Speaker 1: Montreal, Bon soirs.
Speaker 2: It is Josh and Chuck.
Speaker 1: And we are coming to your french Ish town.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And not just Montreal, We're also coming to Ottawa,
Speaker 3: the capital of Canada itself, and Toronto, one of our
Speaker 3: favorite cities in the entire world.
Speaker 1: That's right. We're gonna be in those cities on June
Speaker 1: twenty fifth, twenty sixth, and twenty seventh, and there are
Speaker 1: still plenty of great tickets available. We love going to
Speaker 1: Canada and we can't wait to go to some of
Speaker 1: these towns we've never been to. And you can get tickets. Well,
Speaker 1: you can go to the websites of the venues. You
Speaker 1: can go to stuff youshould Know dot com and click
Speaker 1: on the on tour button and click on the tickets
Speaker 1: link there. There are all kinds of ways to find
Speaker 1: these tickets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we'll see you guys next week.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hanging. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck
Speaker 3: and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff you Should Know,
Speaker 3: part of our ongoing TV edition because we were raised
Speaker 3: on TV, so it's familiar to us and we.
Speaker 1: Love it well. One of us love this. You might
Speaker 1: as well go ahead and get that out of the way.
Speaker 1: What do you mean, Mash? Yeah, I love Mash. You
Speaker 1: hated Mash.
Speaker 3: I don't know what you're talking about. Come on, I
Speaker 3: don't I don't hate Mash. It's mostly a put on
Speaker 3: just to annoy you. I yeah, I don't hate it,
Speaker 3: hate it, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Well, tell me your history. Did you watch it at all?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I watched it with my dad.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: My dad would laugh out loud, throw his head back
Speaker 3: and clap sometimes. Yeah, And it was fun just to
Speaker 3: see my dad do that. Of course, he had, you know,
Speaker 3: consumed two old Milwaukee tall boys by this time, but sure,
Speaker 3: you know, I would guess that he probably would have
Speaker 3: laughed regardless. And that was it. I mean, that's how
Speaker 3: I know Mash essentially, and I've seen probably a decent
Speaker 3: amount of the episodes, but I don't know. It was
Speaker 3: never like I love Mash, you know, like Head of
Speaker 3: the Class. I never loved Mash like I loved Head
Speaker 3: of the Class or Perfect Strangers.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, this is when I remember that you are
Speaker 1: younger than me, so it's not like you were like
Speaker 1: me nine years old and loving a show about alcoholic
Speaker 1: surgeons in the Korean War.
Speaker 3: No, but I don't feel like a lot of it
Speaker 3: was lost on me. I think I got a lot
Speaker 3: of it. It's just I don't think I was old
Speaker 3: enough for the comedy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well I have talked about it before, but it
Speaker 1: was definitely weird that a nine year old was into
Speaker 1: a comedy sometimes serious about alcoholic surgeons during the Korean War, right,
Speaker 1: But I was into it. And you know, at one point,
Speaker 1: Mash was on reruns in the evening and then late
Speaker 1: night and while it was still airing so on Thursdays.
Speaker 1: I believe it aired on Thursdays in primetime, at least
Speaker 1: it did when I from my recollection. At one point
Speaker 1: I was watching five episodes of Mash on Thursday and
Speaker 1: four episodes of Mash every other day of the week.
Speaker 3: Wow, there's not that many shows you can do that with.
Speaker 1: No, it's like five and five thirty and then something
Speaker 1: like ten then ten thirty or something like that.
Speaker 3: I can do that with Law and Order. I can
Speaker 3: just watch Law and Order indefinitely, the original series.
Speaker 1: But it was I was into it. It was a
Speaker 1: formative show for me. It was you know, it was
Speaker 1: a top five show as a kid, So.
Speaker 3: Wow, And is it still one of your top shows?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's not when I go back to
Speaker 1: and it certainly has a place in my heart. But
Speaker 1: it's hard to definitively rank today's TV against TV back then.
Speaker 1: You know, it's different, very definitely different. There are no
Speaker 1: short shows about alcoholic surgeons in the Korean War.
Speaker 3: Now there are no short shows. They're all six or
Speaker 3: eight hours long at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the thirty minutes sitcom is on its legs. It
Speaker 1: feels like, huh, are there any out there?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yes, there's a few.
Speaker 1: I mean main you know, the main network still have
Speaker 1: their shows. I just don't watch any of them.
Speaker 3: The last mainstream network show that I saw that I
Speaker 3: really liked was a ted dancing show called Mister Mayor
Speaker 3: and it's it was funny. I don't know why I
Speaker 3: got canceled. A great cast. It wasn't dumb, it was
Speaker 3: as smart, but it was also hilarious, had a real
Speaker 3: kind of like a slightly different thirty rock vibe to
Speaker 3: like the writing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what, man, I'd have to really dig
Speaker 1: to see what the last major network half hour sitcom was.
Speaker 1: I watched because I feel like it was like arrested development.
Speaker 1: But maybe there's been one since then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I would say probably before, mister Mayor. That's
Speaker 3: as far as it would go back for me too.
Speaker 1: And you watched The Good Place too, didn't you?
Speaker 3: I did. I didn't watch it. I watched it big
Speaker 3: wise on I guess Netflix or whatever. I never watched
Speaker 3: it when it was on.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So obviously all this is barreling us toward MASH,
Speaker 3: which is an acronym. Did you know that, mister Smarty?
Speaker 1: I did. Yeah, Well, why don't you since this is
Speaker 1: your favorite show, why don't you tell everybody what it
Speaker 1: stands for?
Speaker 3: It stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. And as everyone,
Speaker 3: even Jerry knows that there's an asterisk in between the letters.
Speaker 3: Three asterisks. Our friend Dave helped us with this, and he.
Speaker 1: He also hates MASH.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He looked high and low and was like, there's
Speaker 3: no reason for the asterisks. He thinks that it was
Speaker 3: just a design thing, and I couldn't find anything that
Speaker 3: contradicted that.
Speaker 1: Well, my feeling is that I think it clearly was
Speaker 1: meant to show that it is an acronym, even though
Speaker 1: that's not how the military necessarily distinguished it because people
Speaker 1: would just say, what in the world is MASH mean?
Speaker 1: But oh wait, it must stand for something, would be
Speaker 1: my guess.
Speaker 3: Right, But they didn't use periods after each letter like
Speaker 3: the military would of.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, sure, I get you. I'm yeah. An acronym
Speaker 1: is typically a period, right, oh gotcha? Yeah yeah. But
Speaker 1: it looks good though, You're.
Speaker 3: Right, it does.
Speaker 1: It looks fantastic, very signature.
Speaker 3: So mobile Army Surgical Hospital and obviously, if you've ever
Speaker 3: seen MASH, it's where the whole thing is set, set
Speaker 3: during the Korean War in a mobile surgical hospital, hence
Speaker 3: the name, and those were actually a real thing. Did
Speaker 3: you know that, mister smart guy who loves MASH so much?
Speaker 1: Oh boy, this is what we're in for. I did
Speaker 1: know that, because you know, at some point the show
Speaker 1: spells that out, So yeah, I knew that was the thing.
Speaker 1: What I was curious, And you know, my Mash recollection
Speaker 1: this is from a long time ago. I don't remember
Speaker 1: them ever moving at all, so I feel like they
Speaker 1: kind of stayed there, unless that was an episode that
Speaker 1: I missed where they were like, yeah, we're gonna move
Speaker 1: to this other part of Malibu, which which is where
Speaker 1: it was filmed, the Fox Ranch which is now Malibu
Speaker 1: Creek State Park, which is why and all the scenes
Speaker 1: of helicopters flying around Korea. Who knows if that's what
Speaker 1: Korea looks like, but it looks like the mountains of
Speaker 1: southern California.
Speaker 3: You don't know, that's where the Manson family lived for
Speaker 3: a while.
Speaker 1: Oh really, no, No, they lived on Spawn Ring, right, Okay.
Speaker 3: Anytime I hear ranch in California, I just immediately think
Speaker 3: of the Manson family.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I know I've told the story about shooting
Speaker 1: out there, but it was a big treat for me
Speaker 1: as a PA to shoot a commercial and see like
Speaker 1: a rusted out army oh yeah, ambulance, and I think,
Speaker 1: I mean, who knows what's there now, but there were
Speaker 1: still a few remnants back then, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I remember my mind being blown when I found
Speaker 3: out that that was like California in the back.
Speaker 1: He didn't go to Korea.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think that's kind of when I started to
Speaker 3: get that people cut corners for money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a mash thing. A mash was actually a thing,
Speaker 3: and I think it was actually first try it out
Speaker 3: in the Korean War, which I think was a three
Speaker 3: year war. But something interesting that I noticed about Mashes
Speaker 3: that it ran for eleven seasons, so it was almost
Speaker 3: four times longer than the actual war that was the
Speaker 3: setting for this TV show. But in reality, like I
Speaker 3: was saying, a MASH hospital was tried out in the
Speaker 3: Korean War in real life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And the idea is that they put
Speaker 1: the surgeons close to the front lines so they could
Speaker 1: save more lives. And it was, you know, they're all
Speaker 1: kind of temporary, like they slept on you know, cot
Speaker 1: like beds, and they lived in tents, and it was
Speaker 1: on the TV show there's a lot to talk about
Speaker 1: the front and how close they were, but the real
Speaker 1: life MASH units apparently had a ninety seven percent survival rate.
Speaker 1: If you got there, your chances are you lived.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it was a really good idea that panned out. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And in the show, you can hear bombs going off
Speaker 3: sometimes occasionally the overhead lights will flicker and sway because
Speaker 3: they are so close to the front. And I was
Speaker 3: thinking about the same thing that you mentioned too, that
Speaker 3: they never seemed to change or move their unit. And
Speaker 3: if it's supposed to be four to five miles behind
Speaker 3: front lines. Then that would have to be a completely
Speaker 3: static front line for all those years to never move.
Speaker 3: But it made me wonder about like the real life
Speaker 3: mash surgeons, like how often did you have to break
Speaker 3: down your mash unit and then move it, you know,
Speaker 3: and set it up again, which apparently you could do
Speaker 3: very quickly. Supposedly you could set one up in twenty
Speaker 3: four hours. But that also just kind of goes to
Speaker 3: explain like these were not like state of the art
Speaker 3: surgical wards. They were like blood and guts, get your
Speaker 3: hands dirty, you're lucky if you have more than one scalpel,
Speaker 3: kind of like surgical outfit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, And that was conveyed very well in
Speaker 1: the show. The doctors on the show, you know, just
Speaker 1: like in real life, the doctors were generally civilians that
Speaker 1: were drafted into the war to be army surgeons. After
Speaker 1: I think World War Two, they had a tougher time
Speaker 1: getting surgeons going, and when Korea came around, they passed
Speaker 1: the Doctor's Draft Act. If you had already served in
Speaker 1: World War two as a doctor or surgeon or nurse
Speaker 1: or whatever, you didn't, you could get waived. You could
Speaker 1: still serve if you wanted to. But the long and
Speaker 1: short of that is the recruits were younger, they didn't
Speaker 1: have as much experience. They definitely were not looking to
Speaker 1: join the army. Which was a big, big part of
Speaker 1: that show is that none of you know, none of them,
Speaker 1: but the main characters that we're going to talk about,
Speaker 1: like the protagonist, not the foils. The Foils kind of
Speaker 1: liked the army, but the other guys generally did not
Speaker 1: like being there or being in the army culture. And
Speaker 1: Alan Alda was thirty six when they started making this.
Speaker 1: It was kind of curious about his starting age. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: thirty six.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think that's almost one of the cornerstones
Speaker 3: of this show is that these are civilian doctors who
Speaker 3: were drafted in the Middle Military, and they're kind of
Speaker 3: bristling against this the regimentedness that's required of them just
Speaker 3: from being in the military. They're like, just get out
Speaker 3: of our hair. We're here to save lives, you know.
Speaker 3: Take that whole like revelly stuff and shove it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. It was actually a book and this
Speaker 1: smart guy I did not know no.
Speaker 3: Way I was going to ask you that facetiously and
Speaker 3: I didn't.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I did not know this. Of course I
Speaker 1: knew it was a movie, and we'll talk about then
Speaker 1: a second. But the movie was optioned from a book
Speaker 1: written in nineteen sixty eight called Mash Colon, a novel
Speaker 1: about three army doctors by a Mash veteran doctor named
Speaker 1: doctor Richard H. Hornberger under a pseudonym Richard Hooker. I
Speaker 1: think he added a co writer named W. C. Hines
Speaker 1: when it came pretty clear that his book was a
Speaker 1: bit of a mess, because it sounds like it was
Speaker 1: just sort of a group of stories about his experience
Speaker 1: in the eight oh five to five. The eighty fifty
Speaker 1: fifth Mash Unit was the real life unit that it
Speaker 1: was based on, and it sounds like it was, you know,
Speaker 1: like what we see on TV and in the movies,
Speaker 1: Like they partied a lot, they drank a lot, did
Speaker 1: a lot of pranks, and on the side did some surgery.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, like you said, it was kind of loosely
Speaker 3: put together, like each chapter started with hey, get this right,
Speaker 3: and they were basically like yeah, they were anecdotes, and
Speaker 3: then apparently he also peppered in some like gory stuff
Speaker 3: just to basically get across the Horrors of War and
Speaker 3: he was actually a surgeon in Maine and when he
Speaker 3: put this whole book together, and they brought in W. C. Hines,
Speaker 3: a sportswriter, to kind of help him with it. If
Speaker 3: you've seen the TV show and you've never read the book,
Speaker 3: maybe even haven't seen the movie, you have a totally
Speaker 3: different conception of Mash than what Hornberger created and what
Speaker 3: the movie kind of portrayed, which is like, this wasn't
Speaker 3: a he didn't have any liberal agenda. In fact, he
Speaker 3: was kind of conservative, and he didn't really like the
Speaker 3: tone of the TV show, but it was still it
Speaker 3: still had like a kind of anti war bent through it,
Speaker 3: or at least just questioning that the morality of war,
Speaker 3: just how stupid and wasteful it is. But it wasn't
Speaker 3: you know, it was not a liberal book or written
Speaker 3: by a liberal person.
Speaker 1: But you know it's Hollywood gets a whold of something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're going to liberalize it. And that's basically, you know,
Speaker 1: like you said, what the movie and TV show ended
Speaker 1: up being. It's like a statement, like an anti war statement.
Speaker 1: Hornberger after not after Mash, because we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 1: The weird spinoff, but Postmash, he wrote more mash books.
Speaker 1: After you Know the movie was a hit. He wrote
Speaker 1: fourteen mash novels. The first one was called Mash and Maine,
Speaker 1: which published the same year the TV show ended up premiering.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fourteen novels, a movie and a TV show off
Speaker 3: of a book that he had to bring a sports
Speaker 3: writer into help, you know, whip into shape.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you cash in exactly?
Speaker 3: So? Yeah, And he was just basically trying to get
Speaker 3: his anecdotes across, which were mostly like drunken prank stuff
Speaker 3: like you said, like you see on the TV show,
Speaker 3: like that was based on this guy's book. So, like
Speaker 3: I said, it was turned into a movie. I think
Speaker 3: it was option maybe even the year it was published
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty eight, because the movie came out in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy and I imagine it took a little while
Speaker 3: to make because it's a mess and it was directed
Speaker 3: by Robert Altman.
Speaker 1: So you didn't like the movie.
Speaker 3: I've only seen it once. I'm not entirely certain I
Speaker 3: saw the whole thing. I don't remember if I saw
Speaker 3: the whole thing. I was reading about people debating on
Speaker 3: whether the movie is any good or not, And it
Speaker 3: seemed like the consensus was that somebody say it's a
Speaker 3: masterpiece of twentieth century comedy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: See, that's where I veer off, Like I love, love,
Speaker 1: love the TV show. I liked the movie okay, like
Speaker 1: I'm a big Robert Almond guy. It critically did very
Speaker 1: I mean, it was a big hit. It won the
Speaker 1: Golden Palm at the Cans Film Festival in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: nominated for Best Picture and four other oscars. I think
Speaker 1: it won Best Screenplay. So it was a huge hit.
Speaker 1: But it's like, I think maybe I was too young
Speaker 1: the first time I saw it, and I loved the
Speaker 1: TV show so much, I was like, I gotta go
Speaker 1: see the movie version, and the movie version's a lot different,
Speaker 1: and it just didn't. I don't know. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's among Altman's best work, but certainly a lot of
Speaker 1: people disagree with me.
Speaker 3: Sure a lot of people like it, but it's almost
Speaker 3: one of those things you get the impression that people
Speaker 3: like it because it's, you know, supposedly this amazing thing,
Speaker 3: not because they'd like it like it, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean. Maybe maybe that's just kind of the tone
Speaker 3: that I got But anyway, the movie was a little
Speaker 3: closer to the book, and in that it's like it
Speaker 3: portrays everything that the younger generations did, like about the
Speaker 3: oldest generation right now explain sexism, racism, Oh sure, she's
Speaker 3: just completely completely ignoring like the consequences of harming other people.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, like essentially everything, Like those are the
Speaker 3: main themes throughout this movie, right although again the subtext
Speaker 3: is that this is an anti war movie at the
Speaker 3: very least again questioning the morality of war. And it
Speaker 3: was released right at you know, the peak of when
Speaker 3: anti war sentiment was really aroused in America because of
Speaker 3: the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And I didn't know where you're going,
Speaker 1: but you totally nailed it. Like in this movie, it's
Speaker 1: like it's supposed to be funny that hot lips Hula Han,
Speaker 1: the head nurse is the shower curtain has ripped open
Speaker 1: and she has fully frontally exposed naked to the rest
Speaker 1: of the camp. Yeah, like this played for laugh So
Speaker 1: obviously it's a movie of its time. It was by
Speaker 1: Ring Lardner junior, obviously son of a great short story writer,
Speaker 1: Ring Lardner, and he I think they called him. Pinky
Speaker 1: Ring was his nickname.
Speaker 3: No, oh, you got me. That's a good one.
Speaker 1: Oh. Thanks, that'd be a pretty good nickname for a
Speaker 1: Ring Junior. Yeah, or maybe toe ring. No pinky pinky ring.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: Uh so Altman, you know, does his Altman thing, which
Speaker 1: is a lot of improvisation, a lot of overlapping dialogue.
Speaker 1: It's his hallmark as a filmmaker. Ring Lardner Junior did
Speaker 1: not care for that, evidently, and said, like, you ruined
Speaker 1: what I wrote. And I don't know if he took
Speaker 1: that back after he won the Oscar for screenplay or not,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's kind of interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I saw he tried to get his name taken
Speaker 3: off of it and then he won the Oscar. Wow,
Speaker 3: I guess I'll stick with this.
Speaker 1: That's really funny.
Speaker 3: One other thing about ring Lardner Junior I saw is
Speaker 3: that he was one of the Hollywood ten who was
Speaker 3: blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so sure.
Speaker 3: It was like almost a slightly sub of act in
Speaker 3: and of itself to hire him in the late sixties
Speaker 3: after you know, they were bringing him back.
Speaker 1: I guess, well, Altmund's he was an old pothead. He
Speaker 1: was a medium age pothead at that point.
Speaker 3: So let's talk about the theme song, which I'm sure
Speaker 3: a lot of people know the title of it, but
Speaker 3: many people might not actually because they played it. If
Speaker 3: you're a fan of the TV show, it was always instrumental.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they changed it from the movie. In the movie,
Speaker 1: it had words. The name of the song is suicide
Speaker 1: is Painless, and the story behind it I did not know.
Speaker 1: In the mash movie there was a character I did
Speaker 1: know this stuff, Captain Walt Waldowski, who says he wants
Speaker 1: to take his own life because he's gay and he's
Speaker 1: in the army and he can't bear it. And so
Speaker 1: they do a fake sort of a fake funeral, a
Speaker 1: living funeral, and give him a placebo pill, telling him
Speaker 1: it's a big sedative that's gonna, you know, take his life, right.
Speaker 1: And so Altman's like, I need a song that he
Speaker 1: pitched it as I needed to be the stupidest song ever.
Speaker 1: So we hired a guy, a real musician named Johnny Mandel.
Speaker 1: Any relation to the Men that's Mandrill, Sorry.
Speaker 3: Close, he's a distant, distant relation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. He dropped the arm and he was like,
Speaker 1: we need a song for this funeral, I want to
Speaker 1: be the dumbest song ever. And Altman tried to write
Speaker 1: it but couldn't come up with anything that he liked. So,
Speaker 1: as the story goes, he hired his fifteen year old
Speaker 1: son Michael to co write this thing with this pro musician,
Speaker 1: and that's what they came up with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like that explains like it was a purposefully
Speaker 3: stupid song, which explains just the only lyrics I know,
Speaker 3: which is suicide is painless. It brings on many changes,
Speaker 3: and I've always been like that seems a little tongue
Speaker 3: in cheek, like what's the right?
Speaker 1: Like I don't get that.
Speaker 3: No, I do maybe want to go back and read
Speaker 3: the rest of the lyrics because I'm sure they're hilario.
Speaker 1: I actually meant to do that too, and I did not.
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, I know Emily worked with two
Speaker 1: all with Roger and two of his sons on The
Speaker 1: gingerbread Man in Savannah, and I asked her if Michael
Speaker 1: was one of them, and she said no, it was
Speaker 1: two of the others or maybe the other two.
Speaker 3: Was it gingerbread Man? Is that a Grisham thriller? I
Speaker 3: think so, or at least in that vein.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was a Grisham thriller.
Speaker 3: Hey, speaking of movies, I saw something just last night
Speaker 3: that I want to recommend.
Speaker 1: Let's hear it.
Speaker 3: It's an old Oswald or ozgood sorry Oz Ozgod Perkins movie.
Speaker 3: You love that guy, Gretel and Hansel, and I think.
Speaker 1: It's feel like you have it backwards.
Speaker 3: To No, no, that's the way, that's the time. I'm
Speaker 3: just kidding because Gretel's older in this one and it's
Speaker 3: from like twenty twelve, thirteen. It's great.
Speaker 1: You should start a podcast on Oz Perkins.
Speaker 3: I wonder if I could get him to come on.
Speaker 1: It, like, you know, like Finding Oz or the Wizard
Speaker 1: of Oz or something like that.
Speaker 3: Sure, or behind the Curtain, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, find the the green behind the green Door. That's
Speaker 1: something different behind the green curtain.
Speaker 3: Behind the green door.
Speaker 1: Oh man, all right, I feel like you should take
Speaker 1: a break. We told the song story and we'll be
Speaker 1: right back to finally get to the TV show after.
Speaker 2: This loop with Joe shoe on cho.
Speaker 3: Stuff.
Speaker 2: You shit.
Speaker 3: Okay, Chuck, So you said we'd get to the TV show,
Speaker 3: but you lied, lied, lied, Because there's a little more
Speaker 3: about the movie. We have to talk about. Oh okay,
Speaker 3: chiefly that it was nominated for five Oscars, like you said,
Speaker 3: Ring Lardner Junior, and for the Best Screenplay. But most
Speaker 3: importantly is that Robert Altman hated the TV show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, good point.
Speaker 3: I'm guessing that Robert Altman never even saw the TV show.
Speaker 3: I'll bet that he heard it, heard that they were
Speaker 3: making it on CBS and that they were turning into
Speaker 3: a thirty minute comedy and was like, this is the
Speaker 3: It's the worst thing I've ever seen, even though I've
Speaker 3: never seen it. That would be my guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe, And you know, to be fair at the time,
Speaker 1: and you know, we'll see Alan Alda's reaction to being
Speaker 1: pitched this idea and him not wanting to try to
Speaker 1: audition it first is that the history of TV and
Speaker 1: war shows and army and Navy shows and stuff like
Speaker 1: Hogan's Heroes and Michale's Navy, and that's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that somebody like Robert Altman and Alan Alda wouldn't
Speaker 1: have liked. And it was only after Alan Alda read
Speaker 1: the pilot and he said, this is the best TV
Speaker 1: pillot I've ever read. I'm totally going to audition for
Speaker 1: this that he decided to do it, But I could
Speaker 1: see Altman just not going there, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's a really risky thing that's actually,
Speaker 3: in retrospect, quite surprising. It's retrospect, by the way, that's
Speaker 3: the German pronunciation. It's really surprising that anybody was able
Speaker 3: to pull it off, because if you know the book
Speaker 3: or the movie, the idea of adapting those into a
Speaker 3: TV show, a family friendly TV show in the late
Speaker 3: sixties early seventies is like, wait, what are you going
Speaker 3: to do? The only way you could possibly do that
Speaker 3: is to make it like screwball high jinks, like Michale's Navy,
Speaker 3: where the war just happens to be the setting. It
Speaker 3: could also be an office comedy essentially, and that's not
Speaker 3: at all what they did. Thanks to a producer named
Speaker 3: Jene Reynolds and a writer named Larry Gelbert. I don't
Speaker 3: know how those two came together, but it was a
Speaker 3: match made in CBS Heaven.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Gelbert was an experienced writer. He wrote,
Speaker 1: or at least co wrote, the musical of Funny Thing
Speaker 1: Happened on the Way to the Forum. Later on, after
Speaker 1: post smash, he wrote the movie TUTSI, which is great
Speaker 1: in the movie Oh God with George Burns and John Denver,
Speaker 1: which to me is great, and I guess to you
Speaker 1: two not so much Oh God Book two, but that
Speaker 1: first Oh God was awesome.
Speaker 3: I saw both. I don't remember the book two, but
Speaker 3: the first one was so great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, agreed, But they you know, they didn't want they
Speaker 1: wanted to walk that fine line between having laughs and
Speaker 1: it being a quote unquote comedy and an anti war
Speaker 1: movie and a movie about the horrors of combat, and
Speaker 1: it's it's really interesting. They walk a really tough fine line,
Speaker 1: and as we'll see, you know, they ended up doing
Speaker 1: some really groundbreaking episodes, you know, in later seasons. The
Speaker 1: first few seasons were definitely leaned way more into the
Speaker 1: sort of high jinks of it all, and then I
Speaker 1: think they realized, like, hey, we have a real chance
Speaker 1: here to have some incredible character arcs and really do
Speaker 1: something a little bit more like All in the Family
Speaker 1: was doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they actually put it behind All in the
Speaker 3: Family at some point, which helped bring it out of
Speaker 3: TV purgatory, I guess. But one of the ways that
Speaker 3: the producers were able to kind of navigate that narrow
Speaker 3: margin between just idiocy and over over melodramatic stuff was
Speaker 3: that the studio the network was like, obviously, we're going
Speaker 3: to have a laugh track. Thirty minutes comedy have to
Speaker 3: have a laugh track, and the producers kept pushing back
Speaker 3: and pushing back, and they finally reached a compromise where
Speaker 3: the oar scenes could not have a laugh track, And
Speaker 3: then there were other sometimes other episodes or scenes where
Speaker 3: they were real downers where they didn't have the laugh
Speaker 3: track either. But if you watch Mash today, it's easy
Speaker 3: to kind of miss the laugh track until they get
Speaker 3: into the oar and then it's glaringly missing, Yeah, which
Speaker 3: I think is actually kind of useful in contrasting you
Speaker 3: know how these surgeons are these not just the surgeons,
Speaker 3: but everybody at the mass unit is having to get
Speaker 3: jerked around by reality, like just messing around, getting drunk
Speaker 3: on homemade gin and then all of a sudden you
Speaker 3: have like both of your hands in a eighteen year
Speaker 3: old soldier's chest, Like that's what they are trying to
Speaker 3: portray in the kind of smart use of a laugh
Speaker 3: track actually helped with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And you know, as a kid and
Speaker 1: just as an American in general at the time, like
Speaker 1: the laugh track was so ubiquitous that you didn't really
Speaker 1: think about it much as being like weird. It was
Speaker 1: usually like a studio audience thing, and this was not
Speaker 1: a studio audience show, but you just sort of accepted it,
Speaker 1: Like apparently the BBC never used the laugh track at all.
Speaker 1: And then I'm also reminded of like I think years back,
Speaker 1: someone did some Friends episode without the laugh track and
Speaker 1: divided him up into clips, and it's just jarring to
Speaker 1: hear that kind of a show without a laugh track.
Speaker 1: So Match was a was sort of a weird case.
Speaker 3: We've talked about that because not only is a jarring,
Speaker 3: it's like this isn't funny at all.
Speaker 1: It really cues you, and you don't even the laugh
Speaker 1: track sounds like such a dumb thing, like one hundred
Speaker 1: years from now people say, like they really did that
Speaker 1: on shows, but you it was such an institution and
Speaker 1: like a certain kind of comedy that yeah, like you said,
Speaker 1: without it, you don't know him to laugh almost.
Speaker 3: Do you remember in the I Guess the two thousand Oughts.
Speaker 3: It must have been right before Cartoon Network came around,
Speaker 3: or Adult Swim, right before adults swim somebody put out
Speaker 3: like old episodes a Birdman and Space Ghosts like the
Speaker 3: original sixties episodes. But then they peppered him with laugh tracks,
Speaker 3: often inappropriately placed where nothing even remotely funny is going on,
Speaker 3: but the audience this hand laughter just kind of comes
Speaker 3: in and it made it so bizarrely funny. Have you
Speaker 3: not seen those?
Speaker 1: Was that space Ghost Coast to Coast?
Speaker 3: This is before space Coast Coast to Coast?
Speaker 1: Oh okay, because yeah, Dave.
Speaker 3: Willis, Yeah, Dave Willis was on Space Coast Coast to
Speaker 3: coast or he co founded it. I guess he might
Speaker 3: have had something to do with this because it was
Speaker 3: clearly attached to space Coast Coast to coast, because that happened,
Speaker 3: you know, right before it. But if you watch those,
Speaker 3: they're just it's such an easy, basic idea, but it's
Speaker 3: so funny to watch them.
Speaker 1: Oh man, those early years of Cartoon Network were just
Speaker 1: the best. Yeah, and Comedy Central, like it used to
Speaker 1: be so much better, you know, oh yeah, everything.
Speaker 3: I think Comedy Central's just old South Park reruns in
Speaker 3: the Daily Show once in a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a real shame. As far as Mash
Speaker 1: and their storylines go though. Apparently Gilbert and Reynolds interviewed
Speaker 1: a lot of veterans from the Korean War, got a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff from that, and worked into episodes like
Speaker 1: the episode where a wounded North Korean soldier is in
Speaker 1: the er there and he pulls a pin out of
Speaker 1: a hand grenade that he was hi hiding on the
Speaker 1: operating table. Like that apparently really happened, as did a
Speaker 1: lot of that stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I was like, did it really happen? And
Speaker 3: I went and found reference to the actual name of
Speaker 3: the surgeon who told that story in these interviews. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: so like it definitely happened. So I think I said
Speaker 3: that Mash was on for eleven years, and it premiered
Speaker 3: in September seventy two and ran all the way to
Speaker 3: February nineteen eighty three. That is a long run for
Speaker 3: a show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean for pretty good back then.
Speaker 3: Now, like eleven years is a really long time. But
Speaker 3: at first it was not very well received the very
Speaker 3: at least people didn't know about it because it was
Speaker 3: put up against the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday
Speaker 3: nights and it was not doing very well there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, wonderful Disney was a juggernaut of a
Speaker 1: show for mainstream America. So Alan Alda apparently used to
Speaker 1: joke that MASH was one of the top seventy eight
Speaker 1: shows on TV early on, and very Alan Alda kind
Speaker 1: of thing to say, and they moved it like like
Speaker 1: you've said earlier to after All in the Family, which
Speaker 1: was a huge hit, and that made gave MASH a
Speaker 1: lot more visibility, obviously, and all of a sudden, MASH
Speaker 1: was the number two show on TV and that was it.
Speaker 1: And Day found a great quote from Newsweek as far
Speaker 1: as a critical acclaim that I think kind of sums
Speaker 1: it up, and it is this, without ever moralizing, Mash
Speaker 1: is the most moral entertainment on commercial television. It proposes
Speaker 1: craft against butchery, humor against despair, wit as a defense
Speaker 1: mechanism against the senseless enormity of the situation. Pretty good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the Newsweek people really got it.
Speaker 1: Should we talk about the characters, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Let's because we've made reference to some, but I feel
Speaker 3: like we should get a little more in depth with them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Hay, we've mentioned a few times. He's I
Speaker 1: guess you would just call the main character and that
Speaker 1: was Alanalda, by the way, the great Alan Alda, Like,
Speaker 1: he's one of my heroes in entertainment really and by
Speaker 1: all accounts, just one of the best dudes ever. And
Speaker 1: he is ninety years old now, and which is great.
Speaker 1: He's still around, and he is one of the great
Speaker 1: writers and great directors and great actors and great human
Speaker 1: beings in the history of the TV and movie business.
Speaker 3: I think did he write a lot of those movies
Speaker 3: he was in in the early eighties.
Speaker 1: I think he co wrote he directed almost all of them.
Speaker 1: He co wrote thirteen Mash episodes, directed thirty one, and
Speaker 1: he played you know, Hawkey Pierce. This is a little
Speaker 1: known fact. Did you get that mental article I sent over? Yeah,
Speaker 1: with the top or whatever? Twelve things seventeen So a
Speaker 1: few of these guys actually served in the at least
Speaker 1: in the reserves. Alan Alda was serch six months in
Speaker 1: the Army reserves in Korea. Pretty crazy.
Speaker 3: So did Jamie Farr, who played Corporal Clinger, who is
Speaker 3: essentially far and away the most famous person until Katie
Speaker 3: Holmes came along to have come from Toledo.
Speaker 1: I thought, you did this a Toledo thing. He was
Speaker 1: always if you did never watch the show. Clinger often
Speaker 1: referenced to Toledo mud Hens.
Speaker 3: Toledo mud Hens, and Tony Pacos, which is a real
Speaker 3: place in to I.
Speaker 1: Mean, that's your place. I didn't know he talked about
Speaker 1: that on the show.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he talked about Tony Pacos all the time.
Speaker 1: Oh see, I didn't know what it was back then.
Speaker 1: I was like, who the hell is Tony Paco.
Speaker 3: No, Tony Pacos is like a hot dog place, a
Speaker 3: Hungarian hot dog place. And every time he would mention
Speaker 3: the mud Hens or the Tony Pacos, I would look
Speaker 3: over at my dad and there'd just be like a
Speaker 3: single tear going down his cheek. He's so filled with
Speaker 3: pride because you know, he got some on his face.
Speaker 1: All right, So Hawkey's the main guy. He Allan all
Speaker 1: did for what It's Worth is the first person to
Speaker 1: win an Emmy for acting, writing and directing on the
Speaker 1: same show.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Then we have his buddy, Trapper John played by Wayne Rodgers,
Speaker 1: who was in real life in the Navy, and he
Speaker 1: is the you know, the tent mate and confidant. Apparently
Speaker 1: Robert Klein, the Great comedian turned down that role and
Speaker 1: regretted it.
Speaker 3: I could see that, although Wayne Rodgers, the guy who
Speaker 3: played Trapper, John was like, you know, this guy's not
Speaker 3: fully fleshed out. I'm basically Hawkeye's sidekick, right, I'm in
Speaker 3: the sidecar. I'm laughing along with him. We're doing like
Speaker 3: pranks together, but there's no me. Who is me? And
Speaker 3: the director was like, I think it's who is I?
Speaker 3: And they got into a really long disagreement about whether
Speaker 3: it was I or me, and Wayne Rogers eventually left
Speaker 3: after the third season.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The reason he was able to was because he never
Speaker 3: signed a contract with the producers. I guess there was
Speaker 3: like a morality clause. He's like, I'm not signing this,
Speaker 3: and they forgot to go back and get him to
Speaker 3: sign something. So he after the third season, which apparently
Speaker 3: he seemed fine with.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, Mash is one of those shows, like Cheers,
Speaker 1: that was able to withstand some pretty drastic cast changes.
Speaker 1: It's hard to pull off as a TV show. Cheers
Speaker 1: did it very well, and Mash did it very well
Speaker 1: because three of the main characters ended up being replaced.
Speaker 1: Trapper was replaced by Honeycut BJ Honeycut played by Mike Farrell,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's Pharrell. He was actually a US Marine
Speaker 1: in real life. He was great. I love Toneycut. You know. Again,
Speaker 1: those later seasons after like Trapper left and as we'll see,
Speaker 1: some of the other characters left, there were some tonal changes,
Speaker 1: but I was along for the whole ride. I was
Speaker 1: in for all of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially in the beginning, Hawkeye and Trapper John were
Speaker 3: like prankster drunk womanizers. They would harass the nurses and
Speaker 3: try to get him to sleep with them and all
Speaker 3: sorts of stuff. And then bj Honeycut was a lot different.
Speaker 3: He was a breath of fresh air because he was
Speaker 3: very true to his wife back home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: And he had a mustache.
Speaker 1: That's right. Did we have Radar of course, Corporal Radar
Speaker 1: O'Reilly played by Gary Bergoff. He was named Radar because
Speaker 1: he was very much a recurring thing on the show.
Speaker 1: Like every single episode he would either kind of finish
Speaker 1: somebody's sentences, usually Colonel Blake's sentence, or know what somebody needed,
Speaker 1: like before they needed it and kind of just hand
Speaker 1: it to him, or he would and this is a
Speaker 1: lot of times at the end of an episode. He
Speaker 1: would always since the helicopters coming in with wounded before
Speaker 1: you could hear the helicopters, and usually, like, if it
Speaker 1: was a pretty light episode to be a lot of
Speaker 1: high jinks that would be kind of halted at the
Speaker 1: end of the episode when he heard the helicopters coming.
Speaker 3: Right there was Colonel Blake. He was one of my favorites,
Speaker 3: played by McLean Stevenson and great. He was an actual
Speaker 3: doctor who was put in charge of this mash unit
Speaker 3: and he's like, I have no idea how to run
Speaker 3: any kind of army outfit. So he was always kind
Speaker 3: of in over his depth, but he tried really hard
Speaker 3: and he would get perturbed, which was kind of funny
Speaker 3: sometimes because he never got mad. He just got right
Speaker 3: perturbed and befuddled.
Speaker 1: Kind of yeah, exasperated.
Speaker 3: But he wasn't an idiot like it was. It would
Speaker 3: have been really easy for any actor to portray him
Speaker 3: as kind of a dummy, but McClean stevenson managed to
Speaker 3: keep him from going down that route.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, he was a man. I love that character.
Speaker 1: We should mention too that Gary Bergoff's radar was the
Speaker 1: only one who bridged the movie as far as you know,
Speaker 1: being in both Colonel Blake was then replaced by Colonel
Speaker 1: Sherman G. Potter. Yeah, played by Harry Morgan, And he
Speaker 1: was a very different character than Blake, and that he
Speaker 1: was an old school soldier, but he also kind of
Speaker 1: he wasn't as by the book as you would think
Speaker 1: for an old school soldier and sort of indulged the
Speaker 1: antics for the most part.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Andy used the term horse feathers a lot to Mars. Yes,
Speaker 3: there was another great character too who you just love
Speaker 3: to hate. He was so good. Frank Burns, who was
Speaker 3: played by Larry Lineville. He was He had what you
Speaker 3: would term today is justice sensitivity. He liked to follow
Speaker 3: the rules. He was fine with the military and the
Speaker 3: requirements for its conformity, and anyone who didn't conform to
Speaker 3: it was it just drove him up the wall, and
Speaker 3: he tried to get them in trouble. So he was
Speaker 3: like a tried and true fascist essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was a bureaucrat. He was completely the foil
Speaker 1: of Hawkeye and Trapper. He was played by Robert Duvall
Speaker 1: in the film. But Larry Lynnville, as Ferret Face as
Speaker 1: they called him, was just I mean always felt bad
Speaker 1: for the guy in real life because he was able
Speaker 1: to play one of the more unlikable characters in TV history,
Speaker 1: and he just did it so well as really good actor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we should say also, Frank Burns was not a
Speaker 3: good surgeon, and at the end of the day in
Speaker 3: this mash unit, that's what that's what mattered, right, That's
Speaker 3: why Hawkeye and Trapper John got away with all of
Speaker 3: their antics, was because they were really good surgeons and
Speaker 3: when it came to it, they were going to save
Speaker 3: people's lives. Frank Burns what made him even worse is
Speaker 3: that he wasn't even a good surgeon, Like you could
Speaker 3: die on his operating table because he wasn't that good.
Speaker 3: And yet he would still go tell on you for
Speaker 3: you know, drinking gin that you made in your get
Speaker 3: you know, and it so much worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were tentmates, the three of them, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: two guys and then Burns lived together, and then he
Speaker 1: was replaced after the fifth season in season six by
Speaker 1: David Ogden's Steers as Charles Emerson Winchester, the third who
Speaker 1: was a major I always thought he was kind of British,
Speaker 1: but he just sort of did that mid Atlantic thing
Speaker 1: because he was came from a wealthy family in Boston
Speaker 1: family of doctors apparently, and he was a little less
Speaker 1: of a foil but still a bit of a foil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and blended and with him because he was so snobby.
Speaker 3: They just had nothing in common essentially from their backgrounds.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Then there's Margaret hot Lips Hula Han played by Loretta Switt,
Speaker 3: who I've seen just from reading up on mash. The
Speaker 3: TV show is roundly credited as taking like a pretty
Speaker 3: one dimensional victim, angry character and turning her into something
Speaker 3: like really respectable and three dimensional over the course of
Speaker 3: the eleven seasons, and that she actually got better, like
Speaker 3: the character got more involved in impressive and interesting over
Speaker 3: the years thanks to this actor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Loretta Sweat, she was great. Rest in peace. I
Speaker 1: think we lost her last year or the year before,
Speaker 1: like fairly recently. She on the show hot Lips was
Speaker 1: having an affair with Frank Burns, and they were always
Speaker 1: sort of coupled together against the you know, the other guys,
Speaker 1: and they were bureaucrats. But like you said, she had
Speaker 1: a great character arc ded up really developing into something
Speaker 1: special and then rounding it out. I guess we already
Speaker 1: talked about Clinger. We have father M'kayhe played by William Christopher,
Speaker 1: who is the chaplain, and that's about all we need
Speaker 1: to say about him. He was just sort of there.
Speaker 3: Did we talk about clingers wearing women's clothing?
Speaker 1: Oh no, that was a big part of it, Yeah, hugely.
Speaker 3: Apparently he was written as a one off character initially,
Speaker 3: and he was written as a gay character who wore
Speaker 3: women's clothes, like full on frilly dresses and sun hats
Speaker 3: like Sunday like going to church kind of stuff. And
Speaker 3: Jamie Farr was like, look, I think I can do
Speaker 3: this a little differently, Like, imagine if this is a
Speaker 3: straight guy dressing like this because he wants to get
Speaker 3: out of the army for some psych thing. And he
Speaker 3: did such a good job in this one off episode
Speaker 3: that they brought him back as a character, not just
Speaker 3: a recurring character. He became one of the characters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And he yeah, he was one of
Speaker 1: the great characters. He tried to eat it ep in
Speaker 1: one episode to further prove his mental unfitness to serve
Speaker 1: and that was one of the funny episodes. I guess
Speaker 1: before we take a break, we should rattle off some
Speaker 1: of these guest stars. Yeah, because Mash had quite a
Speaker 1: list of people who came on for one episode, including
Speaker 1: but not limited to, Ron Howard, Sure, Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Swayzee,
Speaker 1: Laurence Fishburne, the Great George went Terry Garr. Who else
Speaker 1: you got?
Speaker 3: Andrew Dice Clay, Yeah, the Dice manh Yeah, just one thing.
Speaker 3: This is apparently where Leslie Nielsen made the transition to comedy. Oh,
Speaker 3: on his appearance on MASH.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great. Yeah, Rita Wilson, Oh, oh, we're still going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't forget Bagley Junior.
Speaker 1: Yeah, John Ritter, Shelley Long, Pat Marita. Of course, Pat
Speaker 1: Marita's in there. He was into two Hollywood in the seventies.
Speaker 1: They're like, we don't care what part of Asia you're from, exactly,
Speaker 1: just sign them up exactly.
Speaker 3: We feel pretty progressive that we're actually casting an agent
Speaker 3: to play an Asian.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and yeah, for sure. All right, shall we take
Speaker 1: that second break? Yeah, yes, all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Birds of Up with Joe shoe Cho stuff you shoot,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 1: So earlier we talked about some what you would call
Speaker 1: very special episodes. This was a thing that back then
Speaker 1: on a lot of shows, like you know when Arnold
Speaker 1: and Willis find drugs in different strokes, like when a
Speaker 1: comedy takes a more serious tone. Mash added quite a few,
Speaker 1: and we can go through these kind of quickly. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna pick Sometimes You Hear a Bullet from season one,
Speaker 1: because that is an episode in which Hawkeye's childhood friend
Speaker 1: comes over as a journalist to write a book about
Speaker 1: the war and he ends up dying on Hawkeye's operating table.
Speaker 1: And that was the first episode that was really very heavy,
Speaker 1: where like Hawkeye cries and it gets kind of serious
Speaker 1: about the horrors of war.
Speaker 3: Yes, okay, all right, I'm going to pick Dreams from
Speaker 3: season eight, which is apparently its most controversial episode because
Speaker 3: it is very jarring, very disturbing, where it covers each
Speaker 3: of the main characters is taking a rest from like
Speaker 3: a long day in ther where they saw two hundred
Speaker 3: and eleven patients over thirty three hours, and it goes
Speaker 3: through each one of their dreams and it's very surreal.
Speaker 3: All sorts of weird, disturbing stuff happens. And I haven't
Speaker 3: seen it, but I want to watch it because it
Speaker 3: sounds just totally.
Speaker 1: Nuts, but it's pretty weird.
Speaker 3: It's completely contrary to any other episode. So I imagine
Speaker 3: if you were tuning in on Saturday night on CBSC,
Speaker 3: you know to kind of laugh and maybe cry, and
Speaker 3: you saw this horrible weirdness, you might have had a
Speaker 3: bad reaction to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. There were two more episodes that were
Speaker 1: definitely weird as far as mainstream television goes, a documentary style,
Speaker 1: one called The Interview, where it was like a black
Speaker 1: and white you know, like a Vietnam era black and
Speaker 1: white documentary about war. That one was kind of crazy
Speaker 1: to see on TV at the time. It won a
Speaker 1: Humanitus Prize for a work that explores the human condition
Speaker 1: in a meaningful way. And then the other one was
Speaker 1: called point of View, and the whole thing is shot
Speaker 1: from like the camera's point of view is from a
Speaker 1: wounded soldier who can't talk, and so all the actors
Speaker 1: are just coming up and addressing camera as the soldier,
Speaker 1: and it's, you know, again, a very sort of groundbreaking
Speaker 1: roll of the dice to do for mainstream TV in
Speaker 1: the seventies for sure.
Speaker 3: And then we got to talk about Abyssinia. Henry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean this episode wrecked little Chuck, nine
Speaker 1: year old Chuck.
Speaker 3: I remember this one too, and I was like, where's
Speaker 3: the laugh track?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Oh. Colonel Blake, who we both love, played by McClean Stevenson.
Speaker 3: This is the season three finale. He gets word that
Speaker 3: he's going home, like his tour is over. He's out
Speaker 3: of the army now, and so he leaves and that's it,
Speaker 3: Like everybody's saying bye, everybody's happy for him. He's happy.
Speaker 3: And then at the end of the episode, Radar comes
Speaker 3: into the o R and he's holding a telegram and
Speaker 3: what does the telegram say, Chuck.
Speaker 1: I can't even say it.
Speaker 3: It says that Colonel Blake's plane went down with Colonel
Speaker 3: Blake aboard and that there were no survivors. So on
Speaker 3: his way back home after his tour, after becoming beloved
Speaker 3: by all viewers, Colonel Blake is dead. The writers killed
Speaker 3: him after he was already off the show, and it
Speaker 3: just wrecked everybody.
Speaker 1: Like you said, it was brutal. Alan Alda knew this
Speaker 1: was going to happen. The story goes that they didn't
Speaker 1: tell the rest of the cast until they got their
Speaker 1: sides that morning, and because they wanted, you know, a
Speaker 1: real reaction, or maybe they didn't even have the sides
Speaker 1: maybe they. I think they just learned when radar walked
Speaker 1: in in the scene and Gary Berghoff's acting in that
Speaker 1: is incredible. And you know, there's no reaction, like, no
Speaker 1: one's like, oh my god, No, it's just very quietly.
Speaker 1: They keep operating and you just hear they're they're crying
Speaker 1: and you just hear like scalpel, you know, suction, and
Speaker 1: it's it's devastating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's good stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very very tough.
Speaker 3: So, Chuck, I feel like the the episode we can
Speaker 3: just skip it, you know, the Mash finale.
Speaker 1: I don't have to talk about that the big deal.
Speaker 3: I don't know if we said, but we surely we've
Speaker 3: mentioned this before that the most watched television episode is
Speaker 3: the final episode of Mash, which is really saying something
Speaker 3: because it was two and a half half hours long.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's right, it was. I remember it
Speaker 1: being long. I don't remember it being that long.
Speaker 3: Two and a half hours man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course that includes commercials. A thirty second
Speaker 1: spot apparently was four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which
Speaker 1: would be one point three six million dollars today. It
Speaker 1: was called Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, and it was you know,
Speaker 1: the war ends. Basically it's the last episode, but it
Speaker 1: is very dramatic for a lot of it, and like
Speaker 1: the things the characters go through at the end are
Speaker 1: all pretty you know, take pretty dramatic turns.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and very famously in this like kind of heartrending
Speaker 3: montage at the very end, it shows how every character
Speaker 3: dies in the future.
Speaker 1: You're talking about six feet hundred. Yeah, that is I
Speaker 1: haven't seen it in a while. I was like, did
Speaker 1: that really happen?
Speaker 3: That is one of the greatest endings to any show ever.
Speaker 1: Of course it was great also gut wrenching, Yeah it was.
Speaker 3: But Goodbye, Farewell and Amen is fantastic too, for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, like you said, the the biggest rated TV
Speaker 1: show of all time, and that was like including sports
Speaker 1: events up until Super Bowl twenty ten finally surpassed it,
Speaker 1: but Mash is still as far as just a regular
Speaker 1: TV show goes. The finale is the most watched. I
Speaker 1: think seventy five percent of America tuned into that, which
Speaker 1: is a staggering number. You know, you see Hawkeye in
Speaker 1: a mental hospital, father Mukay, he loses his faith in God,
Speaker 1: he loses his hearing and his faith in God. Clinger
Speaker 1: ends up marrying a Korean woman and stays there.
Speaker 3: Ironically, Yeah, because he was always trying to get out
Speaker 3: of there, right.
Speaker 1: He's trying to go home.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Did you see the urban possible urban legend about the
Speaker 1: plumbing in New York City? No, that was in the
Speaker 1: Mental Plus thing. I don't know if this is true,
Speaker 1: but I've always heard this that the plumbing in New
Speaker 1: York City supposedly broke during the first commercial break because
Speaker 1: everybody got up to pee at the same time in
Speaker 1: New York.
Speaker 3: Awesome.
Speaker 1: It totally sounds like it's probably not real. They all
Speaker 1: flushed at once and it just broke everything.
Speaker 3: All the alligators drowned.
Speaker 1: But you know, that's funny. Uh. It's a good story though, regardless.
Speaker 1: For one hundred and twenty one million people tuned in
Speaker 1: to that episode, and I was one of them. My
Speaker 1: whole family sat around and then we didn't do that
Speaker 1: kind of thing much.
Speaker 3: Oh, we watched it. My mom video taped it. We
Speaker 3: watched it on videotape many times too.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she'd be like, watch this, watch this part, watch
Speaker 3: it again. I have a cute little anecdote about watching
Speaker 3: mash though all right, let's hear you me. So, her
Speaker 3: older brother Bobby, he has special needs, and one day
Speaker 3: when they were much much younger, you mean, must have
Speaker 3: probably done five or six or something, Bobby had to
Speaker 3: go to the er. And her dad was a marine,
Speaker 3: so they were living on a marine base at the time,
Speaker 3: and her mom, like her dad, whisks Bobby off to
Speaker 3: the er and her mom tells her that Bobby's going
Speaker 3: to the hospital. And so Yumi's only frame of reference
Speaker 3: for military hospitals is a mass unit where there's always
Speaker 3: bombs going off and everything is kind of nuts. So
Speaker 3: she was really worried or other was going to a
Speaker 3: mash unit, which I've just found endlessly cute.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's adorable, it's funny. I'm going to bring that
Speaker 1: up next time I see you mean, that's hysterical.
Speaker 3: That's hilarious. Oh, by the way, Echo and the Bunny Man.
Speaker 1: Is Saturday this Saturday in Atlanta at the Tabernacle.
Speaker 3: Remember I told you i'd remind you again.
Speaker 1: I know, I'm looking to see if I can go.
Speaker 1: We should probably do this off air.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I just wanted to remind you.
Speaker 1: Okay, You're like, I'm not going, but you should go, Oh, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going we will quickly mention the Mash spinoffs. I
Speaker 1: teased After a Mashed a few times as saying Postmash,
Speaker 1: but that was the name of one of the spinoffs
Speaker 1: that didn't run long, about a season and a half,
Speaker 1: and it was one of the ones that had the
Speaker 1: most characters I guess from the show because the real
Speaker 1: Colonel Potter was there, Clinger was there, and father Okay,
Speaker 1: he was there, you know, obviously, all in a hospital
Speaker 1: post war, a veteran's hospital.
Speaker 3: Did you watch it? I remember watching After Mash.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I watched it some, and I remember not loving it,
Speaker 1: so I don't think I watched it all.
Speaker 3: There's also Trapper John MD, which was on for seven seasons,
Speaker 3: and it even was running concurrently at the same time
Speaker 3: as Mash itself for a lot of that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of weird.
Speaker 3: Ye what was his name, Shane Rogers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like they recast it, so it's just like, why
Speaker 1: not just call it something else?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess because everybody loved the character. But even
Speaker 3: still his character like fifty years in the future or
Speaker 3: something like that, you know, or or thirty years in
Speaker 3: the future, so he's an old band so they had
Speaker 3: another actor, Pernell Roberts, so you probably know from the
Speaker 3: sixties touring company of Camelot, but he played Trapper John
Speaker 3: as an older man.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so of course now I'm a dummy. Like
Speaker 1: the reason they called it that was so they could
Speaker 1: bank on the successive.
Speaker 3: Mash That's what I would guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't think that through.
Speaker 3: It almost makes me wonder if they just retrofitted a
Speaker 3: show that had already been green right to Trapper John.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like The Pit was supposed to be an Er spinoff.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, and there's I think there's still a
Speaker 1: lawsuit because apparently there's And of course I'm speaking completely
Speaker 1: as someone who doesn't know a lot about this, so
Speaker 1: look it up if you really want to know. But
Speaker 1: I think the Michael Crichton estate got involved and they're like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, you can't do an Er spin off
Speaker 1: without like giving us some juice because he came up
Speaker 1: with the idea for r or whatever wrote the book
Speaker 1: that was based on or something. And I think there's
Speaker 1: like a like a paper trail of because The Pit
Speaker 1: was like, no, no, no, that wasn't the deal. It's
Speaker 1: just a new show. It's not supposed to be Noah
Speaker 1: Wiley's character. But I think there's an email trail where
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, you want money, huh, let's just
Speaker 1: call it something else and change the character's name.
Speaker 3: Who is that dumb these days?
Speaker 1: I don't know, and I don't know. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: sure I'm getting some details wrong, but I know that
Speaker 1: it is an ongoing issue.
Speaker 3: There was one more. It was Walter w A l
Speaker 3: t e. R. With the Ass Even. Yeah, that was
Speaker 3: a nineteen eighty four pilot that didn't I think it
Speaker 3: aired one time and it was aired in the Eastern
Speaker 3: and Central time zones. It was apparently so bad they
Speaker 3: didn't even air it in the West that same night.
Speaker 1: Didn't they do that for our show?
Speaker 3: Pretty much? They tried to cram it all into one
Speaker 3: night for sure.
Speaker 1: Man, that's crazy. I didn't know that about the West
Speaker 1: coast thing. That is a brutal move.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we can't even let the California I see
Speaker 1: the show?
Speaker 3: Right? So it was about Radar O'Reilly in his life
Speaker 3: after Korea, and it was played by Gary Berghoff, and
Speaker 3: he was going to become a cop and his wife
Speaker 3: had just left him and he was contemplating suicide and
Speaker 3: this was a comedy a half hour comment from what
Speaker 3: I understand.
Speaker 1: So people, I bet you that's out there. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to watch that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1: I got nothing else. I appreciate you indulging this one.
Speaker 1: I know it's not your favorite show, but I thank you.
Speaker 3: Hey, I can always talk about Mash for fifty three
Speaker 3: straight minutes any time you want.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do it again right now.
Speaker 3: Okay, if you want to know more about match, just
Speaker 3: go start watching it. I propose watching the episode Dreams first, maybe,
Speaker 3: just to get it out of the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And since Chuck said yeah, that means it's time for
Speaker 3: a listener mail.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not so much a listener mail, even though it
Speaker 1: was one little inside baseball. But our email has been
Speaker 1: screwed up for a couple of months now, as far
Speaker 1: as if you haven't heard back from us, by the way,
Speaker 1: and you send an email lately, it's because our email
Speaker 1: is super screwed up.
Speaker 3: My fault.
Speaker 1: The good news is we're now getting them again, but
Speaker 1: they are being forwarded, so you can't directly reply. Long
Speaker 1: way of saying, this comes from Martha Black, and there's
Speaker 1: really no need in even reading the email, because all
Speaker 1: it was was, Hey, Chuck, by the way, that Howard
Speaker 1: Hughes picture of him as an old guy in Vegas
Speaker 1: is actor rip torn. No. It even says so in
Speaker 1: the caption that she so, I definitely have an egg
Speaker 1: on my face for that one, because now that I
Speaker 1: see it, I'm like, yeah, I guess, I guess that
Speaker 1: is ripped? Is there?
Speaker 3: Right? Alreadie?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but he was younger, and he was you know,
Speaker 1: had tissue boxes on his feet. For God's sake.
Speaker 3: It fooled me to chuck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, well, and of course that makes sense.
Speaker 1: There are no pictures of Howard Hughes in Vegas. He
Speaker 1: didn't know all that.
Speaker 3: At least it wasn't ai.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3: You know, at least they got ripped horn.
Speaker 1: To pose for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So who is that from?
Speaker 1: Martha Black?
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, Martha Black. Sounds like an MTV VJ
Speaker 3: from back in the day.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: If you want to be like Martha Black and show
Speaker 3: off your name, you can email us too. Hopefully we'll
Speaker 3: get it these days. Send it off to Stuff Podcast
Speaker 3: at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.