Hulu, where is MASH?

Please excuse me here, I have looked into this further and need to retract this...the chyrons have not been redone in this episode, they are exactly where they were originally...I thought they had been moved up because of the cropping.

So it seems like the episode was originally edited and finished in color...it gave everyone involved (producers, network) the option to change their minds about black and white until the last moment.

 

That's what I would think. Someone in the production team must have pushed hard for the show to air in black & white, creating more realistic-looking documentary footage. And I'm sure the network was none too happy about it, but acquiesced. As I recall, it aired with the opening titles in color as usual, and announcer then said, "The following is in black & white". I think the end credits aired in color too.

 

I was glad to see this thread. I had no idea Mash was on Hulu. You really have to look for it. Best to just search.

But it looks great.

 

I like the new framing, not sure if any DNR has been added, but they seem to look good to me.

I would love a Blu-ray set of the complete series in both original and 16:9 HD presentations of each episode, on or off laugh track, the extras from the Martinis and Medicine set, and select episode commentary from some of the surviving cast (Alda, Farrell, Swit, Burghoff, and Farr are still with us), JUST EMPTY MY WALLET!

 

I will again say that DNR is about 20 different processes, many of them non-real-time that take days to process, and it's not any one thing. The knob goes up and down, there's a lot of judgement involved, and you can denoise blacks differently from mids and mids differently from whites, and even one side of the screen differently from other sides of the screen. It is not a simple process. There are benefits from good noise and grain reduction used well.

My guess is that a lot of Fox TV syndication deals will start to go away in 2 weeks if the Disney deal goes through.

 

And all this time I though DNR was the Department of Natural Resources. Well I’ll be damned ....

 

Digital Noise Reduction. There's actually Spatial Noise Reduction and Temporal Noise Reduction, plus you can assign it to specific colors, or just color vs. B&W, or just B&W, or all of it. And you can use various kinds of noise reduction at the same time, or in layers, or in multiple processes. This is not a simple subject.

 

Somehow I doubt that younger generations are going to care about MASH. It's a pity because the first three or four seasons are really good.

 

It's their loss. Seriously. 35 years after it's been off the air I still consider M*A*S*H to be the gold standard for TV shows, certainly as far as "sitcoms" go.

 

Any more screen caps for those of us without Hulu?

 

Just finished watching one of my favorite episodes from season 2.
Deal Me Out, what a great guest cast, sadly all passed away now:
Allan Arbus
Edward Winter (as Captain Halloran, later to be Col. Flagg)
Pat Morita
John Ritter

 

What's the deal with the bad B&W footage used in season 7 ep 4 and 5? Most of it looks like a 3rd generation video rip. Just a case of being unable to find the original elements?

 

That clip episode "Our Finest Hour", unlike every other MASH ep, was edited on videotape as opposed to film, so all that exists of it is a 40 year old standard definition video master. They most likely could rebuild an HD version from the film elements, but so far haven't....

 

Alan Alda is revealing that he’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Good to hear him sounding so upbeat...

'M*A*S*H' Actor Alan Alda Says He Has Parkinson's Disease | HuffPost

 

I was just looking at the Hulu "Our Finest Hour" again, and while the interviews are obviously from the original videotape source, the old clips are in widescreen HD...I thought I had already checked this. I wonder if they changed it....

 

No, the clips were widescreen when they launched the show on Hulu. It was one of the first episodes I checked, because I’ve known since that season’s DVD was released in the 2000s that they lost the negatives to that episode.

 

Even if they lost the negatives, the interpositives and network air prints would still survive. It's extremely rare when any hit show loses every copy of an episode. I know of cases where some Star Trek episodes are damaged, plus the 3-track 35mm mag soundtracks were lost in a 1983 studio fire, but they've been able to piece them all together and preserve them.

To my knowledge, 100% of M*A*S*H was shot on film, cut on film, and originally aired on film, so no videotape was involved per se. The last episode was aired in February 1983, and even then, editing on videotape was new and very tricky for a show shot on film. (Of course, videotaped shows were cut on tape for decades.)

 

"Our Finest Hour" was composited on videotape.

 

Yes, this one clip episode was finished on videotape. You can easily tell by the episode writing/directing credits which are obviously video keys...

 

In a rare case of the MeTV signal coming in tonight, I caught a small part of the M*A*S*H episode, "Heroes", from the tenth season. Waiting for a static shot for comparison, I picked one where the champ was seated between Potter and Mulcahy with a banner up behind them.

Noting that the champ's beverage was seated at the extreme bottom of the image, and that the pepper shaker to the right of Mulcahy was just cut off at the edge of the frame. I used my DVD and cropped the image to 16:9 to create an example of what I witnessed.



For reference, here is the full frame from the DVD:



I'm not impressed with the cropping. It was hard to judge whether the color had improved on a broadcast from MeTV, since there's so much compression. It looked maybe a little brighter, but then the later seasons looked pretty good on DVD, too.

 

First three especially. Still holds up extremely well all these years later. The later seasons not soon much. Losing Rogers and Stevenson at the same time changed the chemistry too much for me and not for the better. I only watch the first three seasons.

 

Fantastic episode.

 

The wackiness of the first few seasons slowly started to disappear after season 3. That's not to say they weren't still funny after that. There was still some excellent writing in the later seasons, but the show had moved far from the zany first 3, those are my favs.
I remember thinking it would've been a good way to continue the wackiness if they had brought on Harry Morgan in the roll of the crazy General he played in season 3.

 

My observation back in the 1970s was that as the years went on in M*A*S*H, they polished all the rough edges off the characters to the point where they were all smoothed out. I can see why the actors might like that, but it made them much less interesting as characters for the audience. The 1970s/1980s hairstyles on the female characters didn't help. A lot of 1970s/1980s period shows had this same problem; I'm reminded of Chachi in Happy Days, who wouldn't cut his hair to match everybody else in the show.

 

That's the thing. After the third season, it just wasn't as funny. Nowhere near it in my opinion. And a lot of the humour in the later episodes felt forced. I think a big reason for this was the wonderful chemistry between Hawkeye and Trapper (and the two of them with everyone else) ending when Wayne Rogers left. The show never recovered in my eyes.