MacGyver Report

In a previous post, I mentioned that I've had a few people comment over the years that Owen McKenna reminds them a bit of MacGyver, a show I'd never seen and a character I knew nothing about. So I decided to give MacGyver a look.

I'm not sure why my books might make people think of MacGyver, but I think it's mostly the fact that McKenna, like MacGyver, doesn't carry a gun and has to come up with clever approaches to dealing with bad guys. Another possible connection is that the names are vaguely similar.

An example of inventiveness comes to mind in Tahoe Trap, when McKenna is trying to save Paco, a young boy who the bad guys want for reasons that I can't say without giving away the story.

Although young, Paco is an expert when it comes to hot chili peppers. McKenna and Paco make up a batch of pepper spray, use Paco as bait to draw in the men who want him, and they blast the bad guys with pepper spray. Definitely a bit of MacGyver there.

We rented the first DVD of MacGyver from Netflix. I found the shows fun and light-hearted, if a bit goofy. They are also a good time travel back 40 years, which was before there were much in the way of computer graphics and fancy special effects. The acting is stiff, and the stories were low budget, but the stories had the basic components to generate interest. (Sympathetic characters in bad trouble.) The first show featured an underground lab in New Mexico that had been bombed. MacGyver had to work his way through a damaged facility to save the scientists.

The second show had a village in Southeast Asia that was under threat from a drug lord who makes the people grow opium poppies. This was set up like a classic Western, with MacGyver riding in to rescue the innocent villagers from the guy in the black hat. You get the idea.

Much of the shows were over-the-top dramatic. (The same could be said of some of my books.) But that was part of the point of the program. (And the point of the whole thriller genre!)

Conclusion? I liked MacGyver. I'm glad to have finally seen a program that was popular enough to have its character's name become a verb to describe clever solutions to problems. ("He MacGyvered his way out of the locked room.") And I'm pleased to have McKenna readers occasionally think of MacGyver when they read McKenna. After all, McKenna does "MacGyver" his way out of some difficulties!