Richard Dean Anderson won the role of MacGyver when the casting director noticed he was unafraid to use his glasses during his audition, showing a lack of pretension that the creative team wanted in their lead.
The "MacGyverisims" shown in the series are all based on scientific fact, but not all of the steps needed to create the experiment were shown. This was done to prevent children who were watching the show from duplicating the experiments themselves and possibly getting injured.
In the late 1980s, two teenage boys made a bomb in their garage which went off, killing one of them. The surviving boy said they learned how to make the bomb from an episode of the show. However, the show was quickly exonerated after it was discovered no such episode existed.
Dana Elcar's stunt double was Don S. Davis. Davis became General George Hammond, Richard Dean Anderson's superior officer on Stargate SG-1 (1997).
MacGyver's Swiss Army knife went through a few changes over the early episodes. His first and most often used knife was a "Spartan" model from Victorinox. The knife seen in the opening credits of each episode was a Wenger, as noted by its long keychain.