Posted on 02/28/2008 1:23:20 PM PST by Borges
It was great when Steele found a used throat depressor stick on the ground and complained about waste at the unit, and Henry had to tell him that you can’t re-sterilize wood. ;-)
Sad that Harry Morgan had so many legal problems in his later years, for beating his wife, IIRC? :-(
MASH went into the crapper when Mike Farrell joined the cast.
Harry Morgan is actually still alive. He’ll turn 93 in April.
Oh, there are a million fantastic one liners.
A few from Burns come to mind...
“Go peddle your fish”
“There you are. There are your lounge lizards at war”
From Blake...
“Better bring in the brass monkeys tonight”
Not coincidentally, the change for her character came when Linda Bloodworth-Thomason joined the show's writing team.
Bob Newhart I’ll go with - what a great show!
Now THAT is depressing.
A bit wrong. Some had cable going back to the 1950s. Not everyplace in America could get good reception off air. In the earliest days, neighbors had to even agree to the channel or else face poor reception. Jim Backus wrote about his experiences as a homeowner in the 1950s in his first autobiography.
In the 1960s drive-ins and theaters ran anti-"pay tv" promo clips before the movie.
By the late 1970s there were a number of pay movie channels (generally showing 2 movies in a night, alternating the play list through the month).HBO goes back to 1975 and was doing original comedy specials that far back.
There were generally 2 or 4 UHF channels per city as well as a PBS affiliate. If you lived near several mid-sized cities, you might even recieve (via cable or antenna) several NBCs, etc.
The earliest of dedicated channels that I saw (24 hour news, 24 hour sports, 24 hour music video, etc.) also included Nickelodeon (split with A&E at night) and a number of other offerings Upwards of 36 channels by my recall in the early 1980s.
But the idea of the Neilsen ratings is skewed. More viewers doesn't translate to "largest viewing audience".
Because more people are watching TV today than going to the movies, or listening to radio, or doing something else, the bigger audience doesn't really "count"?
Might as well ignore the money that King Kong or Gone With The Wind has made in re-release or home video or tv broadcasts and just tally the take in 1930s dimes to assure us that Golden Compass made "more money" than "supposed" Hollywood blockbusters of old.
It was OK 25 YEARS ago when nothing else was on, but watching Radar and Hawkeye now are definitely "been there, done that".
On the other hand, I could watch the "Beverly Hillbillies" or "Munsters" all day long.
I remember what I was doing when this came on, I was busy doing something unseemly and did not care that I missed it.
And after leaving M*A*S*H, McClean Stevenson never did another worthwhile thing in his career.
Kinda takes one to know one, doesn't it!
From the finale, I especially remember Winchester and the Chinese musicians.
Great quote from Winchester in some episode, about his unwillingness to do something: “I’d sooner share my toothbrush with a Democrat.”
I watched it as a kid.
But really, 11 years of that garbage was too much.
___________
And there is your issue. You were a kid, you didn’t get the humor. That, and you probably missed too many episodes of Mork and Mindy.
High school kids have gotten up to worse things over the years.
My comment was more about the shirt and advertising one's love for the show on one's torso than the show itself. Especially ten or eleven years on after it had gotten really stale.
I loved Monty Python when I was a kid, but if I see somebody doing the penguin sketch now, I cringe. However good it was, it lost something over the years.
Ditto when you see people who can't keep their love of some science fiction or fantasy films and shows under control. I won't say which. They're all fine things, but there's such a thing as going too far and not knowing when to let go.
I guess Robin Williams says a lot of funny things. But after a while it's hard to get past the fact that it's Robin Williams saying them and saying the same things over and over and over again.
For some of us, it's like that with Alan Alda and MASH in general. And when Robin or Alan gets really serious and earnest and starts tugging at the heart strings, that's the worst part.
The series expressed an fascinating mathematical property: as Alan Alda's artistic control over the series approached one, self-righteousness approached infinity while the factors of sublety and enjoyability became vanishingly small.
The finale represented the zenith of Alda's destructive stewardship and a simultaneous nadir for comedy and good will; together, a veritable yin and yang of bad writing. This viewer was left banging his head and muttering Yes, yes, Alan. We get it. War is bad. Now shut the hell up.
Goodbye, farewell and amen.
Amen as in "Thank God it finally ended."
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