A lot of veterans were insulted by that show. Hollywood disrespect has always existed.
Robert Clary (Le Beau) is still with us. I think he’s about 90
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.
“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.
“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.
Yeah great show... I don’t have cable and it is on one of the oldie channels on free tv over the air... Don’t know what network it is, but I am amazed at how many channels we get for free...
“Reach for the Sky” is about Douglas Bader, WWII’s legless British ace squadron leader and Wing Commander. Imprisoned in several camps, he was the instigator of numerous escape attempts, including the huge breakout upon which the “Great Escape” was based. Bob Crane’s character has some aspects of Bader’s activities.
Sgt. Schultz, has incorporated aspects of the Czech folk hero “Good Soldier Svejk.” He was a likeable, bumbling character who screwed up his Austro-Hungarian betters in WWI by following their instructions to the letter. He was a bit like the American cartoon character Beetle Bailey, who also grew out of WWII situations and made WWII American vets laugh.
Somehow, I knew both of these things when Hogan’s Heros originally aired. I think I laughed better knowing this stuff.
My grandfather was a WWII vet, fought against Rommel in North Africa, and LOVED Hogan’s heroes. It was his favorite show.
It wasn’t disrespectful at all. The entire point of the show is that the Nazis looked like clowns, the prisoners were smarter than them, and they didn’t want to escape because they were helping the resistance from inside the prison. The prisoners never wanted Klink to be reassigned, because he was so clueless that he allowed the prisoners to run a huge resistance operation right under his nose.
Klemperer only agreed to do the show because the producers promised that the Nazis would look like buffoons and would never be allowed to seem victorious at the end of any episode.
And yes, the show was based on Stalag 17, though the producers always denied this in court for legal reasons. But it was.
Stalag 17? Now THAT’S a great movie...
Werner Klemperer’s brother is a well received author. You should GOOG his works.
My first wife was a German girl; on a visit here by her mother, I was watching “Hogan’s Heroes” on day, and even though my MIL couldn’t understand a word of English, she exploded in anger when it was on, saying we were “making fools out of Germans”.
I said, well, “Yeah”. After all, we did fight the NAZIs in a war.
She didn’t see that show as “comedy”, at all.
But that was back in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and the girl and I have long-since been divorced.
I’ve been married to my current wife (America) for 41 years now.
Thread is open for theories.
I have seen the reruns many times. I’ve never been a huge fan of the show, but it did have its charms. It was good that we could laugh at Nazism after so much long warfare to end it. Many of the stars died early deaths (Bob Crane was murdered at age 49) but the article is wrong. Not all of the stars are dead. Robert Clary is still living.