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{{trope}}
[[File:xkcd_444_-_Macgyver_Gets_Lazy_8988.png|link=Xkcd
{{quote|''"With what?" Spencer asks. "Don't tell me you know how to make a bomb with a stick of chewing gum." Wow, the first ever MacGyver joke was actually in the first ever episode of ''MacGyver''. That's actually kind of impressive.''|'''[[
{{quote|''TONY STARK was able to build [[Powered Armour|this]] ''in a cave''... with ''a box of scraps!''|'''Obadiah Stane''', ''[[Iron Man (
A character saves the day by making a gadget out of [[It May Help You
The characters that do this may be [[Technical Pacifist|Technical Pacifists]] or [[Mr. Fixit]]. [[The Professor]] often seems to have the right tools on hand at the right time, as well.
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Note that the gadget has to be based on more science than simply, "Hey, I could kill someone with this random object." Look for those under [[Improvised Weapon]]. May involve [[Noodle Implements]].
Compare [[Homemade Inventions]]. Related to [[Duct Tape for Everything]]. See [[Locking MacGyver in
{{examples}}
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** At the end of ''Gundam 00'' season 1, {{spoiler|Setsuna F Seiei disappears after his Gundam Exia is all but destroyed...and he reappears 4 years later having Badass repaired the Gundam by himself with scraps replacing armour, a large cape covering a missing arm and a glowing red eye on the missing side of its face}} earning it the [[Fan Nickname]] {{spoiler|Termin-Exia or Exia-Two-face}}
*** This is somewhat subverted in that it took 4 years for Setsuna to show himself and in this case, it was less of a case of [[MacGyvering]] and more of a case of scrounging for parts that he needed. The replacement Camera eye was probably dug out of a Tieran while a lot of the missing pieces of armor may attribute to him breaking them down for spare parts. This is less of a case of [[MacGyvering]] and more of a case of replacing a broken car tire with a sturdier but smaller tire.
* Yusei from ''[[
* Shogetsu from [[Hatenkou Yuugi|Dazzle]] got a can of mackerel for lunch... but no can opener. So, with a few tools he got from the school's kitchen and science lab and the graphite from a pencil, he made a welding torch in the hopes that it would open the can. It did, but sadly, [http://www.mangafox.com/manga/hatenkou_yuugi/v10/c000.1/52.html it also burned the mackerel.] Oh, and Rahzel and Fay both had can openers.
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* [[Lex Luthor]], on the other hand, ''has'' been known to build a teleporter out out of stuff lying around his cell. During his appearance in the short-lived ''The Joker'' comic, he improvised a jetpack out of a couple of bottles of pop and some paint flakes.
** Spectacular jailbreaks based on his [[MacGyvering]] skills were a huge part of [[Pre Crisis]] [[Mad Scientist]] Luthor's character. One story has him consider that it has reached the point where his guards won't allow him to have ''anything'' other than a pad of paper and a pen. He knows perfectly well how to turn to the ink, metal, plastic, wood pulp, and glue into a high explosive to blast his way out... but he would never ''do'' that, because then they wouldn't let him have a pen and paper any more.
* Mocked, inevitably, in [[Mad Magazine|Mad's]] spoof of [[MacGyver]]. MacGyver remarks the [[Locking MacGyver in
* ''[[Tintin
* ''[[Batman]]'', of course, has pulled this off several times, usually on those rare instances where he is without his utility belt.
== [[Fan Fiction]] ==
* In ''[[
** [[Truth in Television|Somewhat grounded in reality,]] believe it or not; the heat-exchanger from a fridge would be powerful enough to counteract a hell of a lot of overclocking.
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== [[Film]] ==
* [[Angelina Jolie]]'s rocket launcher in ''[[Salt]]'', built from a swivel chair and cleaning chemicals.
* The ''[[Star Trek]]'' example below is satirized (with so many other Star Trek tropes) in ''[[
* ''[[Iron Man (
* ''[[Half Baked]]'' had some fun with this:
{{quote| '''Thurgood Jenkins:''' The MacGyver Smoker is a very handy guy to have around, especially when it comes to reefer.<br />
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* ''[[Mallrats]]'': Silent Bob is said to have a knack for this kind of thing.
{{quote| '''Jay:''' He won the science fair in eighth grade by turning his mom's vibrator into a CD player usin' some chicken wire an' shit. Motherfucker's like [[MacGyver]]. No, motherfucker's better then [[MacGyver]]!}}
* This trope is invoked in ''[[Zack and Miri Make
* Common in the ''[[Tremors]]'' films and series, whenever they run out of ammo and need to improvise defenses against the latest Graboid life-cycle stage or [[Monster of the Week]].
* In ''[[Cast Away]]'', Chuck finds himself stranded on a remote island with several Fed Ex packages full of stuff that initially looks worthless in his current setting, like a taffeta party dress (used for a fishing net), a pair of ice skates (which make handy axeheads when tied to a stick) and lots of videocassettes (whose videotape innards can be woven into some handy rope).
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* Second only to the trope namer in fame would be ''[[
* The Doctor in ''[[Doctor Who]]'' does not carry a gun (though he has used them on occasion), and often cooks up homebrew supertech. In the episode "The Time Monster", he built a "time flow analogue" out of cups, spoons, a pie pan, and other objects found in a small house.
** In "Time Crash" the Tenth Doctor lampshades this based on the fact that the Fifth Doctor never used a sonic screwdriver. "Like, 'Hey, I'm the Doctor. I can save the universe with a kettle and some string. And look at me, I'm wearing a vegetable.'"
* Sam on ''[[Quantum Leap]]'' had MacGyver moments, but only when he used his brain to make a gadget to save the day. Thus, a successful MacGyverist is different from a hero who is simply smart.
* In the ''[[Star Trek:
** Busted by Mythbusters in their [[MacGyver]] episode.
*** One [[Expanded Universe]] novel mentioned that that episode was turned into a training exercise that was considered hellishly difficult, and that 90% of the people who tried Kirk's approach ended up blowing themselves up when the cannon misfired. Riker's solution was to use the makeshift cannon as a giant mine, and clubbed the Gorn with a rock while it was disoriented from the blast.
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{{quote| '''Spock''': I am endeavouring, ma'am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.}}
** [[Mr. Fixit|Scotty]] [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|gets a shuttle to run on the energy from phaser weapons]] in "The Galileo Seven."
** ''[[Star Trek]]'' does it again in the ''[[Star Trek:
** And again in the ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise]]'' two-part episode "Demons/Terra Prime", when Trip picks a futuretech lock using his zipper and belt buckle.
** In-universe, Starfleet officers (engineers in particular) have this reputation. It's even lampshaded by a captured enemy who mocks them for having "one of those famed Starfleet engineers who can turn rocks into replicators."
*** The enemy said it in more of a [[Worthy Opponent]] tone. That said, redunkulously awesome engineering/Macguyvering/bullshit-invoking skills are sort of the humans' [[Planet of Hats|hat]].
* ''[[
* Mike Westen of ''[[Burn Notice]]'' does this constantly, either preparing at home or in the field. He has [[Green Lantern Ring|particular expertise with cell phones]]. His friends Fiona and Sam has also demonstrated some competence in this area. The narration provided by Michael often explains that this is part of his training as a spy since it is assumed that operatives will rarely have access to actual 'spy gear' and will have to improvise from readily available items.
* In an episode of ''[[CSI]]'', Gil Grissom's crime lab kit was stolen while he was up in the middle of nowhere alone investigating a murder. Instead of filling out a form with the local police or request a new one from the lab in Vegas, he uses items he buys at a home maintenance supply shop as a makeshift kit.
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* The British series ''[[Scrapheap Challenge]]'', known as ''[[Junkyard Wars]]'' in the US, had two teams compete to MacGyver together some sort of machine from parts found in the junkyard each episode.
* The USA series ''[[Royal Pains]]'' features the lead doctor utilizing "A bottle of vodka, a sharp knife, a plastic sandwich bag, a BIC pen, and some duct tape" to save the life of a hemophilliac who was bleeding internally. The girl helping him remarked [[Lampshade Hanging|"What are you, MacGyver?"]]
* The Professor on ''[[
** Except a boat.
*** It was even Lampshaded in Gary Larson's ''[[The Far Side]]''!
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'': nearly ''everything'' ever made by tinker gnomes, from ''[[Dragonlance]]'' setting (and spread in ''[[Spelljammer]]'' 'verse) qualifies.
* In ''[[
* ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'' is not devoid of this kind of stuff either, strangely enough. [[Our Orcs Are Different|Da orkz]] build a majority of their own inventions from random scraps of junk, including most of their firearms and vehicles. Ironically, due to the generic mindset of the whole race, most of their inventions work simply because they [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe|''think'' it will work]].
** Ork players have been known to construct vehicles using strategies ranging from "leftovers from other vehicles" to "grab all the spare parts, put them in a box, pour in glue, and stick wheels on whatever comes out".
** Although it's not like non-Ork players don't get in on the action either. Because of [[Crack is Cheaper|the price]] of the hobby, any 40k player (or indeed, wargamer) worth their salt will have a [[Name's the Same|bitz box]] wether they are Orks, Humans, Eldar, whatever. It is the most efficient way to go about doing things and anyone who has played for a long time will have closets full of hoarded spare parts that they can cobble together into just about anything.
* Played for laughs in an early ''[[
* In the ''[[Magic:
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* In ''[[Fallout]] 3'', you can do things like make a gauntlet out of a monster's arm and a medical brace, make a nail-launching rifle out of a steam gauge assembly and a pressure cooker, or make a ''[[Flaming Sword]]'' out of ''motorcycle parts and a lawnmower blade''.
** Also, by combining a leaf blower with a vacuum cleaner, you can build a cannon that launches anything you put in, from tin cans to teddy bears. or a [http://pt.xfire.com/video/42dbe/ toaster]
* In [[Fallout: New Vegas]], when faced with a broken world item (fuse box, food processor...), you can either: go hunt for parts or use a high repair skill to fix it. Special mention for the food processor at Camp Mac Carran, which you can fix with a repair skill of 80 by using a paper clip, a swiss army knife and other stuff.
** Even that example is outdone by the Jury Rigging perk, which enables you to, among other things: repair a [[Power Fist]] with [[Joke Item|boxing gloves]], repair an [[Techno Babble|Inversal Proton Axe]] with a pool cue, and fix an [[Techno Babble|Atomic Tri-Calence Radii Accentuator]] with a pair of sunglasses.
* The Infocom game ''[[
* "Gadgeteer" class in ''[[
* This is Doc Hawkins' trick in ''[[MDK]] 2''. "[[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|I've created]] ''[[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|toast]]''! Delicious!"
* This is the superpower that fans have inferred Nitori of ''[[Touhou]]'' to have. She lives in a [[Medieval Stasis]] world, but has access to books from the real world, and is nevertheless capable of producing working machines of the modern age (or even better than modern equipment, as with her stealth suit) without access to an industrial base, education system, or any kind of energy source (until the end of the tenth game, at least). Western fans even directly state MacGyver to be her personal hero/romantic fantasy.
* In ''[[
* In ''[[Jagged Alliance]] 2'' you can make some gadgets out of random items you find. For example: duct tape and a steel tube can be used to make a barrel extender for your rifle, which increases its range (though it's prone to get fired ''off'' since it's only held on with duct tape), or combining a game system, an x-ray tube, and a couple other things to make an x-ray scanner (reports of massive doses of x-ray radiation when in use are "unconfirmed").
* Parodied in ''[[Leisure Suit Larry]]: Love For Sail''. When you try to combine random objects, the announcers says something along the lines of, "Larry, sometimes you try to mix two things together, but what do you always get? An ass".
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* Fotbar Laboratory in ''[[Choro Q]] HG 4'' allows you to make powerful parts out of spoon, wrist strap, piece of cloth, paper bag, and others. The strongest chassis of the game is happened to be made of eraser.
* [[Professor Layton]] has a habit of this:
** At the end of ''[[Professor Layton and
** That's nothing - in ''[[Professor Layton and The Eternal Diva]]'', {{spoiler|Layton manages to produce a functioning helicopter out of a bunch of odds and ends in a shack on a deserted island. As above, it carries three people. And somehow works.}}
** Not to be outdone, ''[[Professor Layton and
* In ''[[Dead Rising 2]]'', Chuck can make a weapon out of every last thing he finds. These range from simple (Nails + Baseball Bat = Baseball Bat With Nails Through It) to creative (Knifes + Boxing Gloves = [[Wolverine Claws]]) to really weird (Chainsaws + Paddle = Double Ended Polearm With Chainsaws at both ends) to just plain crazy (Gas Can + Super Soaker = ''Flamethrower.'')
** Actually, that last one is pretty realistic
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* Most of the challenges in ''Return to Mysterious Island'' and its sequel are this trope.
* Technologist in ''[[Arcanum]]'' can assemble explosives, chemicals, guns and various mechanical devices from random junk. This includes a device which can ''resurrect dead'' and is made from a capacitor, snake venom and three different herbs.
* ''[[Dark
* In ''[[
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* Rick in [[Blur the Lines]] makes a fleshlight out of an empty can and some ground chuck (meat). [http://www.blur-the-lines.com/?p=45\]
* Parodied numerous times in [[Real Life Comics]] - among other things, Tony has made a [http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/000302.html quantum space-time teleportation device] and a [http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/021017.html trans-dimensional portal device] out of random materials lying around.
* One instance of possible Mac Gyvering is found in the webcomic [[Ctrl
* Subverted in [http://www.housepetscomic.com/2012/03/19/the-optimal-solution/ this] strip of ''[[Housepets]]''.
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* Grampy from the old ''[[Betty Boop]]'' cartoons usually did this. A prominent example comes from the 1937 cartoon "Christmas Comes But Once a Year", wherein Grampy MacGuyvers together several Christmas toys for a group of downtrodden orphans, using nothing more than common household items.
* Jenny 10 from ''[[Dex Hamilton Alien Entomologist]]'': "Last week I made a hadron collider from a broken hairdryer and a box of paperclips..."
* Played with on ''[[G.I. Joe: Renegades]]''. Being fugitives on the run, it's a given. Duke manages to diffuse a bomb with a wad of chewing gum, but Roadblock's attempts to jury-rig an engine-cable for the truck don't go as smoothly.
* Both subverted and played straight in ''[[Codename
* On ''[[
{{quote| "Make a device to extract physical molecular structure from an alien probe? Man, I gotta be a miracle worker."}}
** And it worked, too!
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* In French, MacGyverish translates to ''[http://www.ginandtacos.com/?p=1069 débrouillard]''. [http://www.lesdebrouillards.qc.ca/ And we've got a magazine teaching the virtues of ''la débrouillardise'' to little Quebecers everywhere.] Be afraid, be very afraid... [[Canada, Eh?|Or not, as the case may be.]]
** French call that ''système D''. A convenient way to do things without any annoying organisation.
* In a similar vein, the Egyptians have a [[National Stereotypes|stereotype]] about themselves that they can always find a way to make what they need. As it turns out, this might be true of Arabs in general, judging by the jury-rigged weapons systems of Hamas and Hezbollah in the [[Useful Notes/Arab-Israeli Conflict|Arab Israeli Conflict]], and of the Libyan rebels in [[
* Cracked did an article on the subject, [http://www.cracked.com/article_16151_5-most-amazing-real-life-macgyver-moments.html here.]
* The website [http://www.thereifixedit.com There, I Fixed It] archives photos of some of the more amusing attempts at this. Some of them apparently do the job; they just ''look'' humorously thrown-together.
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* During the [[American Civil War]], the South was strapped for cash and couldn't stand a protracted naval blockade, especially with the North's greater resources for building ironcalds. Considering that the South's main resource was cotton, they strapped bales onto the decks of merchant ships and used them to absorb enemy fire. Thus, the [[wikipedia:Cotton-clad|Cotton-clad]] was born.
* Americans are known for coming up with crazy ideas that just happen to work like using human hair to soak up oil. At the Battle of Midway, the carrier ''Yorktown'' had been redeployed after improvised repairs were rushed after taking heavy damage at Coral Sea. The ''Yorktown'' was bombed by Zeroes, but the Damage Control units not only kept her afloat, but got her back up to speed, to the point that when the Japanese bombed her again, they thought they had sunk two carriers, rather than hitting the ''Yorktown'' twice. She did sink, but not before turning the tide of the battle by means of improvised repairs and sheer endurance.
** In [[The War
* In the wake of the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, basically everyone and their uncle came up with an idea to either A) get the oil from the water, B) fix the gushing oil pipe or C) clean the oil off the poor helpless animals. Almost all these ideas (well, maybe not the "stop the gushing pipe" one) usually involved simple materials that could be found in either the average home, the average High School, or the average supermarket. And most of them either ''worked'' or ''would have worked'', although not on a Gulf-wide scale.
* The phrases "Yankee ingenuity" and "Kiwi ingenuity" refer to the tendencies of early colonists in, respectively, [[Hollywood New England|New England]] and [[Useful Notes/New Zealand|New Zealand]] to make do with whatever was available in order to perform the task at hand, such as using a pole saw to cut brush in the absence of a machete.
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