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Chapter 1: Why do Chuck and Josh have differing opinions on M*A*S*H?
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the M*A*S*H acronym?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, part of our ongoing TV edition, because we were raised on TV. So it's familiar to us, and we love it.
Well, one of us loved this. We might as well go ahead and get that out of the way.
What do you mean?
MASH?
Yeah.
I love MASH. You hated MASH.
I don't know what you're talking about. Come on. I don't hate MASH. It's mostly a put-on just to annoy you. Yeah, I don't hate it, hate it. You know what I mean? Well, tell me your history. Did you watch it at all? Yeah, I watched it with my dad. My dad would laugh out loud, throw his head back and clap sometimes. And it was fun just to see my dad do that.
Of course, he had, you know, consumed two old Milwaukee tall boys by this time. But, you know, I would guess that he probably would have laughed regardless.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How did M*A*S*H reflect real-life medical practices during the Korean War?
At one point I was watching five episodes of MASH on Thursday and four episodes of MASH every other day of the week.
Wow. There's not that many shows you can do that with.
No. It was like 5 and 5.30 and then something like 10 and 10.30 or something like that.
I can do that with Law & Order. I can just watch Law & Order indefinitely, the original series.
But I was into it. It was a formative show for me. It was, you know, it was a top five show as a kid. Wow.
And is it still one of your top shows?
Yeah, I mean, it's not one I go back to, and it certainly has a place in my heart, but it's hard to definitively rank today's TV against TV back then, you know?
It's different.
Very different.
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Chapter 4: What are the notable character arcs in M*A*S*H?
I did. I didn't watch it. I watched it binge-wise on, I guess, Netflix or whatever. I never watched it when it was on. Yeah. Yeah, so obviously all this is barreling us toward MASH, which is an acronym. Did you know that, Mr. Smart Guy? I did.
Yeah. Well, why don't you, since this is your favorite show, why don't you tell everybody what it stands for?
It stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. And as everyone, even Jerry, knows that there's an asterisk in between the letters, three asterisks. Our friend Dave helped us with this.
And heā Who also hates MASH, by the way.
Yeah. He looked high and low and was like, there's no reason for the asterisk. He thinks that it was just a design thing, and I couldn't find anything that contradicted that.
Well, my feeling is that I think it clearly was meant to show that it is an acronym, even though that's not how the military necessarily distinguished it. Because people would just say, what in the world does MASH mean? But, oh, wait, it must stand for something, would be my guess.
Right. But they didn't use like periods after each letter like the military would have.
Oh, yeah, sure. I get you.
I'm talking about the asterisks in particular.
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Chapter 5: How did the show tackle serious themes amid comedy?
I did know that because, you know, at some point the show spells that out. So, yeah, I knew that was a thing. What I was curious, and, you know, my mass recollection, this is from a long time ago, I don't remember them ever moving at all. So I feel like they kind of stayed there. Yeah.
Unless there was an episode that I missed where they were like, yeah, we're going to move to this other part of Malibu, which is where it was filmed, the Fox Ranch, which is now Malibu Creek State Park. Mm-hmm. which is why in all the scenes of helicopters flying around Korea, who knows if that's what Korea looks like, but it looks like the mountains of Southern California.
You don't know. That's where the Manson family lived for a while.
Oh, really? No, they lived on Spahn Ranch.
Right.
Okay.
Anytime I hear ranch in California, I just immediately think of the Manson family.
Yeah. And I know I've told the story about shooting out there, but it was a big treat for me as a PA to shoot a commercial and see like a rusted out army ambulance. And I think, I mean, who knows what's there now, but there were still a few remnants back then.
Right. Yeah. I remember my mind being blown when I found out that that was like California in the background.
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Chapter 6: What were the groundbreaking episodes of M*A*S*H?
If you got there, chances are you lived.
Yeah. So it was a really good idea that panned out. Yeah. And in the show, you can hear bombs going off sometimes. Occasionally, the overhead lights will flicker and sway because they are so close to the front. And I was thinking about the same thing that you mentioned, too, that they never seem to change or move their their unit.
And if it's supposed to be four to five miles behind front lines, then that would have to be a completely static front line for all those years to never move. But it made me wonder about, like, the real-life MASH surgeons. Like, how often did you have to break down your MASH unit and then move it, you know, and set it up again, which apparently you could do very quickly.
Supposedly you could set one up in 24 hours. But that also just kind of goes to explain, like, these were not, like, state-of-the-art surgical wards. They were, like, blood and guts, get your hands dirty. You're lucky if you have more than one scalpel kind of, like, surgical outfit.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. And that was conveyed very well in the show. The doctors on the show, you know, just like in real life, the doctors were generally civilians that were drafted into the war to be army surgeons. After, I think, World War II, they had a tougher time getting surgeons going. And when Korea came around, they passed the Doctors Draft Act.
If you had already served in World War II as a doctor or surgeon or nurse or whatever, you could get waived. You could still serve if you wanted to. But the long and short of that is the recruits were younger. They didn't have as much experience.
They definitely were not looking to join the army, which is a big, big part of that show is that none of, you know, not none of them, but the main characters that we're going to talk about, like the protagonist, not the foils, the foils kind of like the army, but the other guys generally did not like being there or being in the army culture. And Alan Alda was 36 when they started making this.
I was kind of curious about his starting age.
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Chapter 7: How did M*A*S*H influence television sitcoms that followed?
But the movie was optioned from a book written in 1968 called MASH, colon, a novel about three army doctors by a... MASH veteran doctor named Dr. Richard H. Hornberger under a pseudonym Richard Hooker. I think he added a co-writer named W.C.
Hines when it became pretty clear that his book was a bit of a mess because it sounds like it was just sort of a group of stories about his experience in the 8055. The 8055th MASH unit was the real life unit. Right. that it was based on, and it sounds like it was, you know, like what we see on TV and in the movies.
Like, they partied a lot, they drank a lot, did a lot of pranks, and on the side, did some surgery.
Yeah, but like you said, it was kind of loosely put together. Like, each chapter started with, hey, get this. And they were basically like, yeah, they were anecdotes. And then apparently he also peppered in some like gory stuff just to basically get across the horrors of war. And he was actually a surgeon in Maine. And when he put this whole book together and they brought in W.C.
Hines, a sports writer, to kind of help him with it. If you've seen the TV show and you've never read the book, maybe even haven't seen the movie, you have a totally different conception of MASH than what Hornberger created and what the movie kind of portrayed. Which is, like, this wasn't a ā he didn't have any liberal agenda. In fact, he was kind of conservative.
And he didn't really like the tone of the TV show. But it was still, it still had like a kind of anti-war bent through it, or at least just questioning the morality of war, just how stupid and wasteful it is. But it wasn't, you know, it was not a liberal book or written by a liberal person.
Well, you know, once Hollywood gets a hold of something. Yeah. They're going to liberalize it. And that's basically, you know, like you said, what the movie and TV show ended up being. It's like a statement, like an anti-war statement. Hornberger after, not after MASH, because we'll talk about that later, the weird spinoff.
But post-MASH, he wrote more MASH books after, you know, the movie was a hit. He wrote 14 MASH novels. The first one was called MASH in Maine. which published the same year the TV show ended up premiering.
Yeah. 14 novels, a movie, and a TV show off of a book that he had to bring a sports writer in to help whip into shape.
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Chapter 8: What legacy did M*A*S*H leave behind in the TV landscape?
I think it was option. Maybe even the year it was published in 1968 because the movie came out in 1970. And I imagine it took a little while to make because it's a mess. And it was directed by Robert Altman. So you didn't like the movie? I've only seen it once. I'm not entirely certain I saw the whole thing. I don't remember if I saw the whole thing.
I was reading about people debating on whether the movie is any good or not. And it seemed like the consensus was that I saw somebody say it's a masterpiece of 20th century comedy.
Yeah. See, that's where I veer off. Like, I love, love, love the TV show. I liked the movie. OK, like I'm a big Robert Altman guy. It critically did very. I mean, it was a big hit. It won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970, nominated for Best Picture and four other Oscars. I think it won Best Screenplay. So it was a it was a huge hit.
Yeah.
But it's like, I think maybe I was too young the first time I saw it. And I love the TV show so much. I was like, oh, I got to go see the movie version. And the movie version is a lot different. And it just didn't, I don't know. I don't think it's among Altman's best work, but certainly a lot of people disagree with me.
Sure. A lot of people like it. But it's almost one of those things, you get the impression that people like it because it's, you know, supposedly this amazing thing. Not because they like it like it. You know what I mean? Maybe. Maybe. That's just kind of the tone that I got. But anyway, the movie was a little closer to the book. And in that it's like,
It portrays everything that the younger generations dislike about the oldest generation right now.
Explain.
Sexism, racism. Oh, sure. Just completely ignoring the consequences of harming other people.
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