This episode gently spoofs Tom Selleck's failure to get the role of Indiana Jones because of scheduling conflicts between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the pilot for this series. Magnum must help a young scientist, who strongly resembles Karen Allen and like her character in Raiders is named Marion, find her eccentric professor father who went missing searching for a mythical treasure - the story premise of the film.
The Nihoa Channel is fictional. Nihoa is one of the very small islands in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Nihoa means "tooth" in the Hawaiian language.