I have never 'gotten' Hogan's Heroes

Unlike Hogan's Heros, we watched MASH when I was a kid and I liked it.

Watched it off and on in repeats over the years until I got into my 20s. By then whatever I liked about it was long forgotten by me. The early shows can still be entertaining, but as it went on it seemed to get more self-righteous and smug with each agonizing season.

I can't watch it today, it's unbearable.

dan c

 

I'm just the opposite. I could watch MASH repeatedly when it was on but I can't stand more than 3 seconds of a Stooges routine. Smacking your co-stars around is funny if you're Daffy Duck but for full grown men it's just sad.

I wasn't a huge fan of Hogans Hero's until after I discovered that one of the actors (LaBeu) is a real survivor of a concentration camp and has a serial number on the inside of his forearm. After that I had a whole different insight to the show and actually enjoyed the show after that.

 

I concur. Alan Alda and one of the other male leads (Hot Lips's boyfriend? Can't recall his name) make we want to vomit on my television set every time I see them.

 

I fall into the watch MASH regularly. Stooges...never. Different stroked for different folks...and Diff'rent Strokes....bbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadddddddddddddddddddddd sitcom that should never be seen again.



Sadie

 

Bumping this because I dusted off my season sets of Hogans Heroes for the first time in 8 years and man this show still has the ability to make me belly laugh. Broad parody or not this show is FUNNY! Also, this time around I am truly realizing that Werner Klemperer was a gifted actor.

 

I think the show worked because so many of the viewers would have been World War II veterans that were still in their 40s and 50s, and would look back on those years with nostalgia.

I haven't seen it in decades, but watched reruns regularly when it was on.

 

Hoooo-gahhhhn??

 

Entertainment featuring military, special agents, and secret missions were generally pretty popular with kids at the time. Man from UNCLE, Get Smart, Combat, the Bond films, GI Joe toys, etc.

 

That is probably why I never understood it. At the age of seven, I knew about WWII, but, did not yet understand anything about the Third Reich. I haven't seen the show since 1971. The other thing is my sister liked the show. You know how it is when you're a kid: you tend to dislike whatever your sibling liked (well, unless you were an only child).

 

I was a kid in the 70s/80s and didn't like the reruns of it, either. Also, MASH and Barney Miller (although MASH at least had amusing characters).

 

I felt about the same. It used to be on after one of my fave shows back in the day, The Wild Wild West. I would watch some and wanted...tried to like it but there was something missing. There was something there, but usually not quite enough. It didn't quite make it.

 

I watch HH all the time. I love the show. Always have. Sad what happened to Bob Crane.

 

I watched it as a kid and liked it. Still watch it occasionally now, but it can get boring pretty fast. I have to be in the mood for it.

 

lives on cliches

 

I only wish the Nazis were as stupid and bumbling as the ones on Hogan's Heroes.

 

"The Avengers" was NEVER a comedy--it did have a strong element of satire and much droll humor that even I recognized as a 7 year old.

 

I've known more than a few Jewish people who refused to watch the show precisely because the Nazis were portrayed as clownish and incompetent.

 

In what time slot did HH air back in the 1960's? To me its the least expensive programming theory. I was born in 1968, but my parents would watch rerun's of HH in the early 70's. It was mindless fun that could be watched by the whole family. I was 5 years old and I had to be in bed at 8. And I haven't seen a second of HH since I was just about that age. I remember more about the buffoonery of Klink and Schultz than I do about the Allied prisoners.

Many times while walking through Best Buy or Wal-Mart I've held DVD sets in my hand of various TV programs I enjoyed as a kid or teenager and I've never brought myself to buy any of them. MASH. Magnum P.I. Miami Vice. Hill Street Blues. Others I can't think of at the moment.

I watched these programs with my Dad and talked with him about what I'd just seen when they were over. He's been gone 10 years and I don't think it would be the same even if he was still here. The fact that I haven't even seen the movie adaptations of Miami Vice or The A-Team says a lot.

We live in a different world from what it was was back then.

 

• Friday at 8:30-9:00 p.m. on CBS: September 17, 1965—April 7, 1967; September 26, 1969—March 27, 1970
• Saturday at 9:00-9:30 p.m. on CBS: September 9, 1967—March 22, 1969
• Sunday at 7:30-8:00 p.m. on CBS: September 20, 1970—April 4, 1971

What finished it the last year was scheduling it against NBC's "Wonderful World of Disney".

 

It's not a great show, but it was considered funny in the 1960s. The awful reality is that several cast members actually were Eastern European Jews who escaped their countries in the late 1930s and early 1940s to avoid persecution... and they played German Nazis in the show. Robert Clarey ("LeBeau") was actually in a concentration camp as a child during part of the war. I can remember some people protesting that the show was in very poor taste in part of the 1960s, even though it was a POW camp and not a concentration camp per se.

Never a great show, but it was a mildly amusing show, basically just a sitcom version of the very fine 1950s Bill Holden film Stalag 17. The writers of the latter film sued the Hogan's Heroes show creators for plagiarism and actually won their case, as I recall. There were tons of ridiculous, over-the-top sitcoms in the 1960s, but you have to consider them in historical context.

 

I always thought it was on the surreal side that Werner Klemperer played Adolph Eichmann. The total opposite of Col. Klink.

Chad

 

Same here. I've always hated it.

 

I used to work with a young woman whose father had been a POW of the Nazis during WW II, and she said her father could not tolerate even a minute of this show. He found absolutely NOTHING funny about this show and felt it insulted all those who were in Stalags during WW II.

 

Actually the prime creator of the show was Bernard Fein, who played Private Gomez in the Phil Silvers/Sgt Bilko show. He wanted a similar anti-authority show but set in a prison. But he could not convince anyone in Hollywood, probably because it is one thing to have a conniving motor pool sergeant running things, another to have murders, rapists or bank robbers. When you look at it, Hogan manipulates Klink much like Bilko manipulates Hall and his wife. What changed things was Fein took a plane from Los Angeles to New York, saw someone reading "Von Ryan's Express" and had a eureka moment-change it to an Allied POW camp. He flew back to LA, got together with Albert Ruddy and within a few days sold it. A parody of POW camps was probably inevitable, given the success of films "Stalag 17", "Great Escape" and "Bridge on the River Kwai", the latter being detested by the POWs of those camps.
It struck me as interesting in reading about the two comedy films about Polish actors escaping Nazi-occupied Warsaw the 1942 version by Ernst Lubitsch was criticized in its day but today it is regarded as one of his masterpieces. The 1983 version by Mel Brooks was well-received by critics such as Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby, although today it isn't regarded as highly as the original.
I remember my mother reading aloud a letter to the editor denouncing "Hogan's Heroes" and "Bewitched" as tasteless and inappropriate so it had critics in its day.

 

I've caught a couple of episodes on ITV recently. The video has been nicely remastered, but there's no laugh track.