Which in turn means that the unit would have been on the move pretty much constantly, as UN forces got pushed back to the Pusan perimeter. There would have been none of the hijinks and japery the show displayed.
For the most part, the show had the 4077th stationed near Uijeongbu, which is today a satellite of Seoul.
eta: The Chinese crossed the Yalu on November 25, 1950.
No, Chinese troops began moving into Korea in October. There were skirmishes between Chinese and allied forces but MacArthur dismissed reports of this and insisted it was just misidentification of North Korean forces. November 25 was the date the Chinese launched a major offensive against American forces and the reality that the Chinese were fighting in Korea became undeniable.
That said, the MASH episode I referred to was based on the Chinese presence being known so you are correct that it was set after November 25.
[QUOTE=silenus;20682591For the most part, the show had the 4077th stationed near Uijeongbu, which is today a satellite of Seoul.[/QUOTE]
There were occasional references to Uijeongbu, but there were also occasional references to being “three miles” from the front. I’m guessing the “mobile” idea was largely scrapped for budgetary reasons, only used twice that I can recall over the entire series.
It would have become a STationary Army Surgical Hospital.
CBS wouldn’t have gone along with a zany madcap comedy entitled " STASH".
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“Bug out!!!”
It’s probably a mistake to look at the show’s 11-year run and say ‘The war didn’t last anywhere near that long.’ It was only one half-hour per week, with few exceptions, during those eleven years…and with 168 hours in a week the program represented 1/336th of a week (with the most extreme example being the episode “Life Time.”) And since MASH* didn’t run for 336 episodes that gave them plenty of latitude for the show’s timeline, as matched up with the war’s timeline.
Nope, it doesn’t work that way either. There were shows that depicted entire years in one episode. Most episodes were obviously covering multiple days, when you account for everything. You also can’t just do basic math and declare it solved, because you don’t account for the vast majority of the shows being shown in daylight conditions.
Wait sorry, fill me in please? I’ve not seen much of the show, and I’ve seen none of the movie. What happened exactly?
I actually saw only one episode–“A War for All Seasons”–that covered an entire year. It seems to me that the vast majority of episodes covered a day or, at the most, a week.
Yes but that’s beside the point I was making. I was pointing out that this particular episode was pinned to a specific historic event.
But that one episode borks the whole timeline into total chaos. Check out the wiki page for the episode - it goes into great detail as to how totally impossible the whole series is. Not just amount of time, but people referencing things in-show that occurred well after they left. Truman is President in episodes after ones that mention President Eisenhower, for example.
In the movie, Hawkeye, Trapper John, and the other assorted doctors pulled a frat-boy prank by raising the wall of the shower tent while Maj Houlihan (Margaret, aka “Hot Lips”) was inside, naked. (They despised her because of her prudish “Regular Army” attitude toward everything.) She marched straight to CO Col Henry Blake’s tent in tears and threatened to resign her commission over such harassment. Henry, himself a draftee, was in bed with a nurse (and a bottle of champagne, IIRC) at the time and said roughly “Hot Lips, go ahead and resign your goddamned commission. Who cares?”
On the TV series, early Hawkeye might have pulled such a prank; later Hawkeye was, of course, far too “sensitive” and “caring” to ever do such a thing.
No “Who cares?” That was definitely Henry’s attitude, but he didn’t say it. Hot Lips just blubbers “My commission. My commission.” and staggers out while Henry turns to the nurse he’s in bed with and says “More champagne, my dear?”
The antidote to that is the 1992 thriller Whispers in the Dark in which we get to see Alan Alda smash a wine bottle over a woman’s head