M*A*S*H: The Story of the 4077th

7:20Josh Clark:Well, my feeling is that I think it clearly was meant to show that it is an acronym, even though that's not how the military necessarily distinguished it. Because people would just say, what in the world does MASH mean? But, oh, wait, it must stand for something would be my guess.

7:35Chuck Bryant:Right. But they didn't use like periods after each letter like the military would have.

7:41Josh Clark:Oh, yeah, sure. I get you.

7:42Chuck Bryant:I'm talking about the asterisks in particular.

7:45Josh Clark:Yeah. An acronym is typically a period, right?

7:47Chuck Bryant:All right. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. But it looks good, though. You're right. It does. It looks fantastic.

7:52Josh Clark:Very signature.

7:53Chuck Bryant:So Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and obviously, if you've ever seen MASH, It's where the whole thing is set, set during the Korean War in a mobile surgical hospital, hence the name. And those were actually a real thing. Did you know that, Mr. Smart Guy, who loves MASH so much?

8:11Josh Clark:Oh, boy. Is this what we're in for? I did know that because, you know, at some point the show spells that out. So, yeah, I knew that was a thing. What I was curious and, you know, my MASH recollection, this is from a long time ago. I don't remember them ever moving at all. So I feel like they kind of stayed there. Unless there was an episode that I missed where they were like, yeah, we're going to move to this other part of Malibu, which is where it was filmed, the Fox Ranch, which is now Malibu Creek State Park, which is why in all the scenes of helicopters flying around Korea. Who knows if that's what Korea looks like, but it looks like the mountains of Southern California.

8:50Chuck Bryant:You don't know. That's where the Manson family lived for a while.

8:55Josh Clark:Oh, really? No, they lived on Spahn Ranch. Right. Okay.

8:59Chuck Bryant:Anytime I hear ranch in California, I just immediately think of the Manson family.

9:03Josh Clark:Yeah, and I know I've told the story about shooting out there, but it was a big treat for me as a PA to shoot a commercial and see, like, a rusted-out Army ambulance. And I think, I mean, who knows what's there now, but there were still a few remnants back then.

9:17Chuck Bryant:Right. Yeah, I remember my mind being blown when I found out that that was, like, California in the background.

9:22Josh Clark:Like, they didn't go to Korea?

9:24Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I think that's kind of when I started to get that people cut corners for money.

9:29Josh Clark:Yeah, totally.

9:31Chuck Bryant:So, yeah. So, a MASH thing, a MASH was actually a thing. And I think it was actually first tried out in the Korean War.

9:39Josh Clark:Yeah.

9:40Chuck Bryant:Which I think was a three-year war. But something interesting that I noticed about MASH is that it ran for 11 seasons. So, it was almost four times longer than the actual war that was the setting for this TV show. But in reality, like I was saying, a MASH hospital was tried out in the Korean War in real life.

10:00Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And the idea is that they put the surgeons close to the front lines so they could save more lives. And it was, you know, they're all kind of temporary. Like they slept on, you know, cot-like beds and they lived in tents. And on the TV show, there's a lot of talk about the front and how close they were. But the real-life MASH units apparently had a 97 % survival rate. If you got there, chances are you lived.

10:25Chuck Bryant:Yeah, so it was a really good idea that panned out. Yeah, and in the show, you can hear bombs going off sometimes. Occasionally, the overhead lights will flicker and sway because they are so close to the front. And I was thinking about the same thing that you mentioned, too, that they never seem to change or move their unit. And if it's supposed to be four to five miles behind front lines, then that would have to be a completely static front line for all those years to never move. But it made me wonder about like the real life MASH surgeons. Like how often did you have to break down your MASH unit and then move it, you know, and set it up again, which apparently you could do very quickly.

11:08Chuck Bryant:supposedly you could set one up in 24 hours. But that also just kind of goes to explain, like, these were not, like, state-of-the-art surgical wards. They were, like, blood and guts, get your hands dirty, you're lucky if you have more than one scalpel kind of, like, surgical outfit.

11:25Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And that was conveyed very well on the show. The doctors on the show, you know, just like in real life, the doctors were generally civilians that were drafted into the war to be Army surgeons. after, I think, World War II, they had a tougher time getting surgeons going. And when Korea came around, they passed the Doctors' Draft Act. If you had already served in World War II as a doctor or surgeon or nurse or whatever, you could get waived. You could still serve if you wanted to. But the long and short of that is the recruits were younger. They didn't have as much experience. They definitely were not looking to join the Army, which was a big, big part of that show is that none of, you know, not none of them, but the main characters that we're going to talk about, like the protagonist, not the foils.

12:14Josh Clark:The foils kind of like the army, but the other guys generally did not like being there or being in the army culture. And Alan Alda was 36 when they started making this. I was kind of curious about his starting age.

12:25Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

12:26Josh Clark:Yeah, 36.

12:27Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, I think that's almost one of the cornerstones of this show is that these are civilian doctors who were drafted in the military, and they're kind of bristling against the regimentedness that's required of them just from being in the military. They're like, just get out of our hair. We're here to save lives, you know? Take that whole, like, Reveille stuff and shove it. Yeah, that's right.

12:54Josh Clark:It was actually a book, and this smart guy, I did not know.

12:57Chuck Bryant:No way. I was going to ask you that facetiously, and I didn't.

13:02Josh Clark:I'm sorry. I did not know this. Of course, I knew it was a movie and we'll talk about that in a second. But the movie was optioned from a book written in 1968 called MASH, colon, a novel about three army doctors by a MASH veteran doctor named Dr. Richard H. Hornberger under a pseudonym Richard Hooker. I think he added a co-writer named W.C. Hines when it became pretty clear that his book was a bit of a mess. Because it sounds like it was just sort of a group of stories about his experience in the 8055. The 8055th MASH unit was the real-life unit that it was based on. And it sounds like it was, you know, like what we see on TV and in the movies.

13:41Josh Clark:Like, they partied a lot, they drank a lot, did a lot of pranks, and on the side did some surgery. Yeah.

13:47Chuck Bryant:But like you said, it was kind of loosely put together. Like each chapter started with, hey, get this. And they were basically like, yeah, they were anecdotes. And then apparently he also peppered in some like gory stuff just to basically get across the horrors of war. and he was actually a surgeon in Maine. And when he put this whole book together and they brought in W.C. Hines, a sports writer to kind of help him with it. If you've seen the TV show and you've never read the book, maybe even haven't seen the movie, you have a totally different conception of M.A.S.H. than what Hornberger created and what the movie kind of portrayed, which is like this wasn't a, he didn't have any liberal agenda.

14:32Chuck Bryant:In fact, he was kind of conservative and he didn't really like the tone of the TV show, but it was still it still had like a kind of anti-war bent through it or at least just questioning the the morality of war, just how stupid and wasteful it is. But it wasn't, you know, it was not a liberal book or written by a liberal person.

14:56Josh Clark:Well, you know, once Hollywood gets a hold of something.

14:59Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah.

15:00Josh Clark:They're going to liberalize it. And that's basically, you know, like you said, what the movie and TV show ended up being. It's like a statement, like an anti-war statement. Hornberger after, not after MASH, because we'll talk about that later, the weird spinoff. But post-MASH, he wrote more MASH books after, you know, the movie was a hit. He wrote 14 MASH novels. The first one was called MASH in Maine, which published the same year the TV show ended up premiering.

15:27Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah, 14 novels, a movie and a TV show off of a book that he had to bring a sports writer in to help, you know, whip into shape.

15:36Josh Clark:Yeah. Can you say cash in?

15:37Chuck Bryant:Exactly. So, yeah. And he was just basically trying to get his anecdotes across, which were mostly, like, drunken prank stuff. Like you said, like you see on the TV show, like that was based on this guy's book. So, like I said, it was turned into a movie. I think it was optioned, maybe even the year it was published in 1968, because the movie came out in 1970. And I imagine it took a little while to make because it's a mess. And it was directed by Robert Altman. So you didn't like the movie? I've only seen it once. I'm not entirely certain I saw the whole thing. I don't remember if I saw the whole thing.

16:15Chuck Bryant:I was reading about people debating on whether the movie is any good or not. And it seemed like the consensus was that I saw somebody say it's a masterpiece of 20th century comedy.

16:28Josh Clark:Yeah, see, that's where I veer off. Like, I love, love, love the TV show. I liked the movie okay. Like, I'm a big Robert Altman guy. It critically did very—I mean, it was a big hit. It won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970, nominated for Best Picture and four other Oscars. I think it won Best Screenplay. So it was a huge hit. but it's like, I think maybe I was too young the first time I saw it, and I loved the TV show so much, I was like, oh, I've got to go see the movie version. And the movie version's a lot different, and it just didn't, I don't know, I don't think it's among Altman's best work, but certainly a lot of people disagree with me.

17:07Chuck Bryant:Sure, a lot of people like it. But it's almost one of those things, you get the impression that people like it because it's, you know, supposedly this amazing thing, not because they like it like it, you know what I mean? Maybe. Maybe. That's just kind of the tone that I got. But anyway, the movie was a little closer to the book. And in that it's like, it portrays everything that the younger generations dislike about the oldest generation right now. Explain. Sexism, racism. Oh, sure. Um, just completely, um, completely ignoring like the consequences of harming other people.

17:54Josh Clark:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

17:54Chuck Bryant:Like essentially everything. Like those are the main themes throughout this, this movie, right? Although, again, the subtext is that this is an anti-war movie, um, at the very least, again, questioning the morality of war. And, and it was, um, released right at, you know, the peak of when anti-war sentiment was really aroused in America because of the Vietnam War.

18:16Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And I didn't know where you were going, but you totally nailed it. Like in this movie, it's like it's supposed to be funny that Hot Lips Houlihan, the head nurse, is the shower curtain is ripped open and she is fully frontally exposed naked to the rest of the camp. Yeah. Like this played for laughs. So obviously it's a movie of its time. It was written by Ring Lardner Jr., obviously son of great short story writer, Ring Lardner. Oh. And he, I think they called him Pinky Ring was his nickname.

18:46Chuck Bryant:No. Oh, you got me.

18:48Josh Clark:That's a good one. Oh, thanks. That'd be a pretty good nickname for Ring Jr. Yeah. Or maybe Toe Ring? No, Pinky. Pinky Ring? Okay. So Altman, you know, does his Altman thing, which is a lot of improvisation, a lot of overlapping dialogue. It's his hallmark as a filmmaker. Ring Lardner Jr. did not care for that, evidently, and said, like, you ruin what I wrote. And I don't know if he took that back after he won the Oscar for screenplay or not. But, yeah, it's kind of interesting.

19:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I saw he tried to get his name taken off of it, and then he won the Oscar. Oh, wow. I was like, oh, I guess I'll stick with this. That's really funny. One other thing about Ring Lardner Jr. I saw is that he was one of the Hollywood 10 who was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings.

19:33Josh Clark:Oh, yeah, for sure.

19:33Chuck Bryant:It was like almost a slightly subversive act in and of itself to hire him in the late 60s after, you know, he was, they were bringing him back, I guess.

19:44Josh Clark:Well, Altman's, he was an old pothead. He was a medium age pothead at that point.

19:49Chuck Bryant:So let's talk about the theme song, which I'm sure a lot of people know the title of it. But many people might not, actually, because they played it, if you're a fan of the TV show, it was always instrumental.

20:02Josh Clark:Yeah, they changed it from the movie. In the movie, it had words. The name of the song is Suicide is Painless. And the story behind it, I did not know. In the MASH movie, there was a character, I did know this stuff, Captain Walt Waldowski, who says he wants to take his own life because he's gay and he's in the army and he can't bear it. and so they do a fake sort of a fake funeral a living funeral and give him a placebo pill telling him it's a big sedative that's going to you know take his life right and so Altman's like I need a song that's he pitched it as I need it to be the stupidest song ever so he hired a guy a real musician named Johnny Mandel any relation to the man no that's Mandrell sorry close

20:49Chuck Bryant:he's a distant distant relation yeah that's right

20:52Josh Clark:he dropped the R And he was like, we need a song for this funeral. I want to be the dumbest song ever. And Altman tried to write it, but couldn't come up with anything that he liked. So as the story goes, he hired his 15-year-old son, Michael, to co-write this thing with this pro musician. And that's what they came up with.

21:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And, like, that explains, like, it was a purposefully stupid song, which explains just the only lyrics I know, which is suicide is painless. It brings on many changes. And I've always been like, that seems a little tongue in cheek. Like, what's the right? I don't get that. Now I do. It made me want to go back and read the rest of the lyrics because I'm sure they're hilarious.

21:38Josh Clark:I actually meant to do that, too, and I did not. I thought, you know, I know Emily worked with two with Roger and two of his sons on the gingerbread man in Savannah. And I asked her if Michael was one of them. And she said no. It was two of the others, or maybe the other two.

21:54Chuck Bryant:Was it Gingerbread Man? Is that a Grisham thriller? I think so. Or at least in that vein.

22:01Josh Clark:Yeah, I think it was a Grisham thriller.

22:03Chuck Bryant:Hey, speaking of movies, I saw something just last night that I want to recommend. Let's hear it. It's an old Oswald, or Osgood, sorry, Os. Osgood Perkins movie.

22:15Josh Clark:Oh, you love that guy.

22:16Chuck Bryant:Gretel and Hansel. No, I think you have it backwards. No, no, that's the way it's in. That's the title. I'm just kidding. Because Gretel's older in this one. And it's from like 2012, 13. It's great.

22:30Josh Clark:You should start a podcast on Oz Perkins.

22:34Chuck Bryant:I wonder if I could get him to come on.

22:36Josh Clark:Call it like, you know, like Finding Oz or The Wizard of Oz or something like that. Sure.

22:42Chuck Bryant:Or Behind the Curtain.

22:44Josh Clark:Yeah, yeah. Behind the Green, not Behind the Green Door. That's something different. Behind the Green Curtain. behind the green door.

22:51Chuck Bryant:Oh, man.

22:53Josh Clark:All right. I feel like we should take a break. We told the song story and we'll be right back to finally get to the TV show after this.

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26:00Chuck Bryant:Okay, Chuck, so you said we'd get to the TV show, but you lied, lied, lied, because there's a little more about the movie we have to talk about.

26:07Josh Clark:Oh, okay.

26:08Chuck Bryant:Chiefly, that it was nominated for five Oscars. Like you said, Ring Lardner Jr. won for Best Screenplay. But most importantly is that Robert Altman hated the TV show.

26:20Josh Clark:Yeah, yeah, good point.

26:22Chuck Bryant:I'm guessing that Robert Altman never even saw the TV show. I'll bet that he, like, heard it, heard that they were making it on CBS yes and that they were turning into a 30-minute comedy and was like, this is the, it's the worst thing I've ever seen, even though I've never seen it. That would be my guess.

26:39Josh Clark:Yeah, maybe. And, you know, to be fair at the time, and, you know, we'll see Alan Alda's reaction to being pitched this idea and him not wanting to try to audition at first, is that the history of TV and war shows and Army and Navy shows is stuff like Hogan's Heroes and McHale's Navy. And that's the kind of thing that somebody like Robert Altman and Alan Alda wouldn't have liked. And it was only after Alan Alda read the pilot and he said, this is the best TV pilot I've ever read. I'm totally going to audition for this. That he decided to do it. But I could see Altman just not going there, you know.

27:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I mean, that's a really risky thing that's actually, in retrospect, quite surprising. It's retrospect, by the way. That's the German pronunciation. it's really surprising that anybody was able to pull it off because if you know the book or the movie the idea of adapting those into a TV show a family friendly TV show in the late 60s early 70s is like wait what are you going to do the only way you could possibly do that is to make it like screwball hijinks like McHale's Navy where the war just happens to be the setting it could also be an office comedy essentially and that's not at all what they did thanks to a producer named Gene Reynolds and a writer named Larry Gelbert.

28:00Chuck Bryant:I don't know how those two came together, but it was a match made in CBS heaven.

28:07Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. Gelbert was an experienced writer. He wrote, or at least co-wrote the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Later on, after Postmash, he wrote the movie Tootsie, which is great, and the movie Oh God with George Burns and John Denver. which to me is great, and I guess to you too. Not so much Oh God Book 2, but that first Oh God was awesome.

28:31Chuck Bryant:I saw both. I don't remember the book too, but the first one was so great.

28:35Josh Clark:Yeah, agreed. But they wanted to walk that fine line between having laughs and it being a quote-unquote comedy and an anti-war movie and a movie about the horrors of combat. and it's really interesting. They walk a really tough, fine line and as we'll see, they ended up doing some really groundbreaking episodes in later seasons. The first few seasons definitely leaned way more into the sort of hijinks of it all and then I think they realized like, hey, we have a real chance here to have some incredible character arcs and really do something a little bit more like All in the Family was doing.

29:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they actually put it behind All in the Family at some point, which helped bring it out of TV purgatory, I guess. But one of the ways that the producers were able to kind of navigate that narrow margin between just idiocy and over melodramatic stuff was that the studio or the network was like, obviously we're going to have a laugh track, 30 minutes. Comedy, have to have a laugh track. And the producers kept pushing back and pushing back, and they finally reached a compromise where the OR scenes could not have a laugh track. And then there were other, sometimes other episodes or scenes where they were real downers, where they didn't have the laugh track either.

30:06Chuck Bryant:But if you watch MASH today, it's easy to kind of miss the laugh track until they get into the OR, and then it's glaringly missing. Yeah. Which I think is actually kind of useful in contrasting, you know, how these surgeons or these not just the surgeons, but everybody at the mass unit is having to get jerked around by reality, like just messing around, getting drunk on homemade gin. And then all of a sudden you have like both of your hands in a 18 year old soldier's chest. Like that's what they were trying to portray in the kind of smart use of a laugh track actually helped with that.

30:44Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And, you know, as a kid and just as an American in general at the time, like the laugh track was so ubiquitous that you didn't really think about it much as being like weird. It was usually like a studio audience thing. And this was not a studio audience show. But you just sort of accepted it. Like apparently the BBC never used the laugh track at all. And I'm also reminded of like I think years back someone did some Friends episodes without the laugh track. and divided them up into clips. And it's just jarring to hear that kind of a show without a laugh track. So Match was sort of a weird case.

31:24Chuck Bryant:We've talked about that because not only is it jarring, it's like this isn't funny at all.

31:29Josh Clark:It really cues you and you don't even – the laugh track sounds like such a dumb thing like 100 years from now. People say like they really did that on shows, but it was such an institution and like a certain kind of comedy that, yeah, like you said, without it, you don't know when to laugh almost.

31:46Chuck Bryant:Do you remember in, I guess, 2000-aughts it must have been, right before Cartoon Network came around, or Adult Swim, right before Adult Swim, somebody put out old episodes of Birdman and Space Ghost, like the original 60s episodes, but then they peppered them with laugh tracks, often inappropriately placed, where nothing even remotely funny is going on. but the audience, this canned laughter just kind of comes in and it made it so bizarrely funny. Have you not seen those? Was that Space Ghost Coast to Coast? No, this was before Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

32:24Josh Clark:Oh, okay.

32:25Chuck Bryant:Because, yeah, Dave...

32:27Josh Clark:Dave Willis.

32:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, Dave Willis was on Space Ghost Coast to Coast or he co-founded it, I guess. He might have had something to do with this because it was clearly attached to Space Ghost Coast to Coast because it happened, you know, right before it. But if you watch those, it's such an easy, basic idea, but it's so funny to watch them.

32:49Josh Clark:Oh, man, those early years of Cartoon Network were just the best. And Comedy Central, like, it used to be so much better, you know?

32:55Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

32:57Josh Clark:Everything.

32:58Chuck Bryant:I think Comedy Central is just old South Park reruns in The Daily Show once in a while.

33:03Josh Clark:Yeah, yeah, that's a real shame. as far as Mashed and their storylines go though apparently Gilbert and Reynolds interviewed a lot of veterans from the Korean War and got a lot of stuff from that and worked into episodes like the episode where a wounded North Korean soldier is in the ER there and he pulls a pin out of a hand grenade that he was hiding on the operating table like that apparently really happened as did a lot of that stuff.

33:30Chuck Bryant:Yeah Yeah, I was like, did it really happen? And I went and found reference to the actual name of the surgeon who told that story in these interviews.

33:40Josh Clark:Oh, wow. Yeah.

33:41Chuck Bryant:So, like, it definitely happened. So, I think I said that MASH was on for 11 years and it premiered in September of 72 and ran all the way to February 1983. That is a long run for a show. Yeah. Yeah, pretty good. Back then, now, like 11 years is a really long time. But at first it was not very well received. At the very least, people didn't know about it because it was put up against the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. And it was not doing very well there.

34:12Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, Wonderful World of Disney was a juggernaut of a show for mainstream America. So Alan Alda apparently used to joke that MASH was one of the top 78 shows on TV early on. And very Alan Alda kind of thing to say. And they moved it, like you've said earlier, to After All in the Family, which was a huge hit. And that gave MASH a lot more visibility, obviously. And all of a sudden, MASH was the number two show on TV. And that was it. And Dave found a great quote from Newsweek as far as the critical acclaim that I think kind of sums it up. And it is this. Without ever moralizing, MASH is the most moral entertainment on commercial television.

34:52It proposes craft against butchery, humor against despair, wit as a defense mechanism against the senseless enormity of the situation.

35:01Josh Clark:Pretty good stuff. Yeah.

35:02Chuck Bryant:I think the Newsweek people really got it.

35:05Josh Clark:Should we talk about the characters?

35:07Chuck Bryant:Yeah, let's, because we've made reference to some, but I feel like we should get a little more in depth with them. Yeah.

35:13Josh Clark:So Hawkeye, we mentioned a few times, he's, I guess you would just call the main character, and that was Alan Alda. by the way, the great Alan Alda. He's one of my heroes in entertainment. Really? And by all accounts, just one of the best dudes ever. And he is 90 years old now, which is great. He's still around, and he is one of the great writers and great directors and great actors and great human beings in the history of the TV and movie business, I think. Did he write a lot of those movies he was in in the early 80s? I think he co-wrote. He directed almost all of them. Really? He co-wrote 13 MASH episodes, directed 31.

35:52Josh Clark:Mm-hmm. And he played, you know, Hawkeye Pierce. This is a little-known fact. Did you get that Mental Floss article I sent over?

36:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

36:02Josh Clark:With the top, or whatever, 12 things? 17. 17? Mm-hmm. So a few of these guys actually served in the, at least in the reserves. Alan Alda served six months in the Army Reserves in Korea.

36:16Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm. Yes. Pretty crazy. So did Jamie Farr, who played Corporal Clinger, who is essentially far and away the most famous person until Katie Holmes came along to have come from Toledo.

36:28Josh Clark:I thought you did the Toledo thing. He was always, if you never watch his show, Clinger often referenced the Toledo Mudhens.

36:36Chuck Bryant:Toledo Mudhens and Tony Paco's, which is a real place in Toledo.

36:40Josh Clark:Oh, I mean, that's your place. I didn't know he talked about that on the show.

36:42Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. He talked about Tony Paco's all the time.

36:45Josh Clark:Oh, see, I didn't know what it was back then. And I was like, who the hell is Tony Paco?

36:48Chuck Bryant:No, Tony Paco's is like a hot dog place, a Hungarian hot dog place. And every time he would mention the Mudhens or the Tony Paco's, I would look over at my dad and there'd just be like a single tear going down his cheek. He was so filled with pride because, you know, we lived in Toledo at the time. He's got some on his face.

37:07Josh Clark:All right. So Hawkeye's the main guy. He, Alan Alda, for what it's worth, is the first person to win an Emmy for acting, writing, and directing on the same show. Then we have his buddy, Trapper John, played by Wayne Rogers, who was in real life in the Navy. And he is the, you know, the tent mate and confidant. Apparently, Robert Klein, the great comedian, turned down that role and regretted it. I could see that.

37:33Chuck Bryant:Although, Wayne Rogers, the guy who played Trapper John, was like, you know, this guy's not fully fleshed out. I'm basically Hawkeye's sidekick, right? I'm in the sidecar. I'm laughing along with him. We're doing, like, pranks together. But there's no me. Who is me? And the director was like, I think it's who is I. And they got into a really long disagreement about whether it was I or me. And Wayne Rogers eventually left after the third season. and the reason he was able to was because he never signed a contract with the producers I guess there was like a morality clause he's like I'm not signing this and they forgot to go back and get him to sign something so he left after the third season which apparently he seemed fine with.

38:17Josh Clark:Yeah I mean MASH is one of those shows like Cheers that was able to withstand some pretty drastic cast changes it's hard to pull off as a TV show Cheers did it very well, and MASH did it very well, because three of the main characters ended up being replaced. Trapper was replaced by Honeycutt, BJ Honeycutt, played by Mike Farrell, or maybe it's Farrell. He was actually a U.S. Marine in real life. He was great. I loved Honeycutt. Again, those later seasons after Trapper left, and as we'll see some of the other characters left, there were some tonal changes, but I was along for the whole ride. I was in for all of it.

38:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah, especially in the beginning, Hawkeye and Trapper John were like prankster, drunk womanizers. They would harass the nurses and try to get them to sleep with them and all sorts of stuff. And then B.J. Honeycutt was a lot different. He was a breath of fresh air because he was very true to his wife back home.

39:15Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure.

39:16Chuck Bryant:And he had a mustache.

39:19Josh Clark:That's right. Then we have Radar, of course, Corporal Radar O 'Reilly, played by Gary Berghoff. he was named Radar because he was very much a recurring thing on the show, like every single episode. He would either kind of finish somebody's sentences, usually Colonel Blake's sentence, or know what somebody needed before they needed it and kind of just hand it to him. Or he would, and this is a lot of times at the end of an episode, he would always sense the helicopters coming in with wounded before you could hear the helicopters. And usually, like, if it was a pretty light episode, to be a lot of hijinks that would be kind of halted at the end of the episode when he heard the helicopters coming.

40:00Chuck Bryant:And then there was Colonel Blake. He was one of my favorites, played by McLean Stevenson.

40:05Josh Clark:Great.

40:05Chuck Bryant:He was an actual doctor who was put in charge of the smash unit. And he's like, I have no idea how to run any kind of army outfit. So he was always kind of in over his depth, but he tried really hard. And he would get perturbed, which was kind of funny sometimes because he never got mad. he just got perturbed and befuddled kind of a little bit. Yeah, exasperated. But he wasn't an idiot. Like, it would have been really easy for any actor to portray him as kind of a dummy, but McLean Stevenson managed to keep him from going down that route.

40:37Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. He was a man. I love that character. We should mention, too, that Gary Berghoff as Radar was the only one who bridged the movie, as far as, you know, being in both. Colonel Blake was then replaced by Colonel Sherman T. Potter. Yeah. Played by Harry Morgan. And he was a very different character than Blake in that he was an old school soldier. But he also kind of, he wasn't as by the book as you would think for an old school soldier and sort of indulged the antics for the most part.

41:08Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And he used the term horse feathers a lot. Yeah. Horse feathers. Yes. There was another great character, too, who you just love to hate. He was so good. Frank Burns, who's played by Larry Linville. He was, he had what you would term today as justice sensitivity. He liked to follow the rules. He was fine with the military and the requirements for its conformity. And anyone who didn't conform to it was, it just drove him up the wall and he tried to get them in trouble. So he was like a tried and true fascist, essentially.

41:44Josh Clark:Yeah, he was a bureaucrat. He was completely the foil of Hawkeye and Trapper. He was played by Robert Duvall in the film, but Larry Linville, as Ferret Face, as they called him, was just, I mean, I always felt bad for the guy in real life because he was able to play one of the more unlikable characters in, like, TV history, and he just did it so well. He was a really good actor.

42:08Chuck Bryant:Yeah, we should say also, Frank Burns was not a good surgeon, and at the end of the day, in this MASH unit, that's what mattered, right? That's why Hawkeye and Trapper John got away with all of their antics was because they were really good surgeons. And when it came to it, they were going to save people's lives. Frank Burns, what made him even worse is that he wasn't even a good surgeon. Like you could die on his operating table because he wasn't that good. And yet he would still go tell on you for, you know, drinking gin that you made in your tent. You know, it made him so much worse.

42:44Josh Clark:Yeah, there were tentmates, the three of them. Yeah, the two guys and then Burns lived together. And then he was replaced after the fifth season in season six by David Ogden Steers as Charles Emerson Winchester III, who was a major. I always thought he was kind of British, but he just sort of did that mid-Atlantic thing. Right. Because he came from a wealthy family in Boston, a family of doctors apparently. And he was a little less of a foil, but still a bit of a foil.

43:13Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he just didn't blend in with them because he was so snobby. They just had nothing in common, essentially, from their backgrounds. Yeah. Then there's Margaret Hot Lips Houlihan, played by Loretta Swit, who I've seen, just from reading up on MASH, the TV show, is roundly credited as taking like a pretty one-dimensional victim, angry character and turning her into something like really respectable and three-dimensional over the course of the 11 seasons. and that she actually got better. Like, the character got more involved and impressive and interesting over the years, thanks to this actor.

43:55Josh Clark:Yeah, Loretta Swit. She was great. Rest in peace. I think we lost her last year or the year before, like fairly recently.

44:01Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

44:02Josh Clark:She, on the show, Hot Lips was having an affair with Frank Burns, and they were always sort of coupled together against, you know, the other guys, and they were bureaucrats. But like you said, she had a great character arc, ended up really developing into something special. And then rounding it out, I guess we already talked about Clinger. We have Father Mulcahy, played by William Christopher, who is the chaplain, and that's about all we need to say about him. He was just sort of there.

44:29Chuck Bryant:Did we talk about Clinger's wearing women's clothing?

44:33Josh Clark:Oh, no, that was a big part of it, yeah.

44:35Chuck Bryant:Hugely. Apparently he was written as a one-off character initially, and he was written as a gay character who wore women's clothes, like full-on frilly dresses and sun hats, like Sunday going to church kind of stuff. And Jamie Farr was like, look, I think I can do this a little differently. Like, imagine if this is a straight guy dressing like this because he wants to get out of the army for some psych thing. And he did such a good job in this one-off episode that they brought him back as a character, not just a recurring character, he became one of the characters.

45:08Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And he, yeah, he was one of the great characters. He tried to eat a Jeep in one episode to further prove his mental unfitness to serve. And that was one of the funny episodes. I guess before we take a break, we should rattle off some of these guest stars. Yeah. Because MASH had quite a list of people who came on for one episode, including, but not limited to, Ron Howard. Sure. Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Swayze, Lawrence Fishburne, the great George Wendt, Terry Garr. Who else you got?

45:41Chuck Bryant:Andrew Dice Clay. Yeah. The Dice Man. Yeah. Yeah, just one thing. This is apparently where Leslie Nielsen made the transition to comedy.

45:53Josh Clark:Oh, okay.

45:54Chuck Bryant:Was on his appearance on MASH. Oh, that's great. Yeah.

45:58Josh Clark:Rita Wilson.

45:58Chuck Bryant:Oh, oh, we're still going. Yeah. Don't forget Ed Begley Jr.

46:02Josh Clark:Yeah, John Ritter, Shelley Long. Pat Morita. Of course, Pat Morita's in there. He was in two. It's Hollywood in the 70s. They're like, we don't care what part of Asia you're from. Exactly. Just sign them up. Exactly.

46:15Chuck Bryant:We feel pretty progressive that we're actually casting an Asian to play an Asian.

46:20Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. All right, shall we take that second break? Yeah. Yes. All right, we'll be right back.

46:29Chuck Bryant:Learn Sub-Sub with Joshua. And Charles, stuff you should know.

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49:31Josh Clark:All right, so earlier we talked about some what you would call very special episodes. This was a thing back then on a lot of shows, like, you know, when Arnold and Willis find drugs in different strokes, like when a comedy takes a more serious tone. MASH added quite a few, and we can go through these kind of quickly. I'm going to pick, sometimes you hear a bullet from season one because that is an episode in which Hawkeye's childhood friend comes over as a journalist to write a book about the war and he ends up dying on Hawkeye's operating table and that was the first episode that was really very heavy where like Hawkeye cries and it gets kind of serious about the horrors of war.

50:13Chuck Bryant:Yes. Okay. Alright. I'm going to pick Dreams from season 8 which is apparently its most controversial episode because it is very jarring, very disturbing, where it covers each of the main characters taking a rest from like a long day in the OR where they saw 211 patients over 33 hours. And it goes through each one of their dreams and it's very surreal. All sorts of weird, disturbing stuff happens. And I haven't seen it, but I want to watch it because it sounds just totally nuts. But it's pretty weird. It's completely contrary to any other episode. So I I imagine if you were tuning in on Saturday night on CBS expecting, you know, to kind of laugh and maybe cry and you saw this horrible weirdness, you might have had a bad reaction to it.

51:01Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. There were two more episodes that were definitely weird as far as mainstream television goes. A documentary style one called The Interview where it was like a black and white, you know, like a Vietnam era black and white documentary about war. That one was kind of crazy to see on TV at the time. It won a Humanitas Prize for a work that explores the human condition in a meaningful way. And then the other one was called Point of View. And the whole thing is shot from, like, the camera's point of view is from a wounded soldier who can't talk. And so all the actors are just coming up and addressing camera as this soldier.

51:40Josh Clark:and it's, you know, again, a very sort of groundbreaking roll of the dice to do for mainstream TV in the 70s.

51:47Chuck Bryant:For sure. And then we got to talk about Abyssinia Henry. Oh, God.

51:53Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, this episode wrecked little Chuck, little nine-year-old Chuck.

51:58Chuck Bryant:I remember this one, too, and I was like, where's the laugh track?

52:01Josh Clark:Yeah.

52:03Chuck Bryant:So Colonel Blake, who we both love, played by McLean Stevenson, And this is the season three finale. He gets word that he's going home. Like his tour is over. He's out of the army now. And so he leaves. And that's it. Like everybody's saying bye. Everybody's happy for him. He's happy. And then at the end of the episode, Radar comes into the OR and he's holding a telegram. And what does the telegram say, Chuck?

52:30Josh Clark:I can't even say it.

52:31Chuck Bryant:It says that Colonel Blake's plane went down with Colonel Blake aboard and that there were no survivors. So on his way back home after his tour, after becoming beloved by all viewers, Colonel Blake is dead. The writers killed him after he was already off the show. And it just wrecked everybody, like you said.

52:52Josh Clark:It was brutal. Alan Alda knew this was going to happen. The story goes that they didn't tell the rest of the cast until they got their sides that morning. And because they wanted, you know, a real reaction or maybe they didn't even have the sides. I think they just learned when Radar walked in in the scene. And Gary Berghoff's acting in that is incredible. And, you know, there's no reaction. Like, no one's like, oh, my God, no. It's just very quietly they keep operating and you just hear they're crying and you just hear, like, scalpel, you know, suction. And it's devastating.

53:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah. It's good stuff.

53:28Josh Clark:Yeah, very, very tough.

53:30Chuck Bryant:So, Chuck, I feel like the episode, we can just skip it. You know, the MASH finale, you don't have to talk about that.

53:38Josh Clark:No big deal.

53:40Chuck Bryant:I don't know if we said, but surely we've mentioned this before, that the most watched television episode is the final episode of MASH, which is really saying something because it was two and a half hours long.

53:55Josh Clark:Oh, my God, that's right. It was. I remember it being long. I don't remember it being that long.

53:59Chuck Bryant:Two and a half hours, man.

54:01Josh Clark:Yeah, and of course, that includes commercials. A 30-second spot apparently was$450 ,000, which would be$1.36 million today. It was called Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen. And it was, you know, the war ends, basically, is the last episode. But it is very dramatic for a lot of it. And, like, the things the characters go through at the end are all pretty, you know, take pretty dramatic turns.

54:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And it very famously, in this kind of heart-rending montage at the very end, it shows how every character dies in the future.

54:35Josh Clark:You're talking about Six Feet Under? Yeah. Because I haven't seen it in a while. I was like, did that really happen?

54:41Chuck Bryant:That is one of the greatest endings to any show ever.

54:45Josh Clark:Of course. It was great. Also gut-wrenching.

54:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it was. But Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen is fantastic, too, for sure. Yeah.

54:52Josh Clark:So like you said, the biggest rated TV show of all time, and that was like including sports events up until Super Bowl 2010, finally surpassed it. But MASH is still, as far as just a regular TV show goes, the finale is the most watched. I think 75 % of America tuned into that, which is a staggering number. You know, you see Hawkeye in a mental hospital. Father Mulcahy loses his faith in God. He loses his hearing and his faith in God. Klinger ends up marrying a Korean woman and stays there, ironically. Yeah, because he was always trying to get out of there, right? He's trying to go home. Yeah. Did you see the possible urban legend about the plumbing in New York City?

55:34Josh Clark:No. That was in the mental floss thing. I don't know if this is true, but I've always heard this, that the plumbing in New York City supposedly broke during the first commercial break because everybody got up to pee at the same time in New York. That's awesome. It totally sounds like it's probably not real. Right. They all flushed it once, and it just broke everything.

55:54Chuck Bryant:All the alligators drowned.

55:56Josh Clark:But, yeah, that's funny. It's a good story, though, regardless. But 121 million people tuned in to that episode, and I was one of them. My whole family sat around, and we didn't do that kind of thing much.

56:08Chuck Bryant:Oh, we watched it. My mom videotaped it. We watched it on videotape many times, too.

56:13Josh Clark:Yeah.

56:14Chuck Bryant:Yeah, she'd be like, watch this. Watch this part.

56:17Josh Clark:Watch it again.

56:18Chuck Bryant:I have a cute little anecdote about watching MASH, though. All right, let's hear it. That's from Yumi. So her older brother, Bobby, he has special needs. And one day when they were much, much younger, Yumi must have probably been five or six or something, Bobby had to go to the ER. And her dad was a Marine, so they were living on a Marine base at the time. And her mom, like her dad whisks Bobby off to the ER and her mom tells her that Bobby's going to the hospital. And so Yumi's only frame of reference for military hospitals is a mass unit where there's always bombs going off and everything is kind of nuts.

56:52Chuck Bryant:So she was really worried her brother was going to a mass unit, which I've just found endlessly cute.

56:59Josh Clark:Yeah, that's adorable. It's funny. I'm going to bring that up next time to see Yumi. That's just terrible.

57:03Chuck Bryant:She'll think that's hilarious. Oh, by the way, Echo and the Bunnymen is Saturday.

57:08Josh Clark:This Saturday? Mm-hmm. In Atlanta?

57:10Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm. At the Tabernacle. Remember, I told you I'd remind you again.

57:14Josh Clark:I know. I'm looking to see if I can go. We should probably do this off air.

57:18Chuck Bryant:Okay. I just wanted to remind you. Okay.

57:22Josh Clark:You're like, I'm not going, but you should go.

57:23Chuck Bryant:Oh, I'm going.

57:25Josh Clark:We will quickly mention the MASH spinoffs. I teased after MASH a few times as saying post-MASH, but that was the name of one of the spinoffs. It didn't run long, about a season and a half. And it was one of the ones that had the most characters, I guess, from the show, because the real Colonel Potter was there, Klinger was there, and Father Mulcahy was there. You know, obviously all in a hospital. Post-war, a veterans hospital.

57:52Chuck Bryant:Did you watch it? I remember watching After MASH.

57:54Josh Clark:Yeah, I watched it some, and I remember not loving it, so I don't think I watched it all.

57:59Chuck Bryant:There was also Trapper John, M.D., which was on for seven seasons, and it even was running concurrently at the same time as MASH itself for a lot of that time. Yeah, kind of weird. Yeah.

58:10Josh Clark:Did not have, what was his name?

58:12Chuck Bryant:Wayne Rogers.

58:13Josh Clark:Yeah, like they recast it. So it's just like, why not just call it something else?

58:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I guess because everybody loved the character. But even still, it's a character like 50 years in the future or something like that, you know, or 30 years in the future. So he's an old band. So they had another actor, Purnell Roberts, who you probably know from the 60s touring company of Camelot. But he played Trapper John as an older man.

58:37Josh Clark:Oh, okay. So, of course, now I'm a dummy. Like, the reason they called it that was so they could bank on the success of MASH.

58:44Chuck Bryant:That's what I would guess.

58:46Josh Clark:Yeah, I didn't think that through.

58:47Chuck Bryant:It almost makes me wonder if they just retrofitted a show that had already been greenlit to Trapper John.

58:53Josh Clark:Yeah, like The Pit was supposed to be an ER spinoff.

58:57Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

58:58Josh Clark:Yeah, and I think there's still a lawsuit because apparently there's – and, of course, I'm speaking completely as someone who doesn't know a lot about this. So look it up if you really want to know. But I think the Michael Crichton estate got involved and they're like, wait a minute, you can't do an ER spinoff without like giving us some juice. Because he came up with the idea for ER or whatever, wrote the book that it was based on or something. And I think there's like a paper trail of because the pit was like, no, no, no, that wasn't the deal. It's just a new show. It's not supposed to be Noah Wiley's character.

59:32Josh Clark:But I think there's an email trail where they were like, oh, you want money, huh? let's just call it something else and change the character's name.

59:39Chuck Bryant:Who is that dumb these days?

59:42Josh Clark:I don't know. And I don't know if, I mean, I'm sure I'm getting some details wrong, but I know that it is an ongoing issue.

59:47Chuck Bryant:Man. There was one more. It was Walter, W-A-L-T-E-R, with the asterisk even. That was a 1984 pilot that didn't, I think it aired one time, and it aired in the Eastern and Central time zones. It was apparently so bad they didn't even air it in the West that same night.

1:00:09Josh Clark:Didn't they do that for our show?

1:00:11Chuck Bryant:Pretty much. They tried to cram it all into one night for sure.

1:00:14Josh Clark:Man, that's crazy. I didn't know that about the West Coast thing. That is a brutal move.

1:00:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

1:00:19Josh Clark:Yeah. It's like we can't even let the California eyes see the show.

1:00:22Chuck Bryant:Right. So it was about Radar O 'Reilly and his life after Korea. And it was played by Gary Berghoff. And he was going to become a cop. And his wife had just left him. and he was contemplating suicide. And this was a comedy, a half hour comedy from what I understand. So people didn't watch it.

1:00:42Josh Clark:I bet you that's out there. I'm going to have to watch that.

1:00:43Chuck Bryant:Yeah. You got anything else?

1:00:46Josh Clark:I got nothing else. I appreciate you indulging this one. I know it's not your favorite show, but I thank you.

1:00:51Chuck Bryant:Hey, I can always talk about MASH for 53 straight minutes anytime you want. All right, let's do it again right now. Okay. If you want to know more about MASH, just go start watching it. I propose watching the episode Dreams first. Maybe just to get it out of the way. Yeah. And since Chuck said, yeah, that means it's time for listener mail.

1:01:14Josh Clark:Yeah, not so much a listener mail, even though it was one. A little inside baseball, but our email has been screwed up for a couple of months now. If you haven't heard back from us, by the way, and you've sent an email lately, it's because our email is super screwed up. It's my fault. The good news is we're now getting them again, but they are being forwarded, so you can't directly reply. Long way of saying this comes from Martha Black, and there's really no need in even reading the email. Because all it was was, hey, Chuck, by the way, that Howard Hughes picture of him as an old guy in Vegas is actor Rip Torn.

1:01:49Josh Clark:No. And it even says so in the caption that she found. And so I definitely have egg on my face for that one because now that I see it, I'm like, yeah, I guess I guess it is ripped. Is that right?

1:02:00Chuck Bryant:Artie?

1:02:02Josh Clark:Yeah, but he was younger and he was, you know, had tissue boxes on his feet, for God's sake.

1:02:07Chuck Bryant:It fooled me to Chuck.

1:02:09Josh Clark:Yeah.

1:02:09Chuck Bryant:Oh, well, me too. Of course, that makes sense.

1:02:11Josh Clark:There are no pictures of Howard Hughes in Vegas. He didn't allow that.

1:02:14Chuck Bryant:At least it was an A.I.

1:02:16Josh Clark:Yeah, that's true.

1:02:17Chuck Bryant:You know, at least they got ripped, torn to pose for it. Yeah. So who is that from? Martha Black. Thanks a lot, Martha Black. She sounds like an MTV VJ from back in the day. That's right. If you want to be like Martha Black and show off your name, you can email us too. Hopefully we'll get it these days. Send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

1:02:44Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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