I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of McHale’s Navy, but it certainly has the pedigree for comedy.
I have, however, always loved this classic kidding around by the cast.
Bilko was voted Best Sitcom Ever over in Blighty, where they know a thing or two about sitcoms.
What it and MHN had in common was the best people in the business, both in front of and behind the camera.
I saw it in Chicago with my dad and older brother in the summer of 1964, and remember it fondly.
There were actually two movies filmed about two years apart; Borgnine wasn’t in the second, and I never even knew it existed until I saw part of it on TV much, much later. The thing I noticed most about it was that the national insignia on US airplanes were wrong (post-1947), making me wonder if the setting had been changed to Korea.
I watched the first MHN movie on TV with my daughter a couple of years ago. It was sooooooooooooo un-PC! My favorite moment was when Gruber offered some Chinese racetrack workers a pack of opium-flavored chewing gum! :eek:
Correction: The first came out in '64, the second in '65. One year apart.
Yeah! I caught the laughing gas episode not too long ago and he was absolutely hilarious when trying to get to a bunker during an air raid.
Interesting list. I never knew the MTM Show was popular in Britain. When I was stationed in England, Mork & Mindy was the hot American comedy.
I really thought Ernest Borgnine was strictly a comedic actor based on my exposure to McHale’s Navy as a kid. Then I finally saw From Here to Eternity and…whoa!
:eek:
Not to mention Marty, which he won an Oscar for.
When I was there ('76–'77) they were also showing MTM spinoffs Rhoda and Phyllis.
You can catch a reunited Borgnine and Conway as Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy in reruns of Spongebob Squarepants (Spongebob also reunited most of The Young Ones).
Little Nemo writes:
> I doubt there was any direct connection. There’s always been a genre of
> service comedies. Down Periscope was inspired by McHale’s Navy - but also by
> Sgt Bilko, MASH, Operation Petticoat, Mister Roberts, In the Navy, Gomer Pyle,
> The Wackiest Ship in the Army, Stripes, Son of a Sailor, The Last Detail, Kelly’s
> Heroes, Catch-22, Private Benjamin, 1941, Father Goose, Let’s Go Navy!, Buck
> Privates, No Time for Sergeants, Great Guns, The Sad Sack, Caught in the Draft,
> Don’t Go Near the Water, Ensign O’Toole, The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell, etc.
Interestingly, if you combine the list above with the list of service comedies (a.k.a. military comedies) in the following Wikipedia entry, you can see that the genre began in World War II and began fading out about 1980 as soon as there was no one left (below a certain age) who had been drafted into the military. The later examples like Private Benjamin and Stripes are about joining the military more or less by mistake. There are still a lot of people in the military. They just don’t tend to be the ones who end up writing films.
Forgot to include the Wikipedia entry: