Posted on 11/15/2008 4:55:18 PM PST by Nitro
TVland begins the M*A*S*H series
Mark
“Steele - with 3 e’s, not all in a row!”
It’s common for a candidate for a major role in a series to appear in a guest role first.
I always thought that Lt. Col. Blake and Trapper John were a couple of adulterous snakes. Col. Potter and BJ (although his politics stink), added some integrity to the cast. I always loved Sidney Friedman, but Col. Flagg’s one episode where he offered to send someone some scorpions from his own private collection was the funniest. My biggest complaint was the lack of GI haircuts among the cast. They looked too scruffy to be real soldiers. My favorite nurse was Kelly. I watch several reurns of “M*A*S*H” every day.
Indeed. That's why it started to suck so much toward the end when nuttiness gave way to preachiness. Were it on today, Radar would've married Blake and Klinger would have not only NOT stopped wearing dresses but would've had a sex-change operation.
I can’t watch M*A*S*H* any more. The sight of “1950s Army doctors and nurses” with perfectly layered, sprayed, winged-back 1970s hairdos ruins it for me. In real life those girls would have had ponytails or poodle-dos — the guys would have been in crew cuts.
Plus Alan Alda really starts to grate after a while.
**They put down the US Army for being in Korea in the 1st place.**
I think seeing smuggled out video of the horrors of North Korea and knowing how much the South Koreans has today has pretty much burned me off of MASH.
The best episode of MASH was never made but if I would of made it Hawkeye gets his wish and the Americans pull out of Korea and he comes back to Korea now occupied by the communists and see the horrors the American Army was preventing and realized that there are worse things than war.
I only saw a few episodes, but I did spend two years 1951-53 in the Army, and it has always angered me that the MASH writers seemingly never heard that the Chicoms were involved in the war. Every time I heard the enemy mentioned it was always “the North Koreans”. The vast majority of U.S. casualties were inflicted by Chinese during the two and a half years that the war dragged on after we had rolled up the NK army.
Yep. Winchester was my favorite even as a little kid. Hawkeye got less funny and more preachy.
Also, I thought there wasn’t actually draft for the Korean War... I wasn’t alive then, maybe I’m wrong. I read it in a history book, which means absolutely nothing given the current state of history books.
"Did I mention, that I only accept the Trapper John episopes?
Below is the entire content of the article you posted.
"TVland begins the M*A*S*H series"
Okay... Whatever..
We are at war.....
that means we win, or
else.
I happen to believe in the war, and even if you do not...
we still must win.
If you pull out, every dead and wounded and damaged soldier, sailor and marine will have been for nothing!!!!
I could not have sais it better
My uncle was the same way. He was career Air Force, spent one year in Vietnam. When I told him how great I thought the show was he said; “Right, lets go to war and have fun!”
LOL! Excellent points.
Way of topic, but my brother is currently stationed in Heidelburg, he had an X-ray earlier this week and the tech doing the proceedure told my brother that they were in the exact room where Patton died.
You had better believe there was a draft. I happened to be a recent engineering graduate, unable to find a job in the summer of 1950 due to a serious job shortage with 52,000 graduates and supposedly 29,000 jobs open. After the war started in late June, no one would offer a job to one of us who were highly eligible to be drafted.
Around Labor Day, I did get a job in an oil refinery and was assured that the job would keep me out of the draft; also shortly after that, the fighting turned in favor of the UN forces and I thought it was over. But in November 500,000 Chinese crossed the Yalu and kicked our butts. It turned out that my refinery job did not change my draft classification, but only qualified me for a 60 day delay of induction, which supposedly could be repeated indefinitely. When the first one expired I decided to go ahead and volunteer for immediate service.
The Army, surprisingly, had plans for utilizing draftees with "scientific and professional" qualifications. I wound up at (then) Camp Detrick, now Fort Detrick. I was given the impressive job title of "Mechanical engineering research assistant", with less impressive grade of E-3, KP duties included, working for civilian bosses who had no way of providing promotions and no real incentive to do so anyway. But, hey, it was a lot better than being frozen and shot at.
One of my classmates somehow missed the "SPP" boat and wound up a potential combat replacement in Japan. One day he was called out of formation and told that there was a job for a draftsman at UN HQ in Pusan.
"Why, I'm an engineer, not a draftsman" he told the assignment officer.
"Well, you can take this job, or you can go up North where the fighting is". He finally wised up and spent the rest of his hitch drawing graphs of UN good deeds.
I don't think of myself as a "real" veteran due to the semi-comic circumstances of my service tour, but I never regretted taking the ride.
There was a draft in place continuously from WWII until after Vietnam. In the years immediately following WWII, there was little risk of getting drafted, as the military was still in the process of demobilizing; but the draft did exist, and was used to fill in particular personnel needs, like, say, doctors.
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