This is a silly question, but it comes to mind because I’m watching reruns of Hogan’s Heroes…
Was there ever any resolution to that show? Did they just do a Gilligan’s Island and just stop with the guys still in Stalag 13 or did they show anything pertaining to the end of the war? (I’m guessing they didn’t since Bob Crane was killed way back when…I’m not sure but he probably died during the show’s run.)
I can’t answer your question about the resolution of the series, but Bob Crane died in 1978, and the series ended in '71, so his death wasn’t the reason for the series going off the air.
Funny, I was just thinking about that. Since I watched the show religiously when I was a kid, I can tell you, no the series never depicted the war ending.
I also engaged in some highly geeked-out speculation about after the war. Hogan and Klink become friends, but Klink, down on his luck and humiliated at having let the prisoners get away with so much, goes to the US to get help form Hogan. Hilarity ensues.
Summary of the show’s final episode.
The series never showed the end of the war or the guys getting out of the camp. The last episode was fairly routine and interchangeable with the rest of the series.
It aired in the 60s. Shows did not routinely have series finales until much later. There were a few exceptions (The Dick Van Dyck Show had one, though that was pretty much a regular episode with nothing tied up or any resolution), but usually it was expected that a show would continue indefinitely if it had the ratings or be cancelled if it did not.
The idea of resolving everything just wouldn’t have occurred to anyone at the time.
Having a last show that is different than the rest is a fairly new phenomenon. I can’t recall anyone doing one prior to Mary Tyler Moore but I could be wrong. In the good old days they just kept cranking out the shows in the hopes that it got renewed. When it didn’t, that decision came down well after the last show was in the can.
Trivia point: AFAICT, the series was inspired by the excellent movie Stalag 17. Catch it on AMC the next time it’s on. You’ll recognize several elements that made it into the series, although the humor is darker and the drama more serious.
I believe The Fugitive was the first show with a series-ending finale.
Thats too bad. I like the idea that Klink came the the US humiliated and needed Hogan’s help. Neither he nor Shultz were Nazi party members. Both of them, Klink especially, seemed like men caught up in events, not evil anti-semite crazy men.
I seem to remember that Spy magazine had a prank, just about the time that TV-show-inspired movies were becoming all the rage, where they called around pretending to be producing a big-screen Hogan’s Heroes movie, to see who they could get to go along with it…
Which got me thinking of what you could do with a Hogan’s Heroes movie. My idea was to set it at a reunion, ten years after the end of the war, with everyone anxious to finally meet the mysterious mastermind, Papa Bear, who had planned the entire operation. There would be flashbacks to the group’s last missions, the liberation of the camp, their debriefings and return to civilian life.
At the end of the movie, Papa Bear arrives, and it’s Colonel Klink.
That could work with only a very very very good cast, crew, screenwriter and director.
Schultz was actually the owner of a toy factory so Klink might be working for him after the war.
Marc
Crane definitely didn’t die during the series run; he continued onto an abortive film career (Superdad), a series of guest shots on various TV programmes (see his IMDb.com entry) and a stint in dinner theatre purgatory. Although I can’t vouch for its authenticity the recent film Autofocus purports to cover the highlights of his “Hogan’s Heros” days through his death (and implies that an electrican named John Carptenter who was invovled in Crane’s infamous sexual exploits) was responsible for the murder in a Scottsdale, AZ hotel.
Please, Og, no. The original show was sufficiently in bad taste; a cinematic remake would be hideous. Of course, I’d say the same thing about Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Miami Vice, but no one listens. :dubious:
Stranger
I’ve always wondered about that. Is Hogan’s Heroes in worse taste than The Producers or To Be or Not to Be? Is Mel Brooks the only person who’s allowed to make fun of Hitler these days?
I assumed Stranger meant “in bad taste” simply in reference to its assault on comedy, not that a sitcom set in a WWII POW camp was necessarily bad taste.
Chicken Run, though it wasn’t literally set in a POW camp, was in no uncertain terms a sendup of German WWII POW camps - nobody argues that it was in poor taste, do they?
Wait. There is a remake of Knight Rider out?
There were. One with Hasselhoff and KITT, one with a new KITT and no Hasselhoff, and one with a bunch of new KITTs and still no Hasselhoff.
Oh, yeah, the nineties. I’d don’t remember much from the nineties. Looks like I didn’t miss much.
Isn’t Chicken Run based on The Great Escape?
Mostly. Not the ending 
Seriously, largely no - there are a lot of references to TGE. But CR is its own story.
It’s really not The Great Escape, plot-wise - the tunnel escape was a throwaway joke early on in the movie. And TGE was a movie about various prisoner’s individual experiences after the escape. CR was really about the plot to get out of the camp. And tons of other differences - there’s no “Rhode Island Red” equivalent at all.
And they did a fantastic job of communicating POW camp without ever saying POW camp, and at the same time communicating it wasn’t a concentration camp (I can just imagine how worried the makers of the movie were about that).