Better late than never… and to paraphrase several other posters, my rage STILL burns with the heat of a million suns!
The subject came up at work last week, and reminded me how pissed I was about Hogan’s Heroes being on TV Guide’s 50 Worst Ever TV Shows.
It may not be among the 50 (or 100) best ever, but there is NO WAY it deserves to be on the worst list. I don’t know anybody who saw it who didn’t like it, and judging by thesetwo threads, most members here enjoyed it too.
What fuckin’ PC culture Nazis (ironic, isn’t it!) determined Hogan and his jolly jokers would be consigned to TVs trash bin? I wish I could cancel my subscription in protest, but I never had one. All I can do is curse and sneer at them from a distance!
Clearly, they are not judging the show as a normal person would, like whether or not they were entertained while watching it. Now, they must whip out the PC glasses and see if they must feel retro-actively offended by the subject matter.
Nevermind that several of the principal actors who played Nazi’s were Jewish and fled Nazi Germany, and thus knew firsthand what things were like, weren’t offended, the rest of us have to be because it makes light of a horrible situation.
Clary - exiled at age 16 - closest to having suffered
while I do not doubt that these men were victims, none of them were so traumatized that they could not use their heritage to get roles as Germans - even Nazis. Klemperer, especially, made a career of being a ‘nasty kraut’ (again, my surname is German, so shut up).
Their accepting these roles hardly enobles an insipid sitcom.
To turn it around - how could someone with a number tattooed on his/her forearm possibly have participated in portraying a Nazi POW camp a as fun-with-the-stupid-nazis, laugh-a-minute place to be?
I notice that Clary did, years later, begin to speak seriously about the evil he had seen. better late than never. and offers probably weren’t exactly rolling in.
money is a wonderful incentive - but not always a justification.
Klemperer in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air discussed his career and pointed out that Hollywood tended to cast anyone with an accent as a heavy or a foreigner. When he got his start, Hollywood was churning out pictures with Nazi’s in them, so he got cast in those roles.
Also, since the actors got few, if any royalties from the TV series after it went into re-runs, I’d be inclind to think that if the paycheck they were getting was all that was keeping their mouth shut, then they’d have started carping once they stopped getting them.
In Banner’s case, IIRC, his family was rather wealthy and it took everything they had to get out of Germany. (Translation=They bribed their way out of the country.)
Klemperer’s father was a conductor of the Vienna orchestra and the family escaped with the clothes on their backs. Neither of these men had an easy trip out of Germany, and I seriously doubt that they took the roles solely because they needed a paycheck.
he did not ‘get cast’ - he was offered a role, and he accepted it.
even if he was under contract, he could have refused - it would have cost dearly, but he could have refused.
bottom line: Nazi POW camps were not good places to be - to place a sitcom therein was bad taste in the extreme.
and it was not funny - mindless sitcoms are pretty much the definition of “bad tv shows”.
haven’t seen the list - where did Green Acres show up, vis-a-vis Hogan’s?
Which is perhaps why the generation that suffered through them, liberated them, and lost loved ones in the fight to stop them felt the need to create a show making fun of those who were responsible for them.
To say that making a comedy about Nazi’s is in poor taste because of how bad the Nazi’s were flies in the face of human history. Every side has done it, and will do it. There’s kajillions of net toons about Bin Laden floating around on the internet right now. Are those in poor taste? (No doubt some of them are, but all of them? Come on, now.)
Hell, look at it this way, if the Nazi’s had won the war, they’d have made some pretty horrific comedies about how the Allies were controlled by Jews and worse.
Um… that was sorta the point. They WEREN"T so traumatized that they couldn’t stand to act as a Nazi. How stupid are you? Did you miss the part where Tuckerfan said…
Holy hell, you’re an idiot.
Because they weren’t going to let their negative experiences ruin the rest of their lives? Because they were capable of - GOSH! - moving on? Because despite having been victims once, they didn’t want to be victims again?
Are you actually claiming that they didn’t suffer enough, HH?
Did ‘Good Times’ present the ghetto as a fun place to be? It WAS a comedy, after all. Did ‘Gilligan’s Island’ portray being stranded on island as what the characters wanted?
They weren’t portraying a POW camp as a fun place to be.
Sigh. And I always looked upon Hogan’s Heroes as an example of how people from different backgrounds, placed in an intolerable situation, can work together to overcome great evil even at the risk to their personal safety.
happyheathen, have you heard of The Producers? To Be or Not To Be? ( I speak of the Lubitsch version). Stalag 17, upon which Hogan’s Heroes was based? Of course Nazis were evil. But ridiculing them, taking the teeth out of them, is one way to deal with the grief and fear they left behind. I’m not suggesting HH is in quality even close to the three great movies I just mentioned, but the idea behind them is the same, and is not offensive. What I do find offensive is your insistence that Banner, Klemperer, and Clary did not suffer enough at the hands of the Nazis to be able to play them in such a way, and that if they had they would not have accepted those roles. You cannot measure suffering. Of course they did it for the money, that’s what actors do. Maybe they also did it because it felt damn good to get in a good jab at their old enemies by playing them as morons and buffoons.
First, Klemperer apparently had an agreement that Klink would NEVER ‘win’. He said that the day Klink got the upper hand on Hogan he would quit the show. So he was clearly attempting to show Nazis as ridiculous, stupid, or mean people. I can’t think of a single ‘good’ Nazi on that show - Klink was an idiot, Schultz was lazy and stupid, the SS guys were mean little snakes.
Second, this was a POW camp, not a concentration camp. The Germans actually treated American and British POW’s, and especially the officers, quite well. Far better than the Japanese did.
I think it says something that the audience at the time, despite being about 30 years closer to the events of WWII than we are, did not find the show offensive. I don’t recall hearing any such criticisms of this show while it aired. I was a kid at the time, but I do remember it, and I was much older when it first started showing up in reruns in the late 70s’s. No one cared about that issue. And it wasn’t because people thought the Nazis were good - this was the time when there was still intense effort in hunting down the remaining Nazis, and people thought the holocaust was just as horrific as they do today. But rather, the attitude was more like, 'It’s a TV show. It’s not reality. Get over it."
I watched “Lawrence of Arabia” last night. What a great movie. And utterly unfilmable today. There would be far too many complaints about portrayal of Arabs, portrayal of the British, treatment of horses and camels, and especially about T.E. Lawrence’s sexuality (it was never mentioned that he was gay, but it wasn’t hidden either. That would probably offend both the pro and anti-gay communities today). We have just become far too sensitive for our own good.
