Australian producer/director/film guy James Wan, who you probably know as the dude who co-created and directed that extravagantly gory film Saw is directing a remake of the television classic MacGyver. Approached by film studio New Line, Wan will provide a big screen take on the series popularised in the mid-1980s.
The original series garnered a cult following over many years, with notable mega fans like Patty and Selma Bouvier, with protagonist Angus MacGyver (played by Eighties hair king Richard Dean Anderson) as the handsome hero with a prodigious ability for crafting gadgets-of-necessity out of one apple, some toothpicks and a ball of string to save the day.
Whether or not you’re old enough to remember the original series, the word MacGyver has made its way into modern-day vernacular, as a noun used to describe someone who has the ability to solve complex problems using whatever is around, exemplified by urban dictionary as “someone who can jump-start a truck with a cactus”; or as a verb, for example: “I MacGyvered the lock with a nail file and a tin of beer.”
Here’s hoping the remake does the original justice. Because let’s face it, it won’t be easy to beat the retro action-packed goodness that is the original MacGyver intro:
Words By Nikki Brogan
