Posted on 08/14/2018 8:21:22 PM PDT by SamAdams76
I was wondering how you might reply. That was great!
Haha - Mr Drysdale lived down the street from us and Ray Milland drove his car into our garage door (as intoxicated as anyone’s ever been) :)
Bob Cranes dad was a Waterbury Connecticut police detective who lived on Greenwood Avenue. I delivered the newspaper to him.
A lot of veterans were insulted by that show. Hollywood disrespect has always existed.
But it is not at all remarkable that these old episodes still exist somewhere (after all, the original films are probably still sitting in their studio vaults). Of course, it is a marvel of modern technology that those episodes are now accessible to the general public - even only on a whim (and even if illegally).
But what is remarkable about your personal experience is that, when re-watching an episode for the first time after 45 years, you could recall every individual camera shot. The human mind is more amazing than Youtube.
And about the Political Correctness rampant today, and how HH could have been filmed in the 1960s/70s: It is because the WWII vets had just reached their prime that there was such a potential demand for such shows. And it was because the show was so unrealistic that no one felt offended.
Incidentally, another show, "Campo 44," about Allied POWs in an Italian camp, preceded HH.
Regards,
METV is on DISH! Whoo hoo! I didn’t know.
He musta got in to granny’s moonshine again.
I remember watching the show and both the Allied prisoners and the regular Germans had a sense of fear and dread when the Gestapo showed up - obviously whenever the black Gestapo car pulled up it was bad news for everyone.
My favorite is when Hochstetter was tricked into thinking the war was over and allowed prisoners to go free by letting them borrow his own car.
Apparently (it was before my time) Crane was a huge DJ in Los Angeles prior to either TV show. So he was a radio star already, and he had looks that made the networks come knocking.
Robert Clary (Le Beau) is still with us. I think he’s about 90
A few years ago, when my kids were still in high school, we hosted some German exchange students in our home. We eventually met one of their families (from Dusseldorf). Very nice people. As you say, most Germans in that war wanted no part of it either.
One experience that sticks out, I had a copy of William Shirer's "Rise And Fall of Adolf Hitler" in my library and on the spine was an image of the Nazi Swastika. I never thought much of it but the German kids were shocked that I had it on display like that. In their country, that image is strictly verboten.
Another episode with the German kids was the education they gave me on beer! They were only around 16 but they were beer experts and told me (in a nice way) that I was drinking crap. So I had the surreal experience of having them in a liquor store with me, telling me what was good and what wasn't. I came back home with some Spaten, Paulaner and Pilsner Urquell.
They also thought we Americans were strange for keeping drinks in refrigerators. They wanted everything room temperature. Even milk!
In real life, allied POW officers were assigned to different camps than enlisted personnel. Hogan would have been in a different location than the rest of the Heroes.
Interesting observation. I've never noticed this.
That said, we Viet and Viet era Vets were definitely given the cold shoulder, especially those of us who went to college after serving.
That all changed after GWI, and it was nice to be a part of the vets' community thereafter.
Re Hogan's Heroes?
A bit sappy, but fun. Just the thing when decompressing and not needing major conflict and drama.
If Hitler had invaded Russia 3 or 4 monthe earlier as the original plan...the Germans would have not been bogged down in the very harsh russian winter and may have destroyed the Red Army and the commies. But Hitler delayed the invasion to help the Italians finsh off the italians weak effort against Greece. I read that little tidbit in “The rise and fall off the third reich” A master (to a point) political manipulator and conniver but a very poor general. Many German generals felt the war was over as soon as it began.
“When I was growing up, one of the shows my father used to watch was “Hogan’s Heroes.” I had not actually watched the show since the early 1970s so the show itself was long forgotten but the theme music was always a bit of an earworm, popping up randomly in my head from time to time during the decades since.
About a week ago, I noticed that entire episodes of Hogan’s Heroes was on YouTube and decided to click on one.
As the opening credits played, everything was instantly recognizable to me even though it has been maybe 45 years since I last saw it.”
I was a kid in the 1970s and I watched LOTS of tv. Not just for entertainment, but as a way to provide myself with escape and comfort from my misery because I was being raised in an abusive and dysfunctional home.
One of the many syndicated reruns of classic tv shows i watched daily in the 70s was The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. But for reasons I dont know, they suddenly stopped airing reruns of ghost and mrs muir. And never aired them again. As a result, i dont have episodes of that program memorized the way I do with many other classic sitcoms. BUT the opening theme remained with me.
Fast forward a few decades and I’m aimlessly surfing youtube when i run across some videos of full episodes of ghost and mrs muir posted there. I begin to watch one of them and as soon as the opening theme plays, all of the sudden I’m flooded and overwhelmed with fond, nostalgic memories of myself as a kid, sitting in front of the living room 25 inch color tv (the only tv we had in the apartment, unlike today where people have a tv in almost every room), watching daily syndicated reruns of my favorite classic tv shows, movies, and cartoons. More than just entertain me, they really did a good job in helping me preserve what few shreds of sanity I had as well as provided me with much needed laughter, happiness, and joy in an otherwise joyless existence.
The opening theme to ghost and mrs muir:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4ooVafQ8Y
Werner Klemperer was half-Jewish. Howard Caine (Hofstetter), John Banner(Schultz) and Leon Askin (Burkhalter) were all Jewish as is Robert Clary (Le Beau) who is still alive.
A one-sided take of things to be sure but packed with telegrams that passed back and forth between himself, Roosevelt and Stalin. Stalin was clearly not happy at all that it took the West so long to open that Second Front (with D-Day). He considered our actions in North Africa, the Mediterranean and Italy of little consequence. He wanted that channel crossing and he wanted it now!
“All of them are dead now.”
Robert Clary, the Holocaust survivor, is still alive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF7TzXn8oI0 He mentions that he is the only one left of the main stars. Kenneth Washington, a replacement for Ivan Dixon, is still alive as well.
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