Well Gary Burghoff they say was tired of the Radar character and who wouldnt? The young virgin with his teddy bear. Plus he was the sole holdover from the MASH movie and he thought his character should have had more prominence.
What I dont get about Harry Morgan is his first appearance was this racist general just visiting and then they decide to make him the new colonel?
Yeah, it was kind of unfortunate that he had already made such a memorable appearance as a different character. It was bad enough that we had to stop thinking of him as the guy from Dragnet!
Sometimes Linville didn’t show up for the read-throughs because he got tired of being put down all the time. The writers hardly ever gave Frank a chance to redeem himself, so he didn’t care for being constantly reviled. Charles at least got to put in his share of good deeds, so maybe the writers learned something from that.
Another shock is Stiers appeared as Scott Woodville, the head operative of the Townsend Detective Agency, in the pilot film for “Charlie’s Angels” in March, 1976. Bosley (David Doyle) was his bumbling assistant. Apparently audiences didn’t react like his character so when it went to a series, they got rid of Woodville, made Bosley more competent and promoted him. I’d say it worked out well for Stiers. Comedies usually do better in syndication than dramas (if we can call a show featuring women without bras as a drama).
I’m surprised at the number of people who vote for later seasons. For me, the initial cast was pure comic gold. The Blake-Hawkeye-Trapper-Burns dynamic was hysterical, and the rest of the cast, in my memory at least, never hit a false note. Some episodes were better than others, but I loved the show most when it was FUN. During the early years, I really don’t think anybody who watched it was under the impression that the moral of the show was about anything but the senseless destruction of Vietnam. We got it. And it was powerful. But it was able to carry that moral without beating us over the head with it like it did in the joyless, ultra-self-serious later seasons. Some of those episodes were just exhausting. And soon after Hunnicutt showed up, the lines he got were so unbelievably lame that it felt like they had a special intern writer or something that was just in charge of his dialogue. His lines started tanking almost every good line Alda would get off. It was a terrible thing to witness!:smack:
Everyone knows the weirdest, oddest most bizarre performance/appearance by David Ogden Stiers was as J’onn J’onzz / Martian Manhunter in the 1997 film Justice League of America. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118365/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_73
If you ever want to see the Martian Manhunter with a large gut…