When Mark Hamill pointed out a continuity issue with his dry hair following a scene where he was all wet, Harrison Ford said something like, “This ain’t that kind of movie, kid.” I think that applies to Hogan’s Heroes as well.
Just imagine that the show is actually you talking to Grampa about his time in the war. Of course his stories are going to bounce around a bit, and well, his memory isn’t quite what it used to be. So enjoy the flavor of his exploits, and don’t sweat the details.
There was the Hercules / Xena series. One week they had Julius Caesar as a character, the next it was Alexander the Great.
'cause everything else in the show is perfectly believable.
Right.
Xena also managed to meet Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, David preparing to fight Goliath, and Joseph and Mary on the road to Bethlehem, all within a few years of each other.
The Odd Couple had two different explanations of how Oscar and Felix first met. Three, if you count the original opening narration that called them “childhood friends.”
Episode to episode continuity just wasn’t that important in those days.
Exactly so, and particularly for a situation comedy, where there were no story arcs, no real character development from episode to episode, etc. For the most part, each episode stood on its own, as a singular tale told about the characters and premise.
I didn’t pay attention when my father would point out historical inaccuracies in the show. I didn’t care and if he didn’t love the show he wouldn’t have bothered.
He was “supposed” to be Luftwaffe. As I kid, I just figured “that’s what German uniforms looked like.” As an adult, I just figure “that’s what uniforms they had (that fit Leon Askin).” Hochsteader didn’t even have the proper insignias for an SS major, but then, I still can’t tell. (and besides, Gestapo didn’t wear uniforms, and weren’t part of the SS. I just figured he was SS, on permanent detached service to the Gestapo. It’s only a show!)
Burkhalter was on familiar terms with Hitler, one of his trusted generals, which probably meant he would have ended up in Nuremberg after the war. (On the other hand, there was a strong possibility that he was the double agent code named “Nimrod”, so maybe he wouldn’t have been hanged.) Klink should be grateful he never got promoted! Hochsteader, on the other hand…[makes throat slashing motion]
Not just sitcoms. Star Trek also. Which explains why the Federation never made use of the technology the Enterprise found. The only two exceptions I remember are the reference to the Organian Peace Treaty in Trouble with Tribbles and the cloaking device’s return in The Enterprise Incident. And I’m not sure that counts as continuity.
As far as time goes on Have Gun Will Travel, Paladin stumbles onto Little Big Horn (1876) and meets Oscar Wilde (1882). At least Wilde really did come to San Francisco.
That was the most you might expect, the occasional mention of something that had happened in a prior episode. In the case of Hogan’s Heroes, Bernard Fox appeared in several episodes as the bumbling Colonel Crittenden. He was clearly the same character each time, but there was no sense that he was progressing as a character, or had been affected by anything that had happened to him before. He had no “arc,” to put it in modern terms. He was just a familiar face that Hogan and his men occasionally had to deal with. That was the most “continuity” that you could hope for.
The series did progress from 1942 in the pilot to later in the war, but not with any real continuity. For instance, D-Day fell somewhere near the middle of the third or fourth season IIRC. I don’t think there were any stories about Allied advances after that, except (of course) on the Russian Front.
One goof early in the series was an American (a USO dancer, IIRC) worried about being captured saying “I don’t want to spend the next two years in an internment camp.” How did she know the war would end in 1945?
I always assumed Burkhalter was in charge of the local military district (Wehrkreis), and things like POW camps came under his jurisdiction. Klink might have complained/appealed to Goering, but he was way too much of a pussy to do so. It was easier to just keep his mouth shut.
The Gestapo, BTW, was very much part of the SS. It was a subdivision of the Security Police, which was in turn a division of the Reich Security Office:
https://www.tracesofwar.com/articles/7264/Reichsführung-SS.htm
Strange but true, he was Army simply because it was hard to find Luftwaffe General uniforms were hard to find in the 1960s.
IIRC, the Germans in Stalag 17 all wore Heer (army) uniforms. The army would not have been in charge of a camp for captured airmen. The Luftwaffe was. (Which is why they were called Luftstalags.)
Another Fun Fact: The USAAF gave all enlisted aircrew in Europe the rank of Sergeant (of different grades) so they would get better treatment if captured. I don’t know if this was true in other theaters—the gunner/flight engineer (played by Robert Walker, Sr) in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo was a corporal. (But that was early in the war.)
The idiom “the next two years” is used by a lot of people in a general sense as “a long time of vague / unknown duration, but much less than a lifetime”. I don’t see that line of dialog as a “goof” so much as just a standard idiom of the time.
Maybe she, or even the writers were being optimistic about how long the show would last. I’m sure plenty of people thought a sitcom about a WWII prison camp had no chance of succeeding.
Not entirely true.
Group Captain (not Colonel, American writers!) Crittenden first appeared as a by-the-book officer, who was bound and determined to report any sabotage to the “jerries”, because sabotage by prisoners was against the rules. Prisoners’ sole duty was to escape. So Hogan had to hide their operation from him.
By his last appearance, he had graduated commando school (“toughest weekend I ever spent!”) and was parachuted in to lead a commando raid, and was fully on board with Hogan’s mission.
And, as I remember, Crittenden had been promoted to his current rank just before Hogan had, making him the ranking prisoner, and thus, in command of the prisoner group.
It was his Date of Commissioning that made him Senior Prisoner.
In the original cut of this episode, Klink asks Hogan for his DoC, and he gives it. (I don’t remember what it was, other than sometime in 1942.) Suspicious, he then says “You know my Date of Commissioning. Why did you ask?”
When I last saw it, the first part had been edited out, presumably to make more time for commercials. The laugh track had also been eliminated, as it was for every other episode in that run, making them much darker. There was nary a chuckle when Hochstetter said things like “Open up, zis iss ze Gestapo!”
Ahh, thank you for the clarification. I was going on 40+ year old memory.
I’d never say that unless I knew for sure something was going to change in two years. I might say something like “a few” or “a couple of years,” but it still wouldn’t make sense in this context. In 1943, even Patton thought the Germans could still win the war.