An interesting fact about the M*A*S*H finale

Not a spin-off, but a cartoon parody:

 

I can't recall the name of the episode but the one where potter gives his horse to the old Korean laundry guy who use to be in the Korean cavalry always gets me

 

"The Price" Season 7, episode 18.

 

Indeed, Fritzell and Greenbaum were basically entrusted with introducing all of the major new characters -B.J., Potter, Charles- as well as writing out Trapper, Henry and Frank. That alone would ensure Fritzell and Greenbaum's "immortality" as far as M*A*S*H writers go. I seem to recall reading somewhere -possibly in the excellent blog Jason (czeskleba) linked to in one of our other M*A*S*H discussions here (https://bondwine.com/mash-a-writers-view/)- that Fritzell and Greenbaum could see the direction the series was heading in season 6 (more seriocomic, among other things) and wanted out at that point. And, again, they left the series with another significant character development: Klinger's wife Laverne divorcing him in the final episode they wrote, "Mail Call Three".

Could have been- especially considering Marks hadn't contributed any episodes since season 3. I could easily see Frank trying to pull a fast one on the Korean villagers the way Charles did in "Change Day". Even though it's actually Klinger's failed attmept to get into West Point that makes that episode for me

If anything, Levine and Issacs -though they did write a few decent eps as well of some mediocre ones- deserve the credit fro writing the "Goodbye Radar" episode, which Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum themselves couldn't have done any better.

True- "Goodbye Radar" was intended to be the season 7 finale. Thad Mumford...(shudder)...now those are some bad, cheesy, sickeningly sentimental episodes ("Yes Sir, That's Our Baby" and "Old Soldiers" -both from season 8- are just about unbearable to watch IMO)

As I've said before regarding "Fallen Idol", best part about the episode for me is when Radar tells Hawkeye to crawl back into his bottle of booze and pickle himself I always like it when somebody calls Hawkeye out over his boozing or his womanizing

"The Price"- my old gran's favourite episode, she loved horses...

 

Heartless, FTL...

 

FTL? Care to speak in English and not text messaging acronyms? And, yeah, I think "Old Soldiers" is a terrible episode. Sue me...

 

FTL = for the lose

Care go get with it?

 

I'm not sure if any of this has been discussed, but here's what I recall about the final episode of "M*A*S*H":

Before the show aired, there were news reports that the episode would air once and never be repeated. Obviously this was not the case, but I remember watching the episode with that understanding. At the same time, I also recall it being one of the very first home video releases, probably at some ridiculous price.

I also remember that Channel 50 in Detroit, then one of the most successful independant stations in the country, broadcast the original pilot episode just before the final episode aired over on the CBS affiliate, Channel 2.

I also seem to recall sporadic announcements as the season progressed about the episode's increasing length--I don't know if it was originally intended to be a one-hour or a two-hour episode, but it wound up being a 2 1/2 broadcast.

Finally, perhaps two or three weeks before the broadcast (and despite the secrecy surrounding the episode) the National Enquirer published a full synopsis of the episode, which proved to be accurate. Did anybody ever determine out who was responsible for that leak?

 

Not sure it's great but I like it. Much as I love the character, Hawkeye had the potential to behave like a dick from early on ("Always the shot; always the needle") and this episode brought it to the fore. I have to admit, also, that by that time, I found Radar annoying - too cute; too sentimental so it was nice to see something that was going against the grain. Of course my sensibilities when I first watched the show in my mid-teens have changed. I'm not sure I'd appreciate lines like I want to "rape your nape" any more, but, overall, it's still the first four series that I prefer because the writing was sharper and the targets were hit most episodes (minus a few like Fred C Dobbs). It's also noticeable that they were still trying visually in those early show (e.g. shooting the net covering; more camera movement; something they did less frequently later on except for obviously signposted episodes like Point of View and The Interview). I'm with you on sporadic good episodes after series seven, but there are very few in the last two, the finale aside. By then, a lot of it had become a safe, relationship and character comedy (which is possibly why I prefer many of the Alda-scripted episodes from this period because at least he was trying to say something) and the great lines were few and far between.

 

Nah, easier to toss you in the iggy bin, since you don't seem to have anything to contribute to the discussion anyway...

 

The look of the show changing later on impacted my enjoyment as well. William Jurgensen was the director of photography the first five years. He had a good cinematic look to the show with nice shadows and as you say, interesting camera moves. William Cline took over for season six and still gave the show a good look. But from season 7 on the show is lit very flat indoors and looks sitcomy and cheap to me.

 

Very good points, and goes a long way towards explaining why the earlier years of the series looked a lot more "real" than the latter half. I mean, it was obvious that they weren't really filming in Korea, etc, but the later episodes -even the exterior shots- look exactly like what they were: shot on a soundstage.

 

I was hoping 5 o clock Charlie would show up in the finale to drop some bombs. Didn't happen.

 

I find the change in tone extremely off-putting. M*A*S*H was at its best a satirical comedy that dealt with serious topics. As such, it had many deeply dramatic moments, but it was first and foremost a comedy. This episode has no comedy whatsoever, and it crosses the line from drama to overwrought melodrama, with no less than five scenes in which one character yells at another. I think the harsh anger with which the characters react to one another is inconsistent with their established personalities and does not seem a realistic progression, and it also does not fit with the tone of the series up to that point. This episode really is the clear signpost that the series was becoming something completely different than it had been, and to me the something completely different is much inferior.

 

I think there's only so much you can do when you have large studio sets with large groups of actors and you're trying to handle fake exteriors & interiors in a single shot. I color-corrected at least 100 episodes of M*A*S*H for Fox, and from my point of view it had the most consistent color and the best picture quality I've ever seen for a TV series from this era. And I've seen some awful shows. I cut them some slack because it's just a half-hour comedy, not some huge, sprawling dramatic epic that has 20 different locations per episode.

M*A*S*H was shot on Kodak 5247 4-perf camera negative, but what we generally used for transfer was a 35mm IP, which is a positive low-contrast fine-grain contact print struck off the negative (just 1 generation down). The advantage of transferring from the IP is that it had no splices in it. I would bet that Fox has already prepared new HD versions done from the camera negs, but the question will be whether it's in 1.33 or in 16x9.

 

More to the point regarding the series as a whole it was supposed to be comedy about wartime doctors. The show seemed to work best when it actually dealt with medicine (either the actual cases or the patients), even if they did tend to overplay the whole "This damn war!" idea a bit too much in the later years. The worst episodes tended to dwell on the characters' personal lives. But absolutely, no matter the storyline the humour for the most part went out of the series about halfway through (and it's noticeable)- I'm not sure if that came down the changes in writers from comedy writers (Gelbart, Marks, Fritzell, Greenbaum etc) to more dramatically inclined writers or Alda's influence, or both.

Based on the DVDs, which are generally excellent for a fourty plus year old show, it seems as though the early and late seasons look the best, oddly enough. That said, some of the episodes in syndication looked really bad, and still do...

 

Just curious, since the actual outdoor scenes seemed fewer as time when on, would they "bunch" up multiple shows worth of outdoor scenes on location to eliminate the travel or would they do it "show by show"?

 

Just an FYI in case anybody is interested: Walmart is selling sets of M*A*S*H-One set contains seasons 1 thru 4, the other contains seasons 5 thru 8... I forget the exact price, but they're in the $25.00/$26.00 range...

 

For me comedies lose a lot when they loose characters you come to know and love, all of a sudden they have been replaced with another character and actor.
Of course Mash is famous for this issue with its many cast changes.

Other prime examples are are Don Knotts leaving The Andy Griffith Show, and John Amos leaving Good Times, those two shows when severely downhill after they lost those primary cast members.

 

Yes, they did try to write scripts in advance and shoot as much of the outdoor material at one time as they could, because of the delays involved in driving out to the Fox Ranch in Malibu (in Malibu State Park) where the "4077" buildings were located. The rest was shot at 20th Century-Fox Studios on Pico in West LA.

 

It might have been Ken Levine, but I remember one of the writers telling a story about how they'd written an episode that took place in the summer where the cast nitpicked the script so much they changed it to a winter episode- causing everybody to bust out their winter gear during a California summer. "They never nitpicked again after that" was the result apparently. I wonder which episode that was?

 

Except in M*A*S*H's case, characters like Potter and Charles added a lot to the show. Both are great characters that greatly rival their predecessors.

 

Early Potter was kind of flinty and really pretty well done. Latter day Potter was gruff but lovable shtick that's been done a million times.

My two biggest nit picks with the show came more or less throughout the run.

First, the whole thing with Radar and choppers. Whoop de do, he knew five seconds before anyone else. But anyway, they had a phone... the Army was going to make every effort to inform support personnel of any activity. So the MASH would have had as much heads up as possible whenever possible. That got better when Radar left and they stopped doing it.

The other one was having the COs be working surgeons. Makes absolutely no sense, they had enough else to do. Principals don't teach, managers don't do subordinate tasks. Not in a unit of 200 people. I don't believe Blake was a surgeon in the movie. You don't need a practicing surgeon for that job anyway.

 

Aaaand I'd buy them all over again if this happens.

 

Ken Levine talked about that on his blog a few years ago:

Remember also that MASH only filmed exteriors out at the Malibu Ranch during the summer and early fall while there was still a lot of daytime light. Once we went to Pacific Standard Time and it got dark at 5:00 we could no longer fit all the work that was needed into the day. So for the last seven or eight shows each season, any exterior shot (day or night) was filmed on a soundstage. And those tended to look crappy, especially the daytime ones. Think Brady Bunch backyard.

In planning out the season we purposely held back shows that didn’t require daytime exteriors and filmed those towards the end of the year. And shows that did need a lot of exteriors were moved up.

The first MASH script ever written with Charles Winchester in it was “Merchant of Korea” written by me and David Isaacs. But since the plotline involved a night-time poker game we didn’t actually shoot the show until maybe the 15th or 16th episode of the season. That script was used as a template however for the other writers to write the Charles character. And those subsequently aired before ours.