leave it in the past: Magnum P.I. edition

I have said it before and realized it again today. I just finished watching two episodes of a once beloved television show Magnum P.I. and great googley moogley I wish I hadn't.

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So for those of you that don't know this already, Magnum P.I. was a wildly popular crime drama of sorts about Thomas Magnum who operates out of a rather luxurious estate in Hawaii. There isn't much mention of how he is there other than the fact that Robin Masters owns the place and lets Magnum stay there for free. A common misconception is that the other major character, Higgins, owns the estate, but alas he does not.

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does not own the house, maybe the dogs.. i dunno

So Magnum goes on a new mission every episode because he is, as the name of the show would suggest, a private investigator. He is batman-esque in his tactics as he rarely uses any sort of firearms. This may have been because what you could put on TV was a lot more strict back in the early 80's.

This show was one of the top-20 most watched shows on TV during the first 5 years and one would think that because of this we could go back and admire the incredible show-making skills of the masters of the 80's. Unfortunately, for this guy, this was not the case.

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this may as well have been Sci-Fi since mobile tech did not exist for many years

I couldn't even make it through 3 episodes unfortunately. Whatever formula they had that worked (and it worked on me in the 80's as well) doesn't really work today. I would love to hear your thoughts on this but the episodes just seemed hokey and any fights seemed extremely fake. The classic Ferrari is nice to see, but I found myself bored pretty much all the time.

Now on to something I didn't know until i looked up some of the stats for this article. There is a reboot of this series and it gets mixed reviews. Apparently CBS made an entire season already and this started in September of 2018. I haven't watched any of them yet but I will check it out.

I can already tell you what my reaction is going to be though. I normally find it to be quite lazy on the part of television studios when they remake an old show and I can't think of one that has lived up to the original outside of Battlestar Galactica, which was actually much better than the original and is one of my favorite series ever. So I guess we'll ahve to wait a while to see what can come of Magnum.

I'm on the fence about this one: At first I was angry at myself for ruining my fond memories of the original by going back and watching it 30 years later, and also don't like it when old shows get remade. Who knows? This might be a great show but I wouldn't bet money on that being the case. One thing is for sure, the fights will be better because I can't imagine them being much worse.

Another fun fact: The famous Magnum P.I. song with the guitar work and orchestra wasn't used until more than halfway through the first season. The original intro music seems incredibly out of place for anyone that was a fan of the 80's series