People tell me that my real sneezes sound like very fake screams.
Ah, it was sneezes.
They were so poorly done, it was ridiculous.
cmkeller-Why isn’t “32!” a great punchline? IMO, he breaking the record was the whole point of the punchline.
No, someone just realized that there were no surgeons of color in MASH units. As for all the repeat Asian guests, same thing happened on other shows. There just weren’t enough Asian actors around Hollywood at the time.
Watched the show unfold in its original showing and have watched many a rerun. If MAS*H is on, it trumps almost any other thing on my TV.
Fave episodes that haven’t been mentioned yet (I think) are the one where Potter plays a practical joke on the gang who presumably make a general die from anger–Potter dances around singing “Fooled you ALL!” I like the one when BJ arrives, and the one in which Radar saves a horse by giving him to Potter.
Overall, I enjoy the funny ones more than the serious ones, and while I like the Potter character, I often think Harry Morgan overacted the role.
Jocularity!
My favorite Hawkeye episode is the one in which he’s obliged to take command of the unit because Potter is away and Winchester is ill. He got a much-deserved dressing-down from Houlihan in that one, as he was forced to see things from the CO’s POV once and handled it badly.
Sadly, in syndication, Margaret’s dream has been edited out to make room for commercials.
I know I have Margarets dream in reruns. She is in a wedding dress. Maybe parts of it have been edited, but not completely.
I loved the show in reruns, when I was 12-15ish. This thread inspired me to set up a series recording on the DVR. It’ll catch “Bless You, Hawkeye” in a few minutes.
Joe
That’s the one with the poorly executed sneezing. Let us know if you agree.
It’s the first of six or seven episodes tonight - two from '81, followed by four or five from '73. I’ll watch the older ones first.
Joe
Just thought of another favorite exchange:
Henry Blake, attempting to introduce Hawkeye and Trapper to some visiting officer:
Blake: “These are Captains Pierce…”
Hawkeye (interrupting): “…and these are Captains McIntyre.”
mmm
Wow, that sucks. Loved it as a kid, tried and failed as an adult. Just tried to watch it again. Man, it has aged poorly. Just staggeringly unfunny. I watched a few older episodes, and will not try again.
Joe
etv78:
Because it comes out of nowhere, in its context. Sure, that’s the record-breaking number mentioned earlier in the episode. But the last three minutes or so of show follow the last commercial and should be a cohesive “punch scene”, the kicker of which is the final line (or final moment, if dramatic silence is appropriate). The basketball scene was merely one of many minor incidents mentioned in the writer’s (B.J., I think?) letter, then the final scene is mainly that character’s closing of the letter, and suddenly, Potter bursts in, yells “32!” and, stop, credits. It doesn’t flow.
It’s from the episode where the students at the elementary school in Crabapple Cove have written letters to the 4077th, with different replies from different characters. The free throw record is mentioned by Potter when answering a letter asking if the people at the MASH ever get bored. (Nice touch: Potter starts his letter with “Hell, yes…” crumples it up and starts over with “Heck, yes.”)
There’s also a letter that Father Mulcahey gets asking if he’s ever saved a life. He suggests one of the surgeons should take it when someone points out that he saved a dog from drinking itself to death. Oddly, no one says, “Or you could tell them about the time you performed an emergency tracheotomy using your Tom Mix pocketknife.”
The classic example has to be Kwan Hi Lim, who played literally dozens of different characters over the years on Hawaii Five-0. His being such a funny-looking guy made it laughably obvious that it was the same person popping up over and over. But I have a hard time believing that there was a shortage of Asian actors in Hawaii!
That’s odd, because Captain Oliver Harmon “Spearchucker” Jones or Captain Oliver Wendell “Spearchucker” Jones was in both the book and the movie. And since Richard Hooker was writing from experience, you’d think he’d know that.
Sometimes it is just human nature. The producers of Hawaii 5-0 must have liked Lim and so they continually used him. They knew him, liked him, knew he could act and take their direction, and would work for what the pay rate they gave him, so why hire someone else and risk hiring someone who they didn’t like and who couldn’t do the job as well? Admittedly, the producers certainly closed themselves off to many other actors who could handle the roles, but what they did was understandable under the circumstances. They had a budget to meet and so why take the time and expense to audition others when Lim could handle what they asked of him?
I respectfully disagree.
The point of the free throw episode is that “war is fifteen minutes of panic in the middle of twenty three hours and forty five minutes of boredom”. The point of having Potter try to break the camp record for consecutive free throws is to contrast the war and the fact that they do surgery on wounded soldiers, with this petty achievement.
And yet it is a small triumph. In the midst of people dying all around, it is a small uptick in mood.
It’s subtle, as opposed to the beat-you-over-the-head sanctimony of some of the episodes, but I think that makes it more effective.
Those small moments are, IMO, better and more effective TV than the show became near the end.
In one episode, the doctors each got a letter from US school children. Hawkeye (of course) got a maudlin letter from a girl blaming him for patching up the girl’s soldier brother so he went back into battle and got killed. Hawkeye has the usual angst and overly-dramatized crisis of conscience, and then sends back a self-serving piece of dreck to the girl.
Winchester gets a letter from a student, who says that it’s fall where he is, and he is not sure if they have fall in Korea, so he sends Winchester a fallen leaf. And Winchester takes the leaf out, and twirls it in his fingers, and puts it to his face and smells it. And he says, in this subdued, reflective voice, mostly to himself - “It’s autumn in New England”.
To me, the contrast, where Winchester is away from everything he is used to, to Korea where he feels out of place and mostly out of control, is a better and more effective demonstration of the tragedy of the war than Hawkeye’s over-written, over-acted “crisis”.
MASH * could do stuff that was better than almost anything else on TV, sometimes. The rest of the time it was just another sitcom full of heavy-handed preaching.
Regards,
Shodan