One episode in which Rizzo had a bigger role than usual was “Wheelers and Dealers” (S10E6).
Klinger & Zale shared a b-plot in “End Run” (S5E18), the one where Frank gets them into a boxing ring.
I was curious if Jamie Farr was still alive (he is) and Google found this interesting fact: Jamie Farr and Alan Alda were both in the Army and were at some point posted in Korea. Farr was in entertainment and Alda was an artillery officer. Mike Farrell was also posted to Korea as a Marine. All of them were there after the armistice. The dog tags that Farr wore in the show were his real dog tags from his service.
My themed death list is living cast members of MASH(movie and show). Living members are not limited to, but include:
Alan Alda
Loretta Swit
Mike Farrell
Jamie Farr
Gary Burghoff
Jeff Maxwell
G.W. Bailey
Donald Sutherland
Elliot Gould
Sally Kellerman
Robert Duvall
Fred Williamson
Tom Skerritt
Farr and Switt are coming to Steel City Con in Monroeville, PA this weekend! The guest list is pretty impressive this year. Steel City Con June 6-11
Jeff Maxwell (who played Igor, the guy on the chow line) co-hosts a podcast called MASH Matters, in which he discusses all sorts of behind-the-scenes topics, occasionally interviews other cast and crew members, and basically celebrates various aspects of the show. Available on most fine podcast apps.
A similar episode was season 9’s “The Life You Save” where we learn the officers rotate through overseeing various camp functions (garbage, laundry, motor pool, etc.) yet they all act like it’s the first time they’ve ever been assigned this duty.
Just a comment about that complaint. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen MAS*H, but I don’t recall there ever being a lot anchoring the episodes to specific historical events or locations. I can suspend my disbelieve in that it took 11 years to tell a story that took place over a year or so, 30 minutes at a time each week.
Yes. It’s not like they ever expected a visit from the medical board.
I would imagine they would just change them in the tent, regardless of who was around.
I don’t know much about operating procedures for a MASH unit in Korea. But I guess my question is how “mobile” are they expected to be? “Mobile” as the unit is quickly deployed in-theatre and then largely stays put? Or “mobile” as they have to constantly move to support whatever operations their parent unit (“I Corps” IIRC) was conducting?
As you pointed out, many of those buildings looked semi-permanent. Not to mention those those mine fields probably didn’t go with the 4077th when it relocated.
Patrick O’Brian in his acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin series crammed something like half a dozen novels and two and a half circumnavigations of the globe by sailing ship into a couple months in 1812.
Another data point for the was-Frank-considered-a-good-doctor discussion:
Early on in Season 1, Episode 9 (“Henry, Please Come Home”), Henry says something like “Leave Frank alone, he’s a great surgeon and we need him.”
mmm
I think part of the problem they had with painting the character into a corner included making him less competent as they made him less stable and more cartoonish.
His motivation for being a doctor was certainly always financial. He wasn’t good with patients. He took twice as long to go through medical school because he failed out. He cheated on his exam. Even if he was competent at the mechanics of being a surgeon he was not ever shown as a good doctor.
Bumping this thread because I’ve been watching MASH reruns, and doing so reminded me of something. Way, way back in the day when I was teaching freshman comp at a local college, I had a student who was a veteran of the Korean War. His two complaints about MASH were
- The setting did not look like Korea. I seem to recall him saying Korea was greener.
- There wasn’t enough bad weather. According to this guy, Korea was either bitterly cold or ungodly hot with not much in between.
He never said anything about hairstyles.
I just read that the reason Burghoff left the series was that his marriage was in trouble (His wife divorced him during his final season.) and that he was burnt out. One of the directors said during the episode where Radar meets a woman he loves but will never see again, Burghoff broke down and couldn’t stop crying. The director had to walk him around the back lot for 15 minutes to calm him down.
The producers really wanted Burghoff to stay and offered him over 4 million dollars per season, which would have made him the third-highest-paid actor on TV (behind Alan Alda and Carol O’Conner) to stay on. Burghoff refused: it wasn’t the money; it was his mental health.
Jamie Farr said, “Gary Burghoff was an absolute delight.” Alan Alda is still in touch with him. I don’t see how he could have been that obnoxious.
They do feature that concept quite often in the show, but not all the time obviously. I’ve been to Seoul twice and it was neither way too hot or way too cold, but that is hardly a good sampling.
The Korean War vet told me this stuff almost 30 years after the war. He might have just remembered the miseries and not the more temperate stuff.
I wonder if he’s still around. A few months after he took my class, he was seriously burned in a freak accident. He survived but his rebuilt face looked very different. A good guy who’d been through too much.
Yeah, I thought the weather became a character relatively often. The hottest hots (the bathtub episode) and the coldest colds (Radar’s cotton-stuffed earmuffs). At least a few of the episodes revolved around the weather.
As for Burghoff, I realize he was an important part of the show, but I find it hard to believe that he was offered a salary that put only Alan Alda and Carroll O’Connor ahead of him. Very hard to believe.
Jeepers.
mmm
I was once watching the show with one guy who noted "The scenery in the movie looked like Korea. With TV, you just want to say “Oh, southern California.”
I have a coworker who was born in Korea. He hated the Korean dialog. He complained no one knew how to speak Korean at all on that show.
Now, one must note he was a bit if a chauvinist when it came to Korea. I could not even pronounce Hyundai correctly as far as he was concerned. 
Unless they are from Southern California (or Korea) , I suspect most visitors driving through one of Malibu’s canyons would be commenting on how much the scenery looks like Korea.