Hi All,

What episodes are the clips that make the intros from? For example, which episode has the cobra snake and which has the cable car?

Thanks,
IH

The cobra snake was Wish Child, if I recall correctly, and the cable car is Cease Fire.

Basically, most of the footage is from episodes, and they would revise the theme song/opening scenes very often to include the latest footage of Mac in action. However, as I am sure someone can reference with a link, there are some mystery scenes that we believe to have been shot for episodes, but never used outside of the credits. In essence, some of those scenes are in no episode you will ever see. I think it's unfortunate that paramount didn't have a big pile of "lost footage" for us all to see, but alas, we can just imagine it.

Here's a list of all the scenes from all the seasons opening credits referenced to the episode they are from.

opening credits

Thanks for the information. That' s exactly what I was looking for. I knew it had to be on here somewhere.

You know, for months I have been wondering which damned episode that timer thing was from. It looks like a microwave oven, and then I see its actually from the Pilot episode.

Definitely some cool info! It makes sense that they would just update a scene used in the intro as RDA's look for the show changed, especially for season 5. It is interesting how so many of the clips that appear before the title explosion are from season 1 and how they were almost always used for each version of the intro.

^I actually don't like the fact they updated the scenes. I think they should have left them alone. MacGyver update eating an icecream - its not a vanilla icecream he was eating, but a chocolate one! They could have at least got that right!

Now that I realize the clips were not from later shows, but just re-shot for the intro, it does seem like kind of a waste to mess with them. I guess they really liked the shot of him eating ice cream more than anything they came up with in the later seasons.

Somewhere in another similar discussion it was mentioned that reshooting scenes from opening credits was a common occurrence in the 90's. There was even a list of some of the shows which had done it. I know one of them was Star Trek:TNG, but can't recall any others from the list.