Okay so according to Colonel Klink, “There has never been a successful escape from Stalag 13.” If only he KNEW, right? BUT…I know something. At one point Ivan Dixon who played Sgt. Kinchloe left the show because he got an opportunity to write and direct. Good for him, but he was replaced by another black actor named Kenneth Washington who played Sgt. Baker. Okay, so if there has never been a successful escape from Stalag 13, then how the hell was Sgt. Kinchloe WRITTEN OUT of the show and replaced with Sgt. Baker!?
“I know nothing, NOTHING!”
actually, this is about the only TV show I watch anymore since I only have one crappy over the air station (where did Rocky Mt PBS go??) and Hogan’s Heroes and Star Trek TNG are the only things on it I like.
I think they switched prisoners.
Hogan did that pretty often. Schultz looked the other way or just didn’t notice. If someone answered their name at roll call Schultz was happy.
Sgt. Kinchloe/Baker would be a problem since the names are different.
There were other characters that left camp too.
He might have been transferred to another POW camp.
I think they made up a succesful escape for one of the stories. I assume they explained it away at the end somehow. Klink occasionally turned a blind eye to the POW activities in order to maintain his unblemished record.
Those sort all look the same.
They never explained it. Ivan Dixon left the show to become a director, and he was replaced by Kenneth Washington. End of story. Presumably he was transferred to another prison camp.
(Having transients take the identity of escaped POWs for the duration of their stay was one of the show’s cleverest concepts, BTW. The system was explained in detail in the black-and-white pilot episode.)
The show took considerable dramatic license portraying blacks in a Luft Stalag. The only black aviators in the USAAF during WWII were the Tuskeegee Airmen, who were all fighter pilots and officers. Kinch’s specialty (radio operator) and rank of SSgt implied he was a crewman on a bomber (and only airmen were lagered by the Luftwaffe, so he couldn’t have been in the ground forces).
I grew up watching that show (in reruns) in the early 70s. There was an episode where the Germans put a notorious escape-artist prisoner into Stalag 13 because they though it was so secure. Hogan tried to keep the guy from escaping again, saying how it would interfere with his whole underground operations, but the guy escaped anyway. Maybe there was an epilog I missed, but I’m pretty sure the show just ended with Hogan in Klink’s office trying to cheer him up about losing his perfect record. Then they just forgot about it.
It was universally common to have little to no continuity season by season or even episode by episode in these goofy, high-concept, 1960s sitcoms. Heck even the original Star Trek made a few mistakes.
Yes, that was the biggest error in “Hogan’s Heroes”.
how anyone can refer to this show as “goofy” I really don’t know…
actually, most Dumb Ass Idea For A Comedy is more like it.
but I grew up watching the show & still do.
I feel pretty dumb asking this but what the hell: I have seen at least one episode where Kinch was out with the others dressed in a German Uniform, is there *any *chance that could have happened? I am guessing the answer is DUH, no, but I await your expertise…
and Richard Dawson was damn sexy in his youth…
interesting stuff from wikipedia:
The actors who played the four major German roles—Werner Klemperer (Klink),[10] John Banner (Schultz), Leon Askin (Burkhalter), and Howard Caine (Hochstetter)—were Jewish. Furthermore, Klemperer, Banner, Askin, and Robert Clary (LeBeau) were Jews who had fled the Nazis during World War II. Clary says in the recorded commentary on the DVD version of episode “Art for Hogan’s Sake” that he spent three years in a concentration camp, that his parents and other family members were killed there, and that he has an identity tattoo from the camp on his arm (“A-5714”). Likewise John Banner had been held in a (pre-war) concentration camp and his family was exterminated during the war. Leon Askin was also in a pre-war French internment camp and his parents were killed at Treblinka. Howard Caine (Hochstetter), who was also Jewish (his birth name was Cohen), was American, and Jewish actors Harold Gould and Harold J. Stone played German generals.
Sorry no. Most Dumbass Idea For A Comedy goes to Heil Honey I’m Home.
I remember that episode. The guest star was Mickey Manners, a Bob Denver/Richard Dawson lookalike who was in a lot of '60s sitcoms, doing a faux British accent. IIRC, Hogan was trying to console Klink in his office and convinced him that Manners (“Sgt Malcolm Flood”) was a plant of some sort (Gestapo, probably), and that he hadn’t really escaped since he was never officially there; ergo, the whole affair was best forgotten. Klink, of course, was so eager to find a way out of his predicament that he agreed with Hogan and didn’t report the escape.
Originally, the show was set in a contemporary US prison, but when it was pitched to network executives they didn’t like the concept. On his way back to New York, the creator (Bernard Fein) sat next to a guy reading Stalag 17; as soon as the plane landed, he got on another flight to California and pitched the idea again, only this time set in a German POW camp. It sold immediately.
The show was originally called “Stalag 13,” but the people who owned the rights to Stalag 17 threatened to sue for plagarism. It subsequently became “Hogan’s Heroes.” (In Germany, where the show is quite popular (!), the title is “A Cage Full of Heroes.”)
In an interview with Bob Crane I saw ca. 1970, he said what they wanted to do was show how clever Allied POWs were in hoodwinking their captors. The Jewish actors on the show jumped at the chance to make fun of the Nazis.
The only actor in the pilot who turned down a regular role in the series was Leonid Kinskey, who played Russian Sgt Vladimir Minsk. In a “Where-are-they-now?”-type book I have, he’s quoted as saying “The premise to me was both false and offensive. The Nazis were seldom dumb and never funny.”
That, and Vladimir Minsk’s presence in the pilot. Russian prisoners were segregated from other Allied POWs (and lived under far worse conditions).
From what I’ve read, the relatively few black Americans captured by the Wehrmacht fared far worse at the hands of their compatriots than they did at their captors’, which actually surprised the Germans.
There was a movie on this topic that starred Bruce Willis (Hart’s War); whether or not it was based on an actual incident, I don’t know.
Here, BTW, is a still from Manner’s episode “The Most Escape-Proof Camp I’ve Ever Escaped From” (Season 2, Episode 26).
Manners’ episode. :smack:
The only episode where that made any sense at all was when they all went out in masks and gloves: “Have you never seen a Gestapo death squad?” But it did happen on other occasions as well, as I recall.
An episode that required complete suspension of disbelief was the one in which Hogan says they can all take turns having a weekend pass to go into Hammelburg, and yes, Kinch was included. (The thought of him quaffing beer at the local Rathskeller boggles the mind!) This may have been the one in which Carter wants to escape to go home to his sweetheart and ends up falling for a German waitress instead, but I’m not sure.
There was a small population of black German citizens during WWII. They were mostly the progeny from a German African colony. They weren’t in the best position, they faced hardships, but uniquely the Nazis didn’t consider them enough of a problem to send them to concentration camps but because they were still viewed as ‘inferior’ they weren’t made to serve in the Germany military. Wiki article…
I guess maybe because it’s so cathartic for them, and a foreign import, or just that Germans are bad at comedy, but yes, Hogan’s Heroes has always been very popular in Germany. What’s unintentionally even more hilarious is that because the Nazi salute is literally illegal there, when the characters do it they dub it nonsense dialog like,* “The wheat grows THIS HIGH!”*
I’ve watched that on YouTube. Certainly not for everyone, but I don’t know, sort of self-mocking meta-humor, not that Hitler is funny but that a silly 70s-style sitcom about him would be. I couldn’t help but admire their commitment to the bit! It needed a catchier theme song though…
2nd best sitcom ever!
Did they ever acknowledge Kinchloe’s absence? I don’t think so. Anyway, I always assumed that Kinchloe caught a bad case of the flu and was either repatriated for humanitarian reasons or simply died. Probably the latter. I think Klink was kept away from the front not merely because he was incompetent but also because he simply wasn’t ruthless.
(Well, actually I think Klink was in on the whole underground thing and was secretly directing Hogan & his group; he was only pretending, even to Hogan, to be a doofus.)
Heh, I always thought it would have been a good ending to find out that he and Schultz were on the Russian payroll.