Montreal, Bon soirs.
It is Josh and Chuck.
And we are coming to your french Ish town.
Yeah. And not just Montreal, We're also coming to Ottawa, the capital of Canada itself, and Toronto, one of our favorite cities in the entire world.
That's right. We're gonna be in those cities on June twenty fifth, twenty sixth, and twenty seventh, and there are still plenty of great tickets available. We love going to Canada and we can't wait to go to some of these towns we've never been to. And you can get tickets. Well, you can go to the websites of the venues. You can go to stuff youshould Know dot com and click on the on tour button and click on the tickets link there. There are all kinds of ways to find these tickets.
Yeah, and we'll see you guys next week.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hanging. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff you Should Know, part of our ongoing TV edition because we were raised on TV, so it's familiar to us and we.
Love it well. One of us love this. You might as well go ahead and get that out of the way. What do you mean, Mash? Yeah, I love Mash. You hated Mash.
I don't know what you're talking about. Come on, I don't I don't hate Mash. It's mostly a put on just to annoy you. I yeah, I don't hate it, hate it, you know what I mean?
Well, tell me your history. Did you watch it at all?
Yeah? I watched it with my dad.
Okay.
My dad would laugh out loud, throw his head back and clap sometimes. Yeah, And it was fun just to see my dad do that. Of course, he had, you know, consumed two old Milwaukee tall boys by this time, but sure, you know, I would guess that he probably would have laughed regardless. And that was it. I mean, that's how I know Mash essentially, and I've seen probably a decent amount of the episodes, but I don't know. It was never like I love Mash, you know, like Head of
the Class. I never loved Mash like I loved Head of the Class or Perfect Strangers.
Right, Well, this is when I remember that you are younger than me, so it's not like you were like me nine years old and loving a show about alcoholic surgeons in the Korean War.
No, but I don't feel like a lot of it was lost on me. I think I got a lot of it. It's just I don't think I was old enough for the comedy.
Yeah. Well I have talked about it before, but it was definitely weird that a nine year old was into a comedy sometimes serious about alcoholic surgeons during the Korean War, right, But I was into it. And you know, at one point, Mash was on reruns in the evening and then late night and while it was still airing so on Thursdays. I believe it aired on Thursdays in primetime, at least
it did when I from my recollection. At one point I was watching five episodes of Mash on Thursday and four episodes of Mash every other day of the week.
Wow, there's not that many shows you can do that with.
No, it's like five and five thirty and then something like ten then ten thirty or something like that.
I can do that with Law and Order. I can just watch Law and Order indefinitely, the original series.
But it was I was into it. It was a formative show for me. It was you know, it was a top five show as a kid, So.
Wow, And is it still one of your top shows?
Yeah, I mean it's not when I go back to and it certainly has a place in my heart. But it's hard to definitively rank today's TV against TV back then. You know, it's different, very definitely different. There are no short shows about alcoholic surgeons in the Korean War.
Now there are no short shows. They're all six or eight hours long at least.
Yeah, the thirty minutes sitcom is on its legs. It feels like, huh, are there any out there?
Oh? Yes, there's a few.
I mean main you know, the main network still have their shows. I just don't watch any of them.
The last mainstream network show that I saw that I really liked was a ted dancing show called Mister Mayor and it's it was funny. I don't know why I got canceled. A great cast. It wasn't dumb, it was as smart, but it was also hilarious, had a real kind of like a slightly different thirty rock vibe to like the writing.
Yeah, you know what, man, I'd have to really dig to see what the last major network half hour sitcom was. I watched because I feel like it was like arrested development. But maybe there's been one since then.
Yeah, yeah, I would say probably before, mister Mayor. That's as far as it would go back for me too.
And you watched The Good Place too, didn't you?
I did. I didn't watch it. I watched it big wise on I guess Netflix or whatever. I never watched it when it was on.
Yeah.
Yeah, So obviously all this is barreling us toward MASH, which is an acronym. Did you know that, mister Smarty?
I did. Yeah, Well, why don't you since this is your favorite show, why don't you tell everybody what it stands for?
It stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. And as everyone, even Jerry knows that there's an asterisk in between the letters. Three asterisks. Our friend Dave helped us with this, and he.
He also hates MASH.
Yeah. He looked high and low and was like, there's no reason for the asterisks. He thinks that it was just a design thing, and I couldn't find anything that contradicted that.
Well, my feeling is that I think it clearly was meant to show that it is an acronym, even though that's not how the military necessarily distinguished it because people would just say, what in the world is MASH mean? But oh wait, it must stand for something, would be my guess.
Right, But they didn't use periods after each letter like the military would of.
Oh yeah, sure, I get you. I'm yeah. An acronym is typically a period, right, oh gotcha? Yeah yeah. But it looks good though, You're.
Right, it does.
It looks fantastic, very signature.
So mobile Army Surgical Hospital and obviously, if you've ever seen MASH, it's where the whole thing is set, set during the Korean War in a mobile surgical hospital, hence the name, and those were actually a real thing. Did you know that, mister smart guy who loves MASH so much?
Oh boy, this is what we're in for. I did know that, because you know, at some point the show spells that out, So yeah, I knew that was the thing. What I was curious, And you know, my Mash recollection
this is from a long time ago. I don't remember them ever moving at all, so I feel like they kind of stayed there, unless that was an episode that I missed where they were like, yeah, we're gonna move to this other part of Malibu, which which is where it was filmed, the Fox Ranch which is now Malibu Creek State Park, which is why and all the scenes of helicopters flying around Korea. Who knows if that's what Korea looks like, but it looks like the mountains of southern California.
You don't know, that's where the Manson family lived for a while.
Oh really, no, No, they lived on Spawn Ring, right, Okay.
Anytime I hear ranch in California, I just immediately think of the Manson family.
Yeah, and I know I've told the story about shooting out there, but it was a big treat for me as a PA to shoot a commercial and see like a rusted out army oh yeah, ambulance, and I think, I mean, who knows what's there now, but there were still a few remnants back then, right.
Yeah. I remember my mind being blown when I found out that that was like California in the back.
He didn't go to Korea.
Yeah. I think that's kind of when I started to get that people cut corners for money.
Yeah, totally.
So.
Yeah, so a mash thing. A mash was actually a thing, and I think it was actually first try it out in the Korean War, which I think was a three year war. But something interesting that I noticed about Mashes that it ran for eleven seasons, so it was almost four times longer than the actual war that was the setting for this TV show. But in reality, like I was saying, a MASH hospital was tried out in the Korean War in real life.
Yeah, for sure. And the idea is that they put the surgeons close to the front lines so they could save more lives. And it was, you know, they're all kind of temporary, like they slept on you know, cot like beds, and they lived in tents, and it was on the TV show there's a lot to talk about the front and how close they were, but the real life MASH units apparently had a ninety seven percent survival rate. If you got there, your chances are you lived.
Yeah, so it was a really good idea that panned out. Yeah, And in the show, you can hear bombs going off sometimes occasionally the overhead lights will flicker and sway because they are so close to the front. And I was thinking about the same thing that you mentioned too, that they never seemed to change or move their unit. And if it's supposed to be four to five miles behind front lines. Then that would have to be a completely static front line for all those years to never move.
But it made me wonder about like the real life mash surgeons, like how often did you have to break down your mash unit and then move it, you know, and set it up again, which apparently you could do very quickly. Supposedly you could set one up in twenty four hours. But that also just kind of goes to explain like these were not like state of the art surgical wards. They were like blood and guts, get your hands dirty, you're lucky if you have more than one scalpel, kind of like surgical outfit.
Yeah, for sure, And that was conveyed very well in the show. The doctors on the show, you know, just like in real life, the doctors were generally civilians that were drafted into the war to be army surgeons. After I think World War Two, they had a tougher time getting surgeons going, and when Korea came around, they passed the Doctor's Draft Act. If you had already served in World War two as a doctor or surgeon or nurse or whatever, you didn't, you could get waived. You could
still serve if you wanted to. But the long and short of that is the recruits were younger, they didn't have as much experience. They definitely were not looking to join the army. Which was a big, big part of that show is that none of you know, none of them, but the main characters that we're going to talk about, like the protagonist, not the foils. The Foils kind of liked the army, but the other guys generally did not
like being there or being in the army culture. And Alan Alda was thirty six when they started making this. It was kind of curious about his starting age. Oh yeah, yeah, thirty six.
So yeah, I think that's almost one of the cornerstones of this show is that these are civilian doctors who were drafted in the Middle Military, and they're kind of bristling against this the regimentedness that's required of them just from being in the military. They're like, just get out of our hair. We're here to save lives, you know. Take that whole like revelly stuff and shove it.
Yeah, that's right. It was actually a book and this smart guy I did not know no.
Way I was going to ask you that facetiously and I didn't.
I'm sorry, I did not know this. Of course I knew it was a movie, and we'll talk about then a second. But the movie was optioned from a book written in nineteen sixty eight called Mash Colon, a novel about three army doctors by a Mash veteran doctor named
doctor Richard H. Hornberger under a pseudonym Richard Hooker. I think he added a co writer named W. C. Hines when it came pretty clear that his book was a bit of a mess, because it sounds like it was just sort of a group of stories about his experience
in the eight oh five to five. The eighty fifty fifth Mash Unit was the real life unit that it was based on, and it sounds like it was, you know, like what we see on TV and in the movies, Like they partied a lot, they drank a lot, did a lot of pranks, and on the side did some surgery.
Yeah. Well, like you said, it was kind of loosely put together, like each chapter started with hey, get this right, and they were basically like yeah, they were anecdotes, and then apparently he also peppered in some like gory stuff just to basically get across the Horrors of War and he was actually a surgeon in Maine and when he put this whole book together, and they brought in W. C. Hines,
a sportswriter, to kind of help him with it. If you've seen the TV show and you've never read the book, maybe even haven't seen the movie, you have a totally different conception of Mash than what Hornberger created and what the movie kind of portrayed, which is like, this wasn't
a he didn't have any liberal agenda. In fact, he was kind of conservative, and he didn't really like the tone of the TV show, but it was still it still had like a kind of anti war bent through it, or at least just questioning that the morality of war, just how stupid and wasteful it is. But it wasn't you know, it was not a liberal book or written by a liberal person.
But you know it's Hollywood gets a whold of something. Yeah, they're going to liberalize it. And that's basically, you know, like you said, what the movie and TV show ended up being. It's like a statement, like an anti war statement. Hornberger after not after Mash, because we'll talk about that later. The weird spinoff, but Postmash, he wrote more mash books. After you Know the movie was a hit. He wrote
fourteen mash novels. The first one was called Mash and Maine, which published the same year the TV show ended up premiering.
Yeah, fourteen novels, a movie and a TV show off of a book that he had to bring a sports writer into help, you know, whip into shape.
Yeah, can you cash in exactly?
So? Yeah, And he was just basically trying to get his anecdotes across, which were mostly like drunken prank stuff like you said, like you see on the TV show, like that was based on this guy's book. So, like I said, it was turned into a movie. I think it was option maybe even the year it was published in nineteen sixty eight, because the movie came out in nineteen seventy and I imagine it took a little while to make because it's a mess and it was directed by Robert Altman.
So you didn't like the movie.
I've only seen it once. I'm not entirely certain I saw the whole thing. I don't remember if I saw the whole thing. I was reading about people debating on whether the movie is any good or not, And it seemed like the consensus was that somebody say it's a masterpiece of twentieth century comedy. Yeah.
See, that's where I veer off, Like I love, love, love the TV show. I liked the movie okay, like I'm a big Robert Almond guy. It critically did very I mean, it was a big hit. It won the Golden Palm at the Cans Film Festival in nineteen seventy, nominated for Best Picture and four other oscars. I think it won Best Screenplay. So it was a huge hit.
But it's like, I think maybe I was too young the first time I saw it, and I loved the TV show so much, I was like, I gotta go see the movie version, and the movie version's a lot different, and it just didn't. I don't know. I don't think it's among Altman's best work, but certainly a lot of people disagree with me.
Sure a lot of people like it, but it's almost one of those things you get the impression that people like it because it's, you know, supposedly this amazing thing, not because they'd like it like it, you know what
I mean. Maybe maybe that's just kind of the tone that I got But anyway, the movie was a little closer to the book, and in that it's like it portrays everything that the younger generations did, like about the oldest generation right now explain sexism, racism, Oh sure, she's just completely completely ignoring like the consequences of harming other people.
Yeah yeah, yeah, like essentially everything, Like those are the main themes throughout this movie, right although again the subtext is that this is an anti war movie at the very least again questioning the morality of war. And it was released right at you know, the peak of when anti war sentiment was really aroused in America because of the Vietnam War.
Yeah, for sure. And I didn't know where you're going, but you totally nailed it. Like in this movie, it's like it's supposed to be funny that hot lips Hula Han, the head nurse is the shower curtain has ripped open and she has fully frontally exposed naked to the rest of the camp. Yeah, like this played for laugh So obviously it's a movie of its time. It was by Ring Lardner junior, obviously son of a great short story writer,
Ring Lardner, and he I think they called him. Pinky Ring was his nickname.
No, oh, you got me. That's a good one.
Oh. Thanks, that'd be a pretty good nickname for a Ring Junior. Yeah, or maybe toe ring. No pinky pinky ring.
Okay.
Uh so Altman, you know, does his Altman thing, which is a lot of improvisation, a lot of overlapping dialogue. It's his hallmark as a filmmaker. Ring Lardner Junior did not care for that, evidently, and said, like, you ruined what I wrote. And I don't know if he took that back after he won the Oscar for screenplay or not, but yeah, it's kind of interesting.
Yeah. I saw he tried to get his name taken off of it and then he won the Oscar. Wow, I guess I'll stick with this.
That's really funny.
One other thing about ring Lardner Junior I saw is that he was one of the Hollywood ten who was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings.
Oh yeah, so sure.
It was like almost a slightly sub of act in and of itself to hire him in the late sixties after you know, they were bringing him back.
I guess, well, Altmund's he was an old pothead. He was a medium age pothead at that point.
So let's talk about the theme song, which I'm sure a lot of people know the title of it, but many people might not actually because they played it. If you're a fan of the TV show, it was always instrumental.
Yeah, they changed it from the movie. In the movie, it had words. The name of the song is suicide is Painless, and the story behind it I did not know. In the mash movie there was a character I did know this stuff, Captain Walt Waldowski, who says he wants to take his own life because he's gay and he's
in the army and he can't bear it. And so they do a fake sort of a fake funeral, a living funeral, and give him a placebo pill, telling him it's a big sedative that's gonna, you know, take his life, right. And so Altman's like, I need a song that he pitched it as I needed to be the stupidest song ever. So we hired a guy, a real musician named Johnny Mandel. Any relation to the Men that's Mandrill, Sorry.
Close, he's a distant, distant relation.
Yeah, that's right. He dropped the arm and he was like, we need a song for this funeral, I want to be the dumbest song ever. And Altman tried to write it but couldn't come up with anything that he liked. So, as the story goes, he hired his fifteen year old son Michael to co write this thing with this pro musician, and that's what they came up with.
Yeah, and like that explains like it was a purposefully stupid song, which explains just the only lyrics I know, which is suicide is painless. It brings on many changes, and I've always been like that seems a little tongue in cheek, like what's the right?
Like I don't get that.
No, I do maybe want to go back and read the rest of the lyrics because I'm sure they're hilario.
I actually meant to do that too, and I did not. I thought, you know, I know Emily worked with two all with Roger and two of his sons on The gingerbread Man in Savannah, and I asked her if Michael was one of them, and she said no, it was two of the others or maybe the other two.
Was it gingerbread Man? Is that a Grisham thriller? I think so, or at least in that vein.
Yeah, I think it was a Grisham thriller.
Hey, speaking of movies, I saw something just last night that I want to recommend.
Let's hear it.
It's an old Oswald or ozgood sorry Oz Ozgod Perkins movie. You love that guy, Gretel and Hansel, and I think.
It's feel like you have it backwards.
To No, no, that's the way, that's the time. I'm just kidding because Gretel's older in this one and it's from like twenty twelve, thirteen. It's great.
You should start a podcast on Oz Perkins.
I wonder if I could get him to come on.
It, like, you know, like Finding Oz or the Wizard of Oz or something like that.
Sure, or behind the Curtain, Yeah.
Yeah, find the the green behind the green Door. That's something different behind the green curtain.
Behind the green door.
Oh man, all right, I feel like you should take a break. We told the song story and we'll be right back to finally get to the TV show after.
This loop with Joe shoe on cho.
Stuff.
You shit.
Okay, Chuck, So you said we'd get to the TV show, but you lied, lied, lied, Because there's a little more about the movie. We have to talk about. Oh okay, chiefly that it was nominated for five Oscars, like you said, Ring Lardner Junior, and for the Best Screenplay. But most importantly is that Robert Altman hated the TV show.
Yeah, yeah, good point.
I'm guessing that Robert Altman never even saw the TV show. I'll bet that he heard it, heard that they were making it on CBS and that they were turning into a thirty minute comedy and was like, this is the It's the worst thing I've ever seen, even though I've never seen it. That would be my guess.
Yeah, maybe, And you know, to be fair at the time, and you know, we'll see Alan Alda's reaction to being pitched this idea and him not wanting to try to audition it first is that the history of TV and war shows and army and Navy shows and stuff like Hogan's Heroes and Michale's Navy, and that's the kind of thing that somebody like Robert Altman and Alan Alda wouldn't have liked. And it was only after Alan Alda read the pilot and he said, this is the best TV
pillot I've ever read. I'm totally going to audition for this that he decided to do it, But I could see Altman just not going there, you know.
Yeah, I mean that's a really risky thing that's actually, in retrospect, quite surprising. It's retrospect, by the way, that's the German pronunciation. It's really surprising that anybody was able to pull it off, because if you know the book or the movie, the idea of adapting those into a TV show, a family friendly TV show in the late sixties early seventies is like, wait, what are you going
to do? The only way you could possibly do that is to make it like screwball high jinks, like Michale's Navy, where the war just happens to be the setting. It could also be an office comedy essentially, and that's not at all what they did. Thanks to a producer named Jene Reynolds and a writer named Larry Gelbert. I don't know how those two came together, but it was a match made in CBS Heaven.
Yeah, for sure. Gelbert was an experienced writer. He wrote, or at least co wrote, the musical of Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Later on, after post smash, he wrote the movie TUTSI, which is great in the movie Oh God with George Burns and John Denver, which to me is great, and I guess to you two not so much Oh God Book two, but that first Oh God was awesome.
I saw both. I don't remember the book two, but the first one was so great.
Yeah, agreed, But they you know, they didn't want they wanted to walk that fine line between having laughs and it being a quote unquote comedy and an anti war movie and a movie about the horrors of combat, and it's it's really interesting. They walk a really tough fine line, and as we'll see, you know, they ended up doing
some really groundbreaking episodes, you know, in later seasons. The first few seasons were definitely leaned way more into the sort of high jinks of it all, and then I think they realized, like, hey, we have a real chance here to have some incredible character arcs and really do something a little bit more like All in the Family was doing.
Yeah, and they actually put it behind All in the Family at some point, which helped bring it out of TV purgatory, I guess. But one of the ways that the producers were able to kind of navigate that narrow margin between just idiocy and over over melodramatic stuff was that the studio the network was like, obviously, we're going
to have a laugh track. Thirty minutes comedy have to have a laugh track, and the producers kept pushing back and pushing back, and they finally reached a compromise where the oar scenes could not have a laugh track, And then there were other sometimes other episodes or scenes where they were real downers where they didn't have the laugh
track either. But if you watch Mash today, it's easy to kind of miss the laugh track until they get into the oar and then it's glaringly missing, Yeah, which I think is actually kind of useful in contrasting you know how these surgeons are these not just the surgeons, but everybody at the mass unit is having to get jerked around by reality, like just messing around, getting drunk on homemade gin and then all of a sudden you have like both of your hands in a eighteen year
old soldier's chest, Like that's what they are trying to portray in the kind of smart use of a laugh track actually helped with that.
Yeah, for sure. And you know, as a kid and just as an American in general at the time, like the laugh track was so ubiquitous that you didn't really think about it much as being like weird. It was usually like a studio audience thing, and this was not a studio audience show, but you just sort of accepted it, Like apparently the BBC never used the laugh track at all.
And then I'm also reminded of like I think years back, someone did some Friends episode without the laugh track and divided him up into clips, and it's just jarring to hear that kind of a show without a laugh track. So Match was a was sort of a weird case.
We've talked about that because not only is a jarring, it's like this isn't funny at all.
It really cues you, and you don't even the laugh track sounds like such a dumb thing, like one hundred years from now people say, like they really did that on shows, but you it was such an institution and like a certain kind of comedy that yeah, like you said, without it, you don't know him to laugh almost.
Do you remember in the I Guess the two thousand Oughts. It must have been right before Cartoon Network came around, or Adult Swim, right before adults swim somebody put out like old episodes a Birdman and Space Ghosts like the original sixties episodes. But then they peppered him with laugh tracks, often inappropriately placed where nothing even remotely funny is going on, but the audience this hand laughter just kind of comes in and it made it so bizarrely funny. Have you not seen those?
Was that space Ghost Coast to Coast?
This is before space Coast Coast to Coast?
Oh okay, because yeah, Dave.
Willis, Yeah, Dave Willis was on Space Coast Coast to coast or he co founded it. I guess he might have had something to do with this because it was clearly attached to space Coast Coast to coast, because that happened, you know, right before it. But if you watch those, they're just it's such an easy, basic idea, but it's so funny to watch them.
Oh man, those early years of Cartoon Network were just the best. Yeah, and Comedy Central, like it used to be so much better, you know, oh yeah, everything.
I think Comedy Central's just old South Park reruns in the Daily Show once in a while.
Yeah, yeah, that's a real shame. As far as Mash and their storylines go though. Apparently Gilbert and Reynolds interviewed a lot of veterans from the Korean War, got a lot of stuff from that, and worked into episodes like the episode where a wounded North Korean soldier is in the er there and he pulls a pin out of a hand grenade that he was hi hiding on the operating table. Like that apparently really happened, as did a lot of that stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, I was like, did it really happen? And I went and found reference to the actual name of the surgeon who told that story in these interviews. Oh yeah, so like it definitely happened. So I think I said that Mash was on for eleven years, and it premiered in September seventy two and ran all the way to February nineteen eighty three. That is a long run for a show.
Yeah, I mean for pretty good back then.
Now, like eleven years is a really long time. But at first it was not very well received the very at least people didn't know about it because it was put up against the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights and it was not doing very well there.
Yeah, I mean, wonderful Disney was a juggernaut of a show for mainstream America. So Alan Alda apparently used to joke that MASH was one of the top seventy eight shows on TV early on, and very Alan Alda kind of thing to say, and they moved it like like you've said earlier to after All in the Family, which was a huge hit, and that made gave MASH a lot more visibility, obviously, and all of a sudden, MASH was the number two show on TV and that was it.
And Day found a great quote from Newsweek as far as a critical acclaim that I think kind of sums it up, and it is this, without ever moralizing, Mash is the most moral entertainment on commercial television. It proposes craft against butchery, humor against despair, wit as a defense mechanism against the senseless enormity of the situation. Pretty good stuff.
Yeah, I think the Newsweek people really got it.
Should we talk about the characters, Yeah.
Let's because we've made reference to some, but I feel like we should get a little more in depth with them.
Yeah. So Hay, we've mentioned a few times. He's I guess you would just call the main character and that was Alanalda, by the way, the great Alan Alda, Like, he's one of my heroes in entertainment really and by all accounts, just one of the best dudes ever. And he is ninety years old now, and which is great. He's still around, and he is one of the great writers and great directors and great actors and great human beings in the history of the TV and movie business.
I think did he write a lot of those movies he was in in the early eighties.
I think he co wrote he directed almost all of them. He co wrote thirteen Mash episodes, directed thirty one, and he played you know, Hawkey Pierce. This is a little known fact. Did you get that mental article I sent over? Yeah, with the top or whatever? Twelve things seventeen So a few of these guys actually served in the at least in the reserves. Alan Alda was serch six months in the Army reserves in Korea. Pretty crazy.
So did Jamie Farr, who played Corporal Clinger, who is essentially far and away the most famous person until Katie Holmes came along to have come from Toledo.
I thought, you did this a Toledo thing. He was always if you did never watch the show. Clinger often referenced to Toledo mud Hens.
Toledo mud Hens, and Tony Pacos, which is a real place in to I.
Mean, that's your place. I didn't know he talked about that on the show.
Oh yeah, he talked about Tony Pacos all the time.
Oh see, I didn't know what it was back then. I was like, who the hell is Tony Paco.
No, Tony Pacos is like a hot dog place, a Hungarian hot dog place. And every time he would mention the mud Hens or the Tony Pacos, I would look over at my dad and there'd just be like a single tear going down his cheek. He's so filled with pride because you know, he got some on his face.
All right, So Hawkey's the main guy. He Allan all did for what It's Worth is the first person to win an Emmy for acting, writing and directing on the same show.
Wow.
Then we have his buddy, Trapper John played by Wayne Rodgers, who was in real life in the Navy, and he is the you know, the tent mate and confidant. Apparently Robert Klein, the Great comedian turned down that role and regretted it.
I could see that, although Wayne Rodgers, the guy who played Trapper, John was like, you know, this guy's not fully fleshed out. I'm basically Hawkeye's sidekick, right, I'm in the sidecar. I'm laughing along with him. We're doing like pranks together, but there's no me. Who is me? And the director was like, I think it's who is I? And they got into a really long disagreement about whether it was I or me, and Wayne Rogers eventually left after the third season.
Yeah.
The reason he was able to was because he never signed a contract with the producers. I guess there was like a morality clause. He's like, I'm not signing this, and they forgot to go back and get him to sign something. So he after the third season, which apparently he seemed fine with.
Yeah. I mean, Mash is one of those shows, like Cheers, that was able to withstand some pretty drastic cast changes. It's hard to pull off as a TV show. Cheers did it very well, and Mash did it very well because three of the main characters ended up being replaced. Trapper was replaced by Honeycut BJ Honeycut played by Mike Farrell, or maybe it's Pharrell. He was actually a US Marine
in real life. He was great. I love Toneycut. You know. Again, those later seasons after like Trapper left and as we'll see, some of the other characters left, there were some tonal changes, but I was along for the whole ride. I was in for all of it.
Yeah, especially in the beginning, Hawkeye and Trapper John were like prankster drunk womanizers. They would harass the nurses and try to get him to sleep with them and all sorts of stuff. And then bj Honeycut was a lot different. He was a breath of fresh air because he was very true to his wife back home.
Yeah, for sure.
And he had a mustache.
That's right. Did we have Radar of course, Corporal Radar O'Reilly played by Gary Bergoff. He was named Radar because he was very much a recurring thing on the show. Like every single episode he would either kind of finish somebody's sentences, usually Colonel Blake's sentence, or know what somebody needed, like before they needed it and kind of just hand it to him, or he would and this is a
lot of times at the end of an episode. He would always since the helicopters coming in with wounded before you could hear the helicopters, and usually, like, if it was a pretty light episode to be a lot of high jinks that would be kind of halted at the end of the episode when he heard the helicopters coming.
Right there was Colonel Blake. He was one of my favorites, played by McLean Stevenson and great. He was an actual doctor who was put in charge of this mash unit and he's like, I have no idea how to run any kind of army outfit. So he was always kind of in over his depth, but he tried really hard and he would get perturbed, which was kind of funny sometimes because he never got mad. He just got right perturbed and befuddled.
Kind of yeah, exasperated.
But he wasn't an idiot like it was. It would have been really easy for any actor to portray him as kind of a dummy, but McClean stevenson managed to keep him from going down that route.
Yeah, for sure, he was a man. I love that character. We should mention too that Gary Bergoff's radar was the only one who bridged the movie as far as you know, being in both Colonel Blake was then replaced by Colonel Sherman G. Potter. Yeah, played by Harry Morgan, And he was a very different character than Blake, and that he was an old school soldier, but he also kind of he wasn't as by the book as you would think for an old school soldier and sort of indulged the antics for the most part.
Yeah, Andy used the term horse feathers a lot to Mars. Yes, there was another great character too who you just love to hate. He was so good. Frank Burns, who was played by Larry Lineville. He was He had what you would term today is justice sensitivity. He liked to follow the rules. He was fine with the military and the requirements for its conformity, and anyone who didn't conform to it was it just drove him up the wall, and
he tried to get them in trouble. So he was like a tried and true fascist essentially.
Yeah, he was a bureaucrat. He was completely the foil of Hawkeye and Trapper. He was played by Robert Duvall in the film. But Larry Lynnville, as Ferret Face as they called him, was just I mean always felt bad for the guy in real life because he was able to play one of the more unlikable characters in TV history, and he just did it so well as really good actor.
Yeah, we should say also, Frank Burns was not a good surgeon, and at the end of the day in this mash unit, that's what that's what mattered, right, That's why Hawkeye and Trapper John got away with all of their antics, was because they were really good surgeons and when it came to it, they were going to save people's lives. Frank Burns what made him even worse is that he wasn't even a good surgeon, Like you could die on his operating table because he wasn't that good.
And yet he would still go tell on you for you know, drinking gin that you made in your get you know, and it so much worse.
Yeah, there were tentmates, the three of them, Yeah, the two guys and then Burns lived together, and then he was replaced after the fifth season in season six by David Ogden's Steers as Charles Emerson Winchester, the third who was a major I always thought he was kind of British, but he just sort of did that mid Atlantic thing because he was came from a wealthy family in Boston family of doctors apparently, and he was a little less of a foil but still a bit of a foil.
Yeah, and blended and with him because he was so snobby. They just had nothing in common essentially from their backgrounds.
Yeah.
Then there's Margaret hot Lips Hula Han played by Loretta Switt, who I've seen just from reading up on mash. The TV show is roundly credited as taking like a pretty one dimensional victim, angry character and turning her into something like really respectable and three dimensional over the course of the eleven seasons, and that she actually got better, like the character got more involved in impressive and interesting over the years thanks to this actor.
Yeah, Loretta Sweat, she was great. Rest in peace. I think we lost her last year or the year before, like fairly recently. She on the show hot Lips was having an affair with Frank Burns, and they were always sort of coupled together against the you know, the other guys, and they were bureaucrats. But like you said, she had a great character arc ded up really developing into something special and then rounding it out. I guess we already
talked about Clinger. We have father M'kayhe played by William Christopher, who is the chaplain, and that's about all we need to say about him. He was just sort of there.
Did we talk about clingers wearing women's clothing?
Oh no, that was a big part of it, Yeah, hugely.
Apparently he was written as a one off character initially, and he was written as a gay character who wore women's clothes, like full on frilly dresses and sun hats like Sunday like going to church kind of stuff. And Jamie Farr was like, look, I think I can do this a little differently, Like, imagine if this is a straight guy dressing like this because he wants to get
out of the army for some psych thing. And he did such a good job in this one off episode that they brought him back as a character, not just a recurring character. He became one of the characters.
Yeah, for sure. And he yeah, he was one of the great characters. He tried to eat it ep in one episode to further prove his mental unfitness to serve and that was one of the funny episodes. I guess before we take a break, we should rattle off some of these guest stars. Yeah, because Mash had quite a list of people who came on for one episode, including but not limited to, Ron Howard, Sure, Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Swayzee, Laurence Fishburne, the Great George went Terry Garr. Who else you got?
Andrew Dice Clay, Yeah, the Dice manh Yeah, just one thing. This is apparently where Leslie Nielsen made the transition to comedy. Oh, on his appearance on MASH.
Oh that's great. Yeah, Rita Wilson, Oh, oh, we're still going.
Yeah, don't forget Bagley Junior.
Yeah, John Ritter, Shelley Long, Pat Marita. Of course, Pat Marita's in there. He was into two Hollywood in the seventies. They're like, we don't care what part of Asia you're from, exactly, just sign them up exactly.
We feel pretty progressive that we're actually casting an agent to play an Asian.
Yeah, and yeah, for sure. All right, shall we take that second break? Yeah, yes, all right, we'll be right back.
Birds of Up with Joe shoe Cho stuff you shoot, all right.
So earlier we talked about some what you would call very special episodes. This was a thing that back then on a lot of shows, like you know when Arnold and Willis find drugs in different strokes, like when a comedy takes a more serious tone. Mash added quite a few,
and we can go through these kind of quickly. I'm gonna pick Sometimes You Hear a Bullet from season one, because that is an episode in which Hawkeye's childhood friend comes over as a journalist to write a book about the war and he ends up dying on Hawkeye's operating table. And that was the first episode that was really very heavy, where like Hawkeye cries and it gets kind of serious about the horrors of war.
Yes, okay, all right, I'm going to pick Dreams from season eight, which is apparently its most controversial episode because it is very jarring, very disturbing, where it covers each of the main characters is taking a rest from like a long day in ther where they saw two hundred and eleven patients over thirty three hours, and it goes through each one of their dreams and it's very surreal.
All sorts of weird, disturbing stuff happens. And I haven't seen it, but I want to watch it because it sounds just totally.
Nuts, but it's pretty weird.
It's completely contrary to any other episode. So I imagine if you were tuning in on Saturday night on CBSC, you know to kind of laugh and maybe cry, and you saw this horrible weirdness, you might have had a bad reaction to it.
Yeah, for sure. There were two more episodes that were definitely weird as far as mainstream television goes, a documentary style, one called The Interview, where it was like a black and white you know, like a Vietnam era black and white documentary about war. That one was kind of crazy to see on TV at the time. It won a Humanitus Prize for a work that explores the human condition
in a meaningful way. And then the other one was called point of View, and the whole thing is shot from like the camera's point of view is from a wounded soldier who can't talk, and so all the actors are just coming up and addressing camera as the soldier, and it's, you know, again, a very sort of groundbreaking roll of the dice to do for mainstream TV in the seventies for sure.
And then we got to talk about Abyssinia. Henry.
Yeah, yeah, I mean this episode wrecked little Chuck, nine year old Chuck.
I remember this one too, and I was like, where's the laugh track?
Yeah?
Oh. Colonel Blake, who we both love, played by McClean Stevenson. This is the season three finale. He gets word that he's going home, like his tour is over. He's out of the army now, and so he leaves and that's it, Like everybody's saying bye, everybody's happy for him. He's happy. And then at the end of the episode, Radar comes into the o R and he's holding a telegram and what does the telegram say, Chuck.
I can't even say it.
It says that Colonel Blake's plane went down with Colonel Blake aboard and that there were no survivors. So on his way back home after his tour, after becoming beloved by all viewers, Colonel Blake is dead. The writers killed him after he was already off the show, and it just wrecked everybody.
Like you said, it was brutal. Alan Alda knew this was going to happen. The story goes that they didn't tell the rest of the cast until they got their sides that morning, and because they wanted, you know, a real reaction, or maybe they didn't even have the sides maybe they. I think they just learned when radar walked in in the scene and Gary Berghoff's acting in that is incredible. And you know, there's no reaction, like, no one's like, oh my god, No, it's just very quietly.
They keep operating and you just hear they're they're crying and you just hear like scalpel, you know, suction, and it's it's devastating.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
Yeah, very very tough.
So, Chuck, I feel like the the episode we can just skip it, you know, the Mash finale.
I don't have to talk about that the big deal.
I don't know if we said, but we surely we've mentioned this before that the most watched television episode is the final episode of Mash, which is really saying something because it was two and a half half hours long.
Oh my god, that's right, it was. I remember it being long. I don't remember it being that long.
Two and a half hours man.
Yeah, and of course that includes commercials. A thirty second spot apparently was four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which would be one point three six million dollars today. It was called Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, and it was you know, the war ends. Basically it's the last episode, but it is very dramatic for a lot of it, and like the things the characters go through at the end are all pretty you know, take pretty dramatic turns.
Yeah, and very famously in this like kind of heartrending montage at the very end, it shows how every character dies in the future.
You're talking about six feet hundred. Yeah, that is I haven't seen it in a while. I was like, did that really happen?
That is one of the greatest endings to any show ever.
Of course it was great also gut wrenching, Yeah it was.
But Goodbye, Farewell and Amen is fantastic too, for sure.
Yeah. So, like you said, the the biggest rated TV show of all time, and that was like including sports events up until Super Bowl twenty ten finally surpassed it, but Mash is still as far as just a regular TV show goes. The finale is the most watched. I think seventy five percent of America tuned into that, which is a staggering number. You know, you see Hawkeye in a mental hospital, father Mukay, he loses his faith in God,
he loses his hearing and his faith in God. Clinger ends up marrying a Korean woman and stays there.
Ironically, Yeah, because he was always trying to get out of there, right.
He's trying to go home.
Yeah.
Did you see the urban possible urban legend about the plumbing in New York City? No, that was in the Mental Plus thing. I don't know if this is true, but I've always heard this that the plumbing in New York City supposedly broke during the first commercial break because everybody got up to pee at the same time in New York.
Awesome.
It totally sounds like it's probably not real. They all flushed at once and it just broke everything.
All the alligators drowned.
But you know, that's funny. Uh. It's a good story though, regardless. For one hundred and twenty one million people tuned in to that episode, and I was one of them. My whole family sat around and then we didn't do that kind of thing much.
Oh, we watched it. My mom video taped it. We watched it on videotape many times too.
Yeah.
Yeah, she'd be like, watch this, watch this part, watch it again. I have a cute little anecdote about watching mash though all right, let's hear you me. So, her older brother Bobby, he has special needs, and one day when they were much much younger, you mean, must have probably done five or six or something, Bobby had to
go to the er. And her dad was a marine, so they were living on a marine base at the time, and her mom, like her dad, whisks Bobby off to the er and her mom tells her that Bobby's going to the hospital. And so Yumi's only frame of reference for military hospitals is a mass unit where there's always bombs going off and everything is kind of nuts. So she was really worried or other was going to a mash unit, which I've just found endlessly cute.
Yeah, that's adorable, it's funny. I'm going to bring that up next time I see you mean, that's hysterical.
That's hilarious. Oh, by the way, Echo and the Bunny Man.
Is Saturday this Saturday in Atlanta at the Tabernacle.
Remember I told you i'd remind you again.
I know, I'm looking to see if I can go. We should probably do this off air.
Oh okay, I just wanted to remind you.
Okay, You're like, I'm not going, but you should go, Oh, well,
I'm going we will quickly mention the Mash spinoffs. I teased After a Mashed a few times as saying Postmash, but that was the name of one of the spinoffs that didn't run long, about a season and a half, and it was one of the ones that had the most characters I guess from the show because the real Colonel Potter was there, Clinger was there, and father Okay, he was there, you know, obviously, all in a hospital post war, a veteran's hospital.
Did you watch it? I remember watching After Mash.
Yeah, I watched it some, and I remember not loving it, so I don't think I watched it all.
There's also Trapper John MD, which was on for seven seasons, and it even was running concurrently at the same time as Mash itself for a lot of that time.
Yeah, kind of weird.
Ye what was his name, Shane Rogers.
Yeah, like they recast it, so it's just like, why not just call it something else?
Yeah, I guess because everybody loved the character. But even still his character like fifty years in the future or something like that, you know, or or thirty years in the future, so he's an old band so they had another actor, Pernell Roberts, so you probably know from the sixties touring company of Camelot, but he played Trapper John as an older man.
Oh okay, so of course now I'm a dummy. Like the reason they called it that was so they could bank on the successive.
Mash That's what I would guess.
Yeah, I didn't think that through.
It almost makes me wonder if they just retrofitted a show that had already been green right to Trapper John.
Yeah, like The Pit was supposed to be an Er spinoff. Oh yeah, yeah, and there's I think there's still a lawsuit because apparently there's And of course I'm speaking completely as someone who doesn't know a lot about this, so look it up if you really want to know. But I think the Michael Crichton estate got involved and they're like, wait a minute, you can't do an Er spin off without like giving us some juice because he came up with the idea for r or whatever wrote the book
that was based on or something. And I think there's like a like a paper trail of because The Pit was like, no, no, no, that wasn't the deal. It's just a new show. It's not supposed to be Noah Wiley's character. But I think there's an email trail where they were like, oh, you want money, huh, let's just call it something else and change the character's name.
Who is that dumb these days?
I don't know, and I don't know. I mean, I'm sure I'm getting some details wrong, but I know that it is an ongoing issue.
There was one more. It was Walter w A l t e. R. With the Ass Even. Yeah, that was a nineteen eighty four pilot that didn't I think it aired one time and it was aired in the Eastern and Central time zones. It was apparently so bad they didn't even air it in the West that same night.
Didn't they do that for our show?
Pretty much? They tried to cram it all into one night for sure.
Man, that's crazy. I didn't know that about the West coast thing. That is a brutal move.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we can't even let the California I see the show?
Right? So it was about Radar O'Reilly in his life after Korea, and it was played by Gary Berghoff, and he was going to become a cop and his wife had just left him and he was contemplating suicide and this was a comedy a half hour comment from what I understand.
So people, I bet you that's out there. I'm gonna have to watch that.
Yeah, you got anything else?
I got nothing else. I appreciate you indulging this one. I know it's not your favorite show, but I thank you.
Hey, I can always talk about Mash for fifty three straight minutes any time you want.
All right, let's do it again right now.
Okay, if you want to know more about match, just go start watching it. I propose watching the episode Dreams first, maybe, just to get it out of the way.
Yeah.
And since Chuck said yeah, that means it's time for a listener mail.
Yeah, not so much a listener mail, even though it was one little inside baseball. But our email has been screwed up for a couple of months now, as far as if you haven't heard back from us, by the way, and you send an email lately, it's because our email is super screwed up.
My fault.
The good news is we're now getting them again, but they are being forwarded, so you can't directly reply. Long way of saying, this comes from Martha Black, and there's really no need in even reading the email, because all it was was, Hey, Chuck, by the way, that Howard Hughes picture of him as an old guy in Vegas is actor rip torn. No. It even says so in the caption that she so, I definitely have an egg on my face for that one, because now that I see it, I'm like, yeah, I guess, I guess that
is ripped? Is there?
Right? Alreadie?
Yeah, but he was younger, and he was you know, had tissue boxes on his feet. For God's sake.
It fooled me to chuck.
Yeah, me too, well, and of course that makes sense. There are no pictures of Howard Hughes in Vegas. He didn't know all that.
At least it wasn't ai.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, at least they got ripped horn.
To pose for it.
Yeah. So who is that from?
Martha Black?
Thanks a lot, Martha Black. Sounds like an MTV VJ from back in the day.
That's right.
If you want to be like Martha Black and show off your name, you can email us too. Hopefully we'll get it these days. Send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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