You’re correct about hair regs not changing, but military haircut rules can go out the window pretty quickly in any combat environment. I was pretty much rear echelon in 'Nam, so we were expected to more or less adhere to regs, but men in remote locations could get pretty shaggy without anybody giving much of a shit. Much of that was because there wasn’t a barber anywhere nearby. When they came in for R&R, then it was back to normal.
I agree that the hair styles in MASH screamed '70s civilian, and I also agree that the show-runners were pushing a Vietnam Era anti-war vibe with the show.
I remember catching this when watching reruns too. Henry called his wife “Mildred” in a very early episode, one of the first thirteen I would think.
Other glaring inconsistencies: Margaret’s father was dead, then alive; Hawkeye’s mother was alive, then dead. I’m sure there were more, but I can’t think of them right now.
I don’t recall Margaret’s father being dead.
[Houlihan on Wikipedia]
(List of M*A*S*H characters - Wikipedia)
I don’t recall Hawkeye saying his mom was alive. The backstory on his nickname was that “Last of the Mohicans” was the only book his father had ever read, but if his father was also a doctor, I found that hard to believe.
I find it best to assume that the movie, every season, the finale, and the episode A War For All Seasons each happen in a separate parallel universe. All universes are broadly similar, but with subtle differences. Mildred Lorraine Blake goes by her first name in one universe, and her middle name in another. Each universe resets the clock. Past events from previous seasons happened, but took place at an earlier date.
In one episode, Margaret tells Frank “For a moment there, you looked like you had a chin. You looked like my father just before he died.” (He was later played by Andrew Duggan, of course.)
In one “letter home” episode (I think it was the first), Hawkeye tells his father “Say hi to Mom and Sis for me.” In the one where he’s scared by his father going into the hospital, he reminisces how he gently broke the news of her death when he was a kid by (IIRC) making him a pancake breakfast.
(Maybe in the letter home, he was asking his father to visit his mother’s grave, but it didn’t sound that way to me.)
A Season 2 episode had a wounded soldier who’d been beaten up because he was gay. Everyone was supportive of him except, of course, Frank Burns. Really? Nobody but Frank Burns was homophobic in the '50s? In my experience of that time, only a VERY tiny number of people were accepting of gay, especially in the military. The MASH personnel themselves would have beaten the guy up again, then slapped him with a dishonorable discharge.
I’m surprised at how much I apparently don’t remember. I thought I’d seen most episodes. It seems like when they realized they had a winner on their hands, someone would make sure inconsistencies in the storyline didn’t occur.
