Brush aside the visions of four-star recruits dancing before your eyes--half of them will end up getting injured, fail drug tests, drop out, fight assault charges, or hold up a number on the bench for four years with their mighty, second-string shoulders. Let's move on to more important issues vital to our national security and safety as a nation.
We need a quality big-screen Magnum P.I., and we need one now.
Example one: Ron Livingston.
Pros: Wears the stache and fits the profile by resemblance better than any other candidate. Don't believe your feeble imagination? Then maybe we'll just let a minute and a half of hard labor with Microsoft Paint do the talking:
Microsoft Paint: kneel before Zod.
Ron also has the middle American, easygoing savoir-faire that made Magnum a corn dog among exotic island poi in the show: a big white dude with a Wonder Bread accent and a Detroit Tigers cap surrounded by tropical splendor. Magnum's charm had one foot firmly in the fish-out-of-water role,
something we think Ron's got in spades judging from his soulful misplaced turns in Office Space and Sex and the City. (He was hands-down the most tolerable of Carrie Bradshaw's boyfriends--"Burger"-- in the whole series. We couldn't stand Aidan, who always struck us as the boring stoner who masked his total lack of soul by listening to Widespread Panic, getting high to bejeezus daily, and purchasing a dog to attract women. Oh, and we just turned in our man license with this aside--it's right there on the counter, next to our balls and our subscription to Rock and Ice. Shred all of it at once.)
Livingston also has acting chops that span the gamut from Office Space to Band of Brothers, where he filled out a mansome role as a soldier well enough to not look as nelly as, say, Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan or Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men.
Vocally and manner-wise, Livingston could all but channel the soul of Thomas Magnum.
Cons: Physically, Livingston might not be able to fill the large shoes of the manbeast Selleck. We were ruminating on this topic watching the furry, undeniably charismatic mid-60s Sean Connery in From Russia With Love on AMC last week: Hollywood is all but devoid of alpha male actors cast in lead roles, and has been since the mid-80s. Connery and Selleck both saunter around the frame with leonine confidence and grace, flaunting big, raw-boned bodies that have seen just a little too much beer to be called "fit" but just enough vigorous outdoor activity to be "virile." The current Hollywood model of manhood embraces the hairless supercut midget (Cruise, Pitt, et al) who gets the ladies in the seats but also requires an entire cast of midgets to make them appear tall in comparison. While this does wonders for unemployed little people, it's wreaked havoc on potential alpha male actors, who now occupy role slots like "third guy killed in ensemble WW2 movie," "Russian Mafioso #5," and "serial rapist." Selleck and Connery would have had to skinny up, wax their chests, and femme around a bit in the auditions just to get one of these three roles now.
Point being: Livingston ain't a manbeast. He's about our height (5'11", the default height for average white guys), and his build is less than overwhelming. As Magnum, he's got to look like an ex-Navy SEAL--which in truth, Livingston may more closely resemble than Selleck does, since the two real-life SEALs we've known were in fact smallish, trim, taut combat ferrets of swimming/flying/running death. But can you see Livingston smacking women on the ass and commanding the frame like Selleck? No, neither do we, unless you cast a legion of midgets around him, which Hollywood may well do.