no medical supplies nearby, hopefully someone around you has seen the MacGyver episode where he uses a couple of candlestick holders, a power cord and a floor mat to make a defibrillator.
6. MacGyver in a strip club? Say it ain’t so! But don’t worry – he’s too busy figuring out how he can hack cosmetics into weapons to be bothered with a lap dance. He crams make-up powder into a confetti cannon and fires it at his pursuers, blinding them while he escapes.
7. Hot air balloons don’t have to be expensive. Just follow Mac’s lead and build one out of super glue, clothes, a parachute, condoms, a refrigerator and an old metal box.
8. I’d like to see them try this one on Cold Case Files: when MacGyver finds a human skull, he identifies the person by recreating the face with pencil tips, modeling clay, glass eyeballs and some wool.
9. Proof that MacGyver is daddy material: He built a swinging playpen from a net and hockey sticks and, of course, fastened a diaper with duct tape.
10. This suggestion was actually sent in to the show’s writers by an avid fan. MacGyver fixes a Jeep’s leaky radiator with some egg whites. First he pours in some water and lets it heat up and then dumps in egg whites, which quickly get cooked by the hot water. The cooked egg whites then seal up the holes in the radiator.
Do you have a favorite MacGyverism I didn’t mention? Feel free to share it in the comments.
Stacy,
I heart you. The Quick 10 is easily my favorite post every day. Aren’t lists fun to write? Great work–I love me some MacGyver trivia.
posted by adrienne on 5-28-2008 at 2:48 pm
I never watched MacGyver much, but I did see #10 proven on MythBusters.
posted by Ed on 5-28-2008 at 3:26 pm
Actually, 8 is more or less one of three methods used by forensic professionals (anthropologists, mostly)to do facial reconstructions. It’s an amazingly eerie art.
Other than clay and pencil tips (rubber markers)? Sketches and computer software are used, but all use the same principles: determining tissue depth and looking for particular bone markers for muscle attachments along with other data determined by bone structure and characteristics to determine what the person would potentially have looked like.
The link I’ve added is the Wikipedia take on it.
I’d forgotten ol’ Mac tried his hand at that….
I used to love that show.
posted by ACute Angle on 5-28-2008 at 4:16 pm
Beat me by 6 hours Ed.
Yep, #10 was indeed proven true on Mythbusters.
posted by Jess on 5-28-2008 at 8:27 pm
…or 5 hours by their clock…
posted by Jess on 5-28-2008 at 8:30 pm
here’s one of my favorites - have you ever found yourself held captive at gunpoint? A pistol pointing straight at you 5 feet away?
Don’t duck out of the way, or try to kick the gun away or anything silly like that. Just grab a nearby ruler, lunge straight at the gun, then jam the edge of the ruler between the hammer and the chamber, stopping the hammer right as the trigger is pulled!!
posted by Joe L. on 5-28-2008 at 9:28 pm
Heehee… MacGyver went to my high school!
Well, the actor who played him (Richard Dean Anderson) did.
Of course, he graduated ~40 years before I came, but it’s still pretty cool.
posted by Mark H. on 5-28-2008 at 10:31 pm
Easily winning the prize for “getting the most from the least”, MacGyver added a bit more tree sap to a pine cone and then lit it on fire, turning it into a full-fledged grenade
posted by Gunther on 5-29-2008 at 8:58 am
That egg in the radiator trick actually works, they did it on Myth Busters. Of course that doesn’t cover the long term effects but for a quick fix when bad guys are after you, it does work.
posted by Kevin on 5-29-2008 at 9:24 am
Joe L, my dad was in law enforcement back in the old country and he said you can use the webbing between your thumb and index finger to stop the hammer. It’ll probably hurt like hell, but better than getting shot.
This is all assuming, that the gun pointed at you has an exposed hammer, unlike many modern automatics and some revolvers.
posted by Jim on 5-29-2008 at 9:53 am
If you do a bit more MacGyver digging, you’ll find the name of the gentleman who actually developed all of those little MacGyver-ish things for the show. For the life of me I do not remember the guy’s name, but it was really interesting to read about (a very long time ago…).
posted by Brad on 6-4-2008 at 2:39 pm