It's a REALLY common attitude amongst the male MacGyver fan contingent -- which is an entitled minority and probably always has been.
I realised there's a good parallel here: were you in Doctor Who fandom pre-reboot? (I was, having started in 1982.) There was a strong fannish subgroup, almost all male, that seemed to think that what made the show Awe-Sum was the monsters. Mind you, they meant the Old Who monsters.
Think about that for a moment . . . now think of MacGyver. Strong subgroup that believes that what made the show Awe-sum was the explosions, and to a lesser extent, the MacGyverisms themselves. Not the character, not the stories, not the charm, not the values system, not the actor who defined the role.
I've also been thinking about some of the other major franchises -- Star Wars, Star Trek, Who, etc. MacGyver is the ONLY ONE I can think of for which, when reboots and comics etc. are bruited, there has been any attempt to isolate the character from the actor, and deny the identification between them. But that's what they keep trying to do with Mac. When the comic book project was in development, and the creators were hanging out on MacGyverOnline and asking us for comments, they were insanely insistent that MacGyver COULD NOT BE INDENTIFIED WITH RDA.
I shit you not. That's what they insisted. They deliberately designed the comic book so that Mac looked generic and Not Like RDA.
The comic book was weak, but it got a lot more things right than the reboot series. Gahhh. (The creators had shifted from accepting feedback to trying to slap us down when we said things they didn't agree with, so it wasn't exactly a shining moment in fan relations.)
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I realised there's a good parallel here: were you in Doctor Who fandom pre-reboot? (I was, having started in 1982.) There was a strong fannish subgroup, almost all male, that seemed to think that what made the show Awe-Sum was the monsters. Mind you, they meant the Old Who monsters.
Think about that for a moment . . . now think of MacGyver. Strong subgroup that believes that what made the show Awe-sum was the explosions, and to a lesser extent, the MacGyverisms themselves. Not the character, not the stories, not the charm, not the values system, not the actor who defined the role.
I've also been thinking about some of the other major franchises -- Star Wars, Star Trek, Who, etc. MacGyver is the ONLY ONE I can think of for which, when reboots and comics etc. are bruited, there has been any attempt to isolate the character from the actor, and deny the identification between them. But that's what they keep trying to do with Mac. When the comic book project was in development, and the creators were hanging out on MacGyverOnline and asking us for comments, they were insanely insistent that MacGyver COULD NOT BE INDENTIFIED WITH RDA.
I shit you not. That's what they insisted. They deliberately designed the comic book so that Mac looked generic and Not Like RDA.
The comic book was weak, but it got a lot more things right than the reboot series. Gahhh. (The creators had shifted from accepting feedback to trying to slap us down when we said things they didn't agree with, so it wasn't exactly a shining moment in fan relations.)