A bad movie that spawned a worse TV show.
BTW, Mars Attacks was a great movie.
True story inspired by MASH. My father, brothers and I saw it when it first came out. My father had an aisle seat and actually fell out of it laughing at the opening scene line, "That jeep's not stolen, it's right there!" The story I dragged out of him at home afterwards was this:
He got to the Pacific late as a replacement rifle platoon lieutenant and so, despite surviving all of the 96th Infantry Division's time in the line, didn't have enough points to go home right away when the war ended.
He was instead transferred to the 86th Division on Mindanao Island in the Phillipines as executive officer of its divisional reconnaissance company. It had a lot of jeeps. There was one intact brothel on Mindanao Island which had survived the war, run by a White Russian named Sergei who wanted a jeep.
So the recon company's officers made a deal - one jeep for certain privileges, which Sergei promptly repainted. The 86th's commander saw it and suspected something but couldn't prove it. He did, however, post a guard on the ship which was to carry the recon company (and other units) back to the States. The guard's job was to count and take down the serial numbers of every jeep loaded on board.
So Pop and the other recon officers ran a jeep on board, disassembled it, carried the pieces off the ship, reassembled it, repainted it with the original serial numbers of Sergei's jeep, and loaded it back on board. The general glared at them but said nothing when Sergei drove up in his jeep to wave bon voyage from the dock.
All the personnel were demobilized in San Francisco before the ship's cargo was unloaded. Years later all the recon company officers got bills from the Army demanding $50 each to pay for the jeep. Pop refused because he had a new young family, me included, and couldn't afford it. He wrote back that the Army should consider that his personal war bonus.
The Army retaliated by giving him a general discharge (which meant a little then) from the Involuntary Reserve in April 1950. His reserve MOS was "High Priority Replacement Rifle Company Commander". The Korean War started two months later.