Despite the contempt many fans had for the reboot it did have some positive outcomes for us by putting MacGyver back on the CBS radar and generating enough interest for Lee Zlotoff to get some of his MacGyver projects off the ground.
The first positive came in 2017 when Glasslight released an official scale model of MacGyver’s jeep as part of its ‘Hollywood collectibles’ set of toy cars. The jeep, for the most part, appeared to be a stock item but Glasslight did include the correct license plate on the front and back of the jeep as well as putting some effort into the packaging. It didn’t make a lot of waves with the fans but it at least showed that CBS was looking at MacGyver as a merchandisable product and gave us hope that there might be more merchandise on the way.
2018 was a busy year for the fandom and started with a huge surprise announcement – after years of speculation that it couldn’t happen, we heard that CBS was remastering MacGyver in HD. The general fandom had thought this wasn’t possible because the show was transferred to video for easier editing, meaning the masters were also on video which we knew at the time wasn’t able to be converted to HD (there are now AI Up-scaling processes that can achieve this) and so believed that having MacGyver in anything other than the video DVD quality was a pipe dream. We got to experience that pipe dream in October of the same year when season 1 was released on Bluray.
Later that year we had an escape room board game released in Target stores with little to no promotion at all. Word started spreading about the game when people started seeing it on shelves and posting on social media about it. The game later became available on Amazon.com and received mostly positive reviews from players.
The good news continued as we saw MacGyver join the Pop culture lexicon as a Funko Pop! figure based on the original MacGyver complete with leather jacket and Swiss Army Knife. Funko Pops are stylized vinyl figurines based on pop culture characters from Movies, Television, video games, comic books, and other pop culture sources and have become major pop culture collectible items around the world so having a MacGyver Funko Pop was quite a big deal.
This was met with varying reactions from fans though. Many were thrilled to have MacGyver finally recognized as a Pop Icon and to have a modern collectible, while others saw it as the closest thing to an action figure we’d probably ever get; but there were also a number of fans who didn’t really understand the Funko Pop phenomenon who complained that it didn’t look like RDA or looked silly with the oversized head.
We also got a second collectible car from Glasslight – this time the very recognizable Phoenix race car from the Collision Course episode. Released with the same customized packaging as the Jeep, the car was better received by fans who recognized the work which was put into reproducing the paint job of the car.
In 2019 Lee Zlotoff announced that he had teamed up with film director Brett Leonard (Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity) and pioneering VR company Imverse to create ‘MacGyverWorld.’ The project would use Imverse’s laser VR technology to create a live-action MacGyver VR escape room adventure. The project appeared to have huge potential but sadly this was the last we ever heard of the project.
Another big Bluray announcement came during 2019 as well – this time from German production studio Koch Films who had secured the rights and copies of the CBS HD masters. Koch has produced high-quality boxsets for other classic TV shows and indicated they were looking to give MacGyver the same high-quality treatment – including having some special features, which was something fans had been calling for since the original DVD releases. The original release date was set as the summer of 2021 – we later go news that the production had been severely hampered by the Covid pandemic and at the time of writing there was still no confirmed release date.
During this time, the reboot continued to build its audience and flood social media in the way original fans wished had happened with the original series, and as much as they hated it, it was keeping MacGyver current and therefore merchandisable by both CBS and Lee Zlotoff.
2020 saw the release of a new book series by Lee Zlotoff who had teamed up with author Eric Kelley to create 3 new adventures. The books would bring MacGyver forward to recent times but still take place in the original MacGyververse allowing people to see what became of MacGyver since the end of the original series. The first book had good reviews with people enjoying the story. There was some disappointment that there were no mentions of any other original characters, (due to the complicated ownership partnership between Zlotoff and CBS). Although the series was meant to be a 3 book series, this first book is the only one which has been released so far.
2021 began with some news that Koch Films were looking at the possibility of using AI Upscaling to convert the two MacGyver TV Movies to HD for their Bluray boxset. This news would be followed later in the year with confirmation from Michael Des Barres that he had recorded a featurette for the Bluray set.
The Bluray news was followed by an interesting 5 part animated video series from Lee Zlotoff’s not-for-profit MacGyver Foundation. The series was developed as a public service to help encourage everyone to find ways to adapt and cope with the escalating stresses in our lives caused by the worldwide global Covid pandemic happening at the time. The video series was released on macgyver.com with viewers encouraged to share stories, photos, and videos of how they—or someone they know—had to MacGyver something to deal with the pandemic.
A few weeks later we got the shocking news that the MacGyver reboot had been canceled. The news hit the reboot fans hard but had a surprising after-effect which we’ll look at in our next installment.
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