Top 10 MacGyverisms - His Greatest Tricks

By Tom Rose
Fancast.com

In the biggest movie of the year so far, brilliant weapons inventor Tony Stark is kidnapped by a desperate group of terrorists and locked in a cave filled with some broken down lab equipment. Sure, the Ironman, as played by Robert Downey Jr., busts out by cobbling together an invincible suit of armor, but how would he fare against MacGyver, who would’ve escaped using nothing more than his wits, some paper clips and a couple of sticks of chewing gum? You decide.

Here’s our Top 10 list of MacGyver’s Greatest Tricks (and you can watch ‘em all on Fancast):

10. Pilot: MacGyver escapes from a locked room by blasting a hole in the wall. He empties an aspirin capsule, and then refills it with some handy sodium metal. Dropped into a glass of water, the pill slowly dissolves. The sodium reacts violently to the water and sets off a small explosion. Sound farfetched? On a recent episode of MythBusters, Jamie and Adam deemed this stunt “plausible.”

9. The Heist: MacGyver needs to trigger the sound activated lock securing a Casino vault. He fills four glasses of wine to varying levels. Then, by rubbing his fingertips around their rims, he “plays” them like a musical instrument. By reproducing the correct sequence of tones, he pops the vault door open just in the nick of time.

8. The Human Factor: MacGyver breaks out the lens of a magnifying glass and removes the crystal face from his trusty watch. By placing both components at either end of a rolled up newspaper, he constructs a crude, but effective telescope. Click here to find out what he needs to see so badly.

7. For Love or Money: MacGyver electrifies his car using baling wire to shock some mercenary soldiers who are trying to force him out of the vehicle. He runs the baling wire from the ignition coil to the frame of the car. When the mercs reach for the door handles, he touches the wire tightly to the frame, shocking them into unconsciousness.

6. Twice Stung: MacGyver breaks through the apartment door of a buddy who is dying of carbon monoxide poisoning inside. He ties one end of a fire hose to the door handle and the other end to an elevator handrail. After sending the elevator down, it pulls enough of the door away with it so that MacGyver can reach in and open the deadbolt chain door lock.

5. Soft Touch: MacGyver uses a road flare to follow a van without being seen by the driver. By throwing the flare into the equipment rack on the roof of the van, he is able to stay close enough behind the van by watching the billowing smoke trail.

4. Bushmaster: MacGyver breaks open a locked door by exposing the knob to Freon gas. He collects the gas from a crimped pipe on the back of an old refrigerator. He opens the pipe and sprays the Freon at the lock. When it freezes, he gives a hard push and the door bursts open.

3. Partners: MacGyver blows open a locked truck trailer door by building a bomb out of an oil can, a pair of pantyhose, an old exhaust pipe and a salvaged car battery. He creates the fuse by soaking the pantyhose in oil, and then threads it through the exhaust which is packed with shavings from the aluminum can. By touching the battery terminals to the fuse the door is smashed apart.

2. Out in the Cold: MacGyver reads a strip of microfilm with a busted microscope and a single drop of water. He uses the light from the microscope to backlight the film, and the drop of water as a magnifying glass. Thus he’s able to view the strip before the bad guys can get their hands on it.

1. Hellfire: Perhaps MacGyver’s most famous trick. He repairs a blown fuse using the tin foil wrapper from a stick of chewing gum to create new contacts across the terminals of a damaged fuse box. Of course, this gag is so old it’s got whiskers, but it was enough to ensure MacGyver’s enduring legacy as the greatest handyman of all time.