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First, Be Good
I hate to admit this, but MacGyver is not good. I’m not referring to the unwatchable reboot currently withering away on CBS. No, I mean the original Richard Dean Anderson vehicle of awesomeness which aired from 1985-1992.
Dat dat dat dat dat dat daaaaa, dat dat daaaaa. The theme song gets you pumped, right? It makes we want to go rifling through the kitchen junk drawer, grab the broken can openers and fashion a defibrillator, just in case we need one. Or take the mercury out of those unused curly cue light bulbs (still in the four-year-old box, because they suck) and make…something with mercury, and batteries!
MacGyver was more than a hero, he was a superhero. In the days before Captain America, comic book superheroes were lame. Heroes were more grounded in reality: “The A-Team” (a bunch of guys with guns and explosives), “Knight Rider” (a guy with a tricked out car), “Walker, Texas Ranger” (a cop with a good roundhouse). But MacGyver was more than all that; he became a verb. Younger folk might not understand, but I’ll bet every GenXer knows what it means to “MacGyver the crap out of (something).” Amen?
I loved MacGyver, even so far as to get annoyed when the Monday Night Football game went long and preempted it. And you know how I feel about Monday Night Football, especially in the ’90s, when the Chiefs had Derrick Thomas in his prime.
So I was filled with childlike glee the day I noticed all 139 episodes of all seven seasons of MacGyver pop up on Amazon Prime Video to stream. “Oh, I’m in,” I told my wife while laying in bed looking at my phone. She raised an eyebrow, then went back to reading Dickens, probably because she has a greater recall ability with respect to quality. She is much less swayed by nostalgic sentimentality. “Whatever,” I thought, “MacGyver rocks.”
But she was right. MacGyver is awful. The cheap, soap-opera set lighting, boring storylines, ’80s TV writing … it all seemed so much better when I was 14. Even the action couldn’t save the pilot episode. I figured I’d try and skim through a few later seasons. What I remember as a kid was 45 minutes of this:
When in reality, it was 40 minutes of this:
The acting? Two observations: 1) Richard Dean Anderson started his career on “General Hospital.” 2) They had an episode featuring Traci Lords. Any questions?
It was heartbreaking. I almost wept, then began wondering what other childhood favorites I would have to refile into the “regrets” category alongside hang-over memories, ex-girlfriends, and old college writing. The Neverending Story? The Dark Crystal? Tron? “Quantum Leap”? Surely these hold up, right? Nope, not even a little. Quality is rare, it would seem.
This is a problem for me. I’m trying to make a career in the creative arts. I write fiction. What if what I’m writing today doesn’t pass the test of time? I went to the bookshelf and pulled off some of my all-time favorite fiction: Red Storm Rising, Perelandra, The Killer Angels, Fahrenheit 451. Do you know what? They’re still good. They hold up as well as Narnia and Lord of the Rings. Whew.
Hopefully in 20 years, people won’t look at my work and shake their heads, wondering, “Why did I like that again?” Perhaps it’s because the written word lends itself so well to customization. The words on the page don’t reflect era-specific hair height, or show a hero wearing a printed silk vest over a white t-shirt. It kinda takes the suspense out of the story.
But that’s not always true. Star Wars has ’70s haircuts all over the place. You can hardly identify Harrison Ford’s blue Members Only jacket in The Empire Strikes Back. The dramatic synthesizer riffs we’re ashamed of liking in Duran Duran or Erasure seem strangely unnoticeable in great films like The Right Stuff or Top Gun. George Lucas, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott were (are) not great writers, but they create some amazing backdrops for their characters to play in. If the story is good, and we care about the characters, the details seem to peel away.
First, be good — then we can overlook the perm hairstyle.
Published in General
Oh dear lord…
They were funny as 1-2 minute bits scattered 4 or 5 through a single episode of SNL. I can’t even imagine the awfulness of a movie-length version.
Full disclosure – A Night at the Roxbury is currently sitting in the #2 position in my Netflix DVD queue. (Yes, I still get DVDS from them).
I finally tried watching that too. It also didn’t do much for me.
As I mentioned in the PIT a week or so back, for the past couple months I’ve been running my 12-year-old through every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel. He’s totally into it. And it still holds up really well.
We just started BTVS season 6 and Angel Season 3. Watched Once More With Feeling last night (BTVS season 6 ep 7). Of course he already knew all the songs from me playing them on my ipod in the car.
Be thankful for small victories. But then again, be careful of what you wish for:
My eldest over the weekend announced that if Brian May is able to pull off another Live Aid concert (to fight Climate Change, natch), as he is wont to do, she is going to skip school to go to London to see it. I reminded her that Freddie Mercury died 28 years ago and it would not be the same. (To say nothing of the Climate Change nonsense; but then again, she is in college and does not yet know better; or at least that is what I tell myself.)
My 12-year-old agrees with me that the music today is “just noise”. He listens to the “classic rock” station on the radio in his room at night.
Edit: How many 12-years-old’s do you know who know who Annie Haslam is?
I wrote an entire post on this last week, so I feel ya.
My kids won’t let me listen to anything. If I’ve got music on in the house they will always demand that I turn it off. Doesn’t matter what it is. Oldest will always add “I’ve got a headache” to play to my sympathies.
I’m becoming less sympathetic.
Remind me – How much are the kids paying towards the mortgage?
I’ve taken to saying stuff like that.
Dad, stop eating the chocolate chips! They’re for baking!
My money bought those chocolate chips. I’ll eat them if I want.
And though that post above makes it sound like my kids are just anti-music, given that they won’t let me listen to anything, they will frequently pollute the house with stupid K-pop. Plus, they both play piano quite well, and will just randomly sit down and start playing loudly at all hours of the day.
I still find that certain arcs of the original Dr. Who run hold up well. Others are better forgotten. It’s strange what stays and what doesn’t. I find that a lot of 80s TV in general does not hold up, but there are exceptions. The soon to be memory-holed Cosby Show still works in its early seasons. I showed my kids some episodes of Alf, and they thought it pretty good too.
Knight Rider and Dukes of Hazzard, both of which I loved as a kid, both fail horribly now.
The original Ghostbusters is still funny, and my kids agreed.
I was listening to a podcast recently on story telling – one of speakers made a solid point: good stories remain good because, even when fictional, they tell truths, and they are true in a way. But bad stories are founded on lies and twisted truths, and over time this is why they keep failing. I think with acting, bad acting or poor scriptwriting are themselves lies after a fashion too.
Hooooo!
Last weekend my kids watched Gone With the Wind for the first time. We had to explain a lot, and had some interesting conversations about the subject matter. It’s a great film because it has great characters, flawed to be sure, but complex, and set within a true backdrop.
Yes, and usually when the baby is finally down for a nap. I love when they play piano, just anytime else.
Ugh, that’s enough to turn anyone into His Dudeness or El Duderino (if you’re not into that whole brevity thing).
After the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man explodes, “It smells like barbecued dog hair!” It’s one of the few quotes I can remember .
I think the first couple of seasons with Sara Jane might be the most conservative SF ever put on TV with the possible exception of season 3 of Babylon Five. All of the human villains in those season are of the political left- anti-fossil fuels types (Terror of the Zygons), ZPG/Marxist Revolutionary types (Robot), radical greens (Seeds of Doom).
Sturgeon’s Revelation applies once more.
I didn’t watch buffy when I was in HS, so I watched it recently. I couldn’t get very far because it just started feeling occultish. The 90s stuff is weird like that… Dawson’s creek and 90210 have nothing like that in them, but they had their moments of feeling that way, too. The obsession with witch craft, ouija boards, and demon horror movies seemed to eclipse in the 90s.
Kennedy era Cold War liberalism. Pay any price, bear any burden to explore and maintain the New Frontier.
Uh, I didn’t know who Annie Haslam was until I looked it up. C’set la vie.
However, my 14-year old listens to a Spotify playlist that mirrors what I have on my phone. I am just as likely to catch him listening to Sinatra, Crosby and Bublé as I am listening to Trace Adkins or Dolly Parton. I have that kid totally screwed up.
Or well taught, one of the two.
He pulls it off better than his old man. He’s just finishing off his Freshman year and has 4+ GPA, he’s athletic (he made the varsity lacrosse team) and he’s got good looking young ladies draped all over him. I blame all of that on his mother.
I agree. I’d put it in my all-time top ten list of TV shows.
That’s right. I read that. It was very good. It did not occur to me that was you. Thanks.