M*A*S*H Memories

The two seasons with Potter and Burns were my favorite. Blake tolerated Burns but Potter hated him. The "Frank Drives A Tank" episode is my
favorite of all.

 

For me it's seasons 2-4, with 1 & 5 just behind those. Larry Gelbart was with the show through the 4th season, & the entire writing staff seemed to hit their creative peak on seasons 2-4, strongly enough to easily & seamlessly handle the cast changes in season 4.

Gelbart's loss was felt slightly in season 5, as, Burns being a cartoon character or not, I feel if Gelbart stayed through season 5, the transition with Margaret's engagement & wedding making Frank just a character to dump on in a scene that year might have been lessened. Season 5 was still strong, but his loss was there.

 

Only the first B&W interview episode. The second mined the format for a lame clips show. And the show was already heavily syndicated by that point so fans didn't especially need the trip down memory lane.

 

My favorite one regarding Frank Burns is in the 1976 season when Klinger and Zale are continuously getting into scraps in the chow hall. Burns gets boxing gloves and arranges a fight between the two. Both of them are sandbagging, throwing nothing punches. Burns yells at them to start punching and he got it instead--gets punched simultaneously in both cheeks by both Klinger and Zale. Great!

 

The only time I watched the final episode was when it aired in '83. I've had it for years and never rewatched it. It was such a big deal back when it aired that it was must see TV. I think just seeing it once made it more special. After watching the series pretty much from its beginning, it was the final goodbye and honestly it wasn't the best M^A^S^H episode by far. I'll probably go back to it sooner or later I think its been long enough! Like most everyone I like seasons 1-6 best. The second half of the series started to decline in the quality of writing and too much focus on Alda. Regardless, its still one of my favorite shows and one of the best series box sets I own.

 

Yes Goodbye, Farewell and Amen was must watch TV for many in Australia too but don't worry about researching it, it is not a complete farce like Seinfeld dished up!

 

A top 3 series for me...

MASH caught the mood of the anti-war sentiment & its horrors of my generation perfectly while everybody else just fell in line

 

I meant to write "rewatching it", chill and enjoy.

 

Interesting... so either they repeated a joke later in the series (which is always possible) or I'm having a Senior Moment (which is also always possible!)

 

There was an excellent 90-minute PBS documentary called MAKING M*A*S*H that was narrated by Mary Tyler Moore. As it was made during the show's run, I suppose it was ignored on DVD because it wasn't about the complete series. Still, it's a fine doc. Someone's uploaded a copy to YouTube:

 

And that managed to get me to find my ancient VHS tape of that show and write it out to DVD for further preservation.

 

I have to dig out my copy of the ' M*A*S*H
Movie this weekend sometime . It' s been awhile since I' ve seen it.
So long in fact I'd forgotten Robert Duval plays Frank Burns..a totally different Frank Burns to be sure but then again all the characters are very different from their television counterparts.
More later...

 

I would have had it been a visit to McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers from M*A*S*H's future, showing them what a bleak mess M*A*S*H became without them, which then changed their minds about leaving, giving us more seasons in the original style of the series... (The visit being ala "The Ghost of Christmas Future" in "Scrooge/A Christmas Carole"...)

 

Are you talking about the one with the Amer-Asian baby?

 

I was a little miffed too when they included the extras on the "new set" after having bought all of the seasons individually... I found the three DVD set you're referring to at Walmart a few years back in by their budget DVDs... I think I paid $5.00 for it, $7.00 max...

 

I know the exact laugh you're talking about...

 

I never thought that the movie Radar was all that different than the Radar character in the earliest seasons...

 

The film version of Frank Burns is a composite of two characters from the book... Major Hobson (a pious Bible thumper) and Captain Burns (an incompetent surgeon who has an affair with Hot Lips). I guess Altman liked the idea of creating a character who was a religious hypocrite. The TV show discards the Hobson elements from the character and makes him more like the book version of Frank Burns, though they retained the film's idea of having Burns outrank the other Swampmen.

 

I wasn't alive when it was airing but it has always been a staple on TV here in Australia. When I was growing up in the late-90s through the 2000s it was always on at 5:00pm in the afternoons. While I wouldn't consider myself a M*A*S*H fan I do have a fondness for the first 3 seasons like a lot of people. My interest totally goes after Burns leaves after that I find it a bit of a chore to deal with. Think I need to get those first 5 seasons on DVD sure they can be had really cheap these days.

 

Barred from O.R., it's:


I wonder if any other vintage Charlie Douglas mag track stems still exist other than what was sold in the machine?

I tried to locate decent quality digital files of some actual studio laugh track stems a while ago to re-cut one of my film projects into a sitcom-style parody, but studios keep those locked down, apparently. For me, anyway, the BET and DesiLu libraries were not obtainable.

 

Another one of my favorites is the one where Pat Hingle, close friend of Clint Eastwood and who appeared in several of Eastwood's films, plays Colonel Daniel Webster Tucker. It's April Fools day and everyone is trying to top the other on April Fool pranks until Col. Potter sets up everyone as Tucker fakes a heart attack in the officers lounge, but the joke is on everyone--except Colonel Potter. He had set up the whole thing earlier. IIRC it was in the 1979 season.

 

I do like the episode when Winchester is introduced and he goes on a tirade after which Potter replies something along the lines of "I think he's starting to get the hang of this place"...

 

Awesome show, one of my faves for sure. Lots of things to love about it. I loved Henry's little weird sayings, like "Checkeroony in the bananica". I have no idea what it means, but I guess it's meant to illustrate the goofy midwesterner in him.
Potter would come out with some of these as well, usually featuring a horse metaphor.
It's these little writing details that make the show so endearing.

 

I think, (as in I'm not 100% sure), that Altman combined the two characters into one like he did more for expediency & streamlining the plot a bit more than anything else. That was one less character & thus one less plot point to contend with, while at the same time having some of the attributes of both in the movie. It was quite clear in the book that Frank & Margaret were hypocrites of the first order, & even when I read the book Hobson felt like a somewhat superfluous & unneeded character. They brought him out, dumped on him & got rid of him. He really served little/no purpose to advancing the story in the novel.

 

Streamlining and reducing the number of characters probably was a factor as you say, but I suspect the main reason the characters were combined was Altman's desire to devise a character who was a religious hypocrite that could be exposed, deflated and humiliated. I don't really see how Captain Burns in the book could be described as a hypocrite. He was not religious nor do I recall him preaching in any way, nor holding himself up as some sort of paragon of virtue. He was basically a jerk, an incompetent surgeon who blamed his mistakes on others as well as a stuck up rich kid with a sense of entitlement.