M*A*S*H- a season by season discussion!

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by ohnothimagen, Dec 1, 2017.

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  1. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    As best I can remember, I was tired of Henry Blake. I was maybe 11 when he was killed off, so it clearly wasn't for any sophisticated reason. I was just tired of him being a schmoe, tired of the finger in the fishing hook, and the bits with Radar where he acted like a buffoon. I just didn't think he was very funny, or very likable either. Frank Burns, on the other hand, was my favorite character. I thought he was the funniest part of the show. Even watching the episodes today, I love his retorts to a simple "Hi Frank" ("That's what YOU say!") Again, I was 11, I didn't really give a thought to the question of the abuse being warranted, or why HE always seemed to have to make the mistake in surgery (in one of the episodes I saw last night he wrote off a frozen soldier for dead before Trapper fixed the matter). I found "Hot Lips" to be incredibly shrill (the season 3 episode where the camera comes in on a close up of her mouth sums it up well). Even at 11, I immediately preferred the character in "Aid Station" to the one who marches into Henry's office and does the ventriloquist routine with Frank. So I guess I wanted Henry gone, Hot Lips evolved, and Frank just the worm-eating way he was.

    I don't feel qualified to speak to the anachronistic Margaret character until I revisit the later episodes.
     
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  2. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I imagine the obstacle to that would have been Loretta Swit, since it seems likely she didn't want to play Hot Lips anymore and I suspect she was the driving force behind the moves to make the character more likable and sympathetic. In retrospect it's almost like Hot Lips did leave and was replaced by a new character, and in typical MASH fashion the new character (like Potter, BJ, and Charles) was in many ways written as the polar opposite of the character she "replaced." Hot Lips was self confident, decisive, didn't care what others thought of her, used sex as a means to control men, and supported the war unquestioningly. Whereas Margaret lacked confidence, was often indecisive, worried incessantly about what others thought of her, and used sex as a means to build up her own self esteem. And she was against the war.
     
  3. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    The evolution of characters like Hot Lips to Margaret seemed gradual enough at the time. Remember, in those days, we got 24 episodes over 26 weeks and that was it till the next fall. Having a character do repetitive things that were genuinely funny isn't a problem when they do it in one half-hour a week. When you run the episodes together in binge fashion, yesterday's Radar anticipates Hanry routine is still awfully familiar in your brain when it happens three more times in two hours.

    It never bothered me to see the cartoonlike Hot Lips grow and evolve over the years. It felt like a natural evolution to me. It was as if her failed marriage made her grow up and see the world in a different light.
     
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  4. Jay_Z

    Jay_Z Forum Resident

    Because it's what Swit was born to play, more or less.

    Swit was born to play antagonists and femme fatales. Thought so on M*A*S*H and everything else I've seen her in. The more I hated her the more I liked her. And the reverse. :laugh:

    After the Hot Lips era she was never sexy. But in the Penobscot era she was arguably more easy to hate than as Hot Lips. And again, that's the way Swit should have always played it, that's her talent. I never had any interest in Swit/Houlihan played likeably, whenever in the run of the show they did it. Just never cared for it. Not that I can't like the character anyway, the way I always sympathized with Frank's POV, but it just always left me cold.
     
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  5. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!" Thread Starter

    Location:
    Canada
    "Lifetime" is my favourite episode of the entire series, always was.
    I believe you are correct, Jason, that Swit herself not only put the kibosh on bringing in another main female character but indeed requested the changes to the Margaret character. Lorretta Swit was ready to quit the show herself, after either season 8 or 9 if memory serves (when she did the Cagney And Lacey pilot), so I'd reckon one way or another there were probably some heavy negotiations going on behind the scenes to keep her on the show.

    Clearly the cast were open to other female characters. Alda claimed he wrote the "Hey Look Me Over" episode as a way to 'elevate' Nurse Kelley and bring some depth to her character. Coming in the final season as it did, though, it was a little too late.
    Couldn'ta said it better myself!
    Over an eleven year series, Margaret's evolution makes sense. But the show takes place within a three year time period- I find it very difficult to believe that anybody could reinvent themselves so drastically in such a short time period. There's a bit of necessary suspension of disbelief IMO when it comes to seeing Margaret's evolution from, say, season three to season 10.
     
  6. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Beyond the fact that the war only lasted three years, no one would have been deployed for the entire duration of the war anyway. I believe a typical deployment was 12 months.

    I don't know that I'd agree that all of the ways she devolved make sense even if she'd been in a war zone for eleven years. I agree a person could easily go from being gung-ho to anti-war in that amount of time, but the profound loss of confidence and the intense concern over what people think of her are really not logical evolutions for a character as confident and "who gives a s**t" as she was in the early years. We're to believe a bad marriage to a guy she didn't know very well, had no real connection to, and spent little time with somehow shattered her confidence so totally as to remake her personality? And made her change from someone who was happy to manipulate men with sex to an anachronous feminist who still desperately chased after every unattached officer who entered the camp? I don't think the changes seem logical, even if we do pretend she was there for eleven years.
     
  7. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!" Thread Starter

    Location:
    Canada
    Well there y'go...makes her changes all the more unbelievable, doesn't it?
    Hear hear!:cheers: We may not agree on the merits (or lack thereof) of "Fallen Idol" but we are definitely on the same page here.
     
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  8. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    "The war only lasted three years" is what history tells us. But this wasn't a history lesson; it wasn't a documentary; and the show often got things wrong in that regard. It was a long-running sitcom that had as its setting a war background. It could have been any war, but the movie was set in Korea, but really was commenting on Vietnam.

    If you're so worried about Margaret's quick turn-around, how about Potter arriving in September of 1952, but present in a later episode as 1950 turns into 1951? There are tons of these anachronisms in M*A*S*H. They're part of the show's charm. Hot-Lips becoming Margaret is just another anachronism.
     
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  9. GLENN

    GLENN Forum Resident

    Location:
    Kingsport,TN, USA
    I'll take the TV change in Margaret's character any day over the silly about-face she has in the original movie.
     
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  10. Jay_Z

    Jay_Z Forum Resident

    Meh.

    Hornberger, the author of the original book, actually served in a war, Korea. The anarchy of the movie and the early years make sense given the context. The surgeons were valuable, they were there for a limited time. Everyone in the camp was there for a limited time, even the Regular Army Clowns like Hotlips. The surgeons weren't going to be disciplined except in extreme circumstances. They had a lot of pull in the camp. They knew they were going home at some point, and they'd never have to deal with some of the other people they didn't like again. So they pulled a lot of crap. This was a reflection of an actual reality.

    Now I would encourage people to read Otto Apel's book. Apel was a consultant to the show who also was an Army surgeon in a Korean MASH. I would say that Apel's service was a lot more innocent, without Hornberger's anarchy. But Apel served earlier in the war. Apel also pretty much wanted to be there; he knew he was on the short list to get called up, didn't do anything to wrangle for a possible deferment, even re-upped for a few months when the Army asked him to. So there's that. There's an interesting passage in Apel's book where he returned to a MASH later in the war and is shocked to find a more debauched atmosphere sounding suspiciously similar to Hornberger's MASH.

    So when fans of the later years go on about how the characters are more serious, look at all of the character development, etc., keep in mind that maybe later day M*A*S*H reflected someone's reality, but it wasn't the reality of the original source material. So a lot of the anti-war stuff, the people actually serving never got that far down the road.
     
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  11. Jay_Z

    Jay_Z Forum Resident

    Even there, if you take it as someone not being happy and flipping out in a limited duration experience, that might have been truer to life than the 11 year war of the show!
     
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  12. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    There are two issues with Hot Lips' alteration into Margaret. In my opinion a. It's not realistic for someone's personality to change so much in what is ostensibly a short period of time, and b. The specific changes that happen to Margaret do not seem a credible or plausible evolution of personality under the circumstances, regardless of the length of time. Issue "b" is far more problematic to me, and has nothing to do with anachronism. I can overlook the changes in the other characters that seem more extreme than what would realistically happen over the short duration they would have been in Korea. In the MASH universe, the Korean War seems to have lasted eleven years, and I can suspend disbelief and accept that. But to me Margaret's personality changes go beyond what is plausible regardless of the amount of time.
     
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  13. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    What happens in the movie (and book) is an incredibly sexist "taming of the shrew" scenario. I really dislike that also. I would not say either is better than the other.
     
  14. ronm

    ronm audiofreak

    Location:
    southern colo.
    Just caught on here.I loved MASH.Perhaps my favorite sitcom of all time.My favorite period was when Potter came and the decline for me was around 1980.
     
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  15. John54

    John54 Senior Member

    Location:
    Burlington, ON
    I thought TV series had a continuity person to keep all these details straight?
     
  16. John54

    John54 Senior Member

    Location:
    Burlington, ON
    That reminded me of the scene when Margaret and Frank marched into Henry's office, Margaret gives a spiel about how ticked off Frank is about something or other, Henry turns to Frank and asks, "Is that true, Frank", and Frank responds, "You heard me"! :biglaugh:
     
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  17. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    MASH clearly did not. There are numerous continuity errors throughout the series, including season nine's "A War For All Seasons" which is a continuity buff's absolute nightmare. Lots of anachronisms, too. My favorite in this category are the two instances in which Radar is seen reading comics published in 1968 and 1969:
    [​IMG]

    This has always puzzled me. The episode was filmed in 1975, so clearly they didn't just run down to the store and buy a new comic book. It presumably took them at least a little effort to locate and purchase a seven-year-old book. Since they were already going to the trouble of finding an old comic book, why didn't they get one that was actually from the early 50s, since that would not have taken much additional effort?
     
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  18. Jay_Z

    Jay_Z Forum Resident

    They probably just got a comic book from one of the writer's or producer's kids... whatever they had laying around.
     
  19. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!" Thread Starter

    Location:
    Canada
    :laugh:Heh heh...seeing some of these comments, I am getting a distinct sense of deja vu- we hashed out a lot of the show's anachronism's (of which there are plenty...probably too many) here, almost six years ago:
    The M*A*S*H timeline
     
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  20. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I don't know, it just seems unlikely to me that some random kid would just happen to have a seven-year-old comic lying around, particularly one in as good of shape as that one. Where would the kid have gotten it, if they weren't old enough to have bought it when it was new? Comics were periodicals, read and discarded, and the only people who saved them were collectors. I suppose it's possible one of the writers or producers had a teenage kid who was a collector. But it still seems like more trouble to get an old comic from someone's family member rather than to just send somebody out to grab a new one at the corner store. I'm sure I'm making too much of this, but it just seems weird to me. Why even go to the trouble of procuring an old comic if it's not one that's period-accurate? Even weirder is that they had two seven-year-old Avengers comics on the set, since (continuity error) the particular issue he's holding changes in a later shot in the show.
    Ha. I thought there was an earlier thread where I'd brought up the comic, but I couldn't find it just now. I see I also mentioned "Fallen Idol" on that old thread. I'm like a broken record.
     
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  21. Scooterpiety

    Scooterpiety Ars Gratia Artis

    Location:
    Oregon
    I was going to mention that thread but you beat me to it! :)
     
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  22. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!" Thread Starter

    Location:
    Canada
    And a great thread it was...and I'm pretty sure I've repeated comments I made in that six year old discussion in this thread as well, so there's more than one broken record participating here and now:laugh:
     
  23. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!" Thread Starter

    Location:
    Canada
    Because I'm bored at work, I just took the time and reread that entire discussion...amazing that a comment I posted about the changes in the Margaret character six years ago I could have written six hours ago:
    "As far as Margaret's 'evolution' goes, she got even more shallow as the show went on, and makes a 180 degree turnaround from being this gung-ho, regular army person to almost as subversive and antiauthoritarian as the doctors were. What bugs me most was how her character started throwing herself at every guy who passed through the unit...I understand a lot of it stemmed from her failed marriage -which IMO was one of the weaker subplots of the show, only worthwhile for Frank's reaction to her engagement/wedding- but the Margaret of the early seasons wasn't the ditzy flirt of the later seasons. She really does come across almost like two entirely different people, and it isn't convincing. It's hard to say how much of that was Lorretta Swit's idea or the writers; either way, it was a bad idea to change her character so much, it's really implausible. Radar 'growing up', Klinger ditching the dresses, yeah, that I can see. Margaret basically turning into a bimbo? Nah..."

    Anyway, I'll start on season 7 tomorrow, probably, been as I've already started going though that season at home in the mornings:D
     
  24. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    Yep. Same stuff from the same people.
     
  25. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!" Thread Starter

    Location:
    Canada
    Like deja vu all over again!:p

    Hey...if Yogi Berra had never said it, Hawkeye Pierce might have.
     
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