MASH

Lucy and Corbett talk about the military in the 70s, through the television series MASH.  There is nothing funnier than the wars of the past.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Welcome to Watch Your Mystery You Didn't Exist. I am Corbett, and I'm fifty-four.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

And I am Lucy. I'm twenty-five. And we're alive. We're here.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

We are indeed. And what we're talking about is things that did not exist or that, well, that happened when Lucy did not exist.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Nope, just didn't exist, period.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Just didn't exist.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Just didn't exist, period.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

So mostly things from the 1970s up to the year 2000. Okay, mostly when I existed. So I guess it's all about me.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Wow, I see the point of the show now.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

This one is kind of funny because I'm talking about something that happened when I didn't exist. The Korean War. And the best way to talk about the Korean War in the 1970s is through a television show called MASH.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

MASH? It was the Monster MASH?

SPEAKER_00 1:22

It was the Monster MASH? No. MASH is short for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. There are specifically hospitals designed to have people from the front come back, get patched up, and be able to go back out again. It was designed to make war more efficient.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Yeah, get some band-aid fixes.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

The thing that made MASH much more interesting is they in the Korean War, they incorporated what are essentially conscripted doctors. They would recruit doctors to be in the army. They weren't given army training. They didn't have to go through the army system. They were given a rank as an officer, but they were essentially just the same surgeon they were when they were put in. A guy named uh Richard Hooker wrote a book, which was a memoir. In 1968, it came out and it was called MASH. And it's about these three doctors who are basically just goofing around and joking around in a death zone. So, you know, they're they're trying to make the best of the situation they're in. They're trying to enjoy things, and it involves like them making liquor on because they know the chemistry and everything that goes into it. Because they're doctors, they're not dum-dums, but they're not military, and there's military doctors, and then there's just doctors who are in the military, which is what MASH was about. MASH, for the purposes of what we're going to talk about it for, was a TV series. There was a movie, there was a book, yes. But we're talking about the TV series, which came out in 1972 and went as far as 1983, which the first thing people complain about is was complaining about how long it was. Well, no, because the Korean War was only from 1950 to 1953, or at least the US involvement in the Korean War. But we went, we fixed Korea, and now Korea has no real problems anymore. So problem solved. Yay, USA.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

Terrible.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

But the US is always nostalgic to absorb things from the 1950s and redo them again in the 1970s, as you will see a pattern. I think if you were to do this now, it would be like going from current time to what 2005 to relive that time in 2005, those nostalgic 2005s.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

When I was a toddler?

SPEAKER_00 3:34

It's a funny thing that in the 70s it was really common, really, really common to to this be nostalgic for the 50s. MASH, of course, had all the elements of classic warfare or World War II style warfare, and it dealt with a mix of comedy and drama. I I think this is one thing that really won me over as a kid watching it. Even today as an adult, I can still watch it. This has got depth to it. You have the laughter and the jokes going along, but there's like the real seriousness of death and loss and social problems that were still a big deal in the 50s. I know it's hard to imagine because we fixed all those.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

But in the 50s there were social problems. Anyway, oh, Hawkeye and Trapper John. Haw Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre, who were the main goofballs in in the MASH hospital, and they were always butting heads with uh Frank and Margaret. Margaret was like the head nurse. Uh Hot Lips was her code name. Frank didn't have a code name because he was the military doctor who wanted things to be done military style.

SPEAKER_02 4:37

Ah.

SPEAKER_00 4:37

And then Henry Blake was the head CEO, the the uh colonel who ran the base. Uh, I think one of the more colorful characters, well, actually two of the most colorful characters in the story, was Radar, Radar O'Reilly and Klinger, Maxwell Klinger. Uh, radar was known as Radar because he could tell when the Choffers were coming before they got the call. Like he had this sense about him, and he would call out, you know, incoming choffers, and everybody goes to the battle stations to get ready to deal with the wounded. Then Jamie Farr plays Klinger. Uh Corporal Klinger is trying to get a section eight, and the way that he's always trying to do that is by wearing a dress.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

What's a section eight?

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Oh, a section eight means you're crazy. It's considered you're insane, you're not qualified to be in the military.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

So he's always wearing a dress, even though everybody just like, okay, he's just wearing a dress, who cares? Which honestly kind of progressive if you think about it.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

It was just sort of, oh, you want to be crazy? Be crazy, man. We're all here together. We're all in this war like hostages. Awesome. So and it has a lot of feel like that, where it is, you know, they're they're stuck and they can't get out. Every time they think they're gonna be out of it, they're not, even though the war ended three years in to the series. But it's it's the way you look at it. It's the stories.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

So why were they still in the hospital for so long, I guess?

SPEAKER_00 6:00

The it's a mobile hospital. Uh the 4077th is the specific hospital they're in.

SPEAKER_02 6:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

But they they have to move it a couple times during the series. Where but they the thing is it's almost always back at the same spot, which is unrealistic in comparison to the way the war went.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

But the hospital that that's basically them waiting for the wounded to come back. Every so often there'd be a special episode where they would go up to the the front lines or deal with traveling from one place to another. Over the tenure run, uh, they've lost several of the main characters, except for Hawkeye. Hawkeye and Hulahan. Hotl's Hulahan were there the whole time. Uh and Klinger. Everybody else kind of came and went because of contracts or changes or story write-offs, just different reasons.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Normal TV show stuff.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Yeah. Some of them were killed off as characters, some of them just left. And it it kind of leaves a good bitter resolve for Hawkeye to kind of keep moving forward. I guess it was the the thing that was really stuck with me watching it as a kid was it was funny. I knew I knew it was funny, and I will admit the laugh track was probably what sold me on that because as a kid, you don't know when to laugh, and it would be confusing.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

That's true. Adult jokes just don't make sense.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

They don't always really hit hard enough to go like, oh, I guess that's a joke. I should laugh at that. Ha ha ha ha ha.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

But there's some times when you get it as a kid because they're just you know Pratt falls and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

True.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Alan Alda, the the guy who plays uh Hawkeye, is is the main character, and he was the one who was adamantly against having the laugh track put in. And outside of the US, it is not part of it. They just felt like the American audience didn't know when to laugh.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Because we are idiots.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Well, as a kid, I didn't. So I appreciated the prompting. But on an adult level, eh, maybe. But there was also serious moments, serious, like it would it would rise and fall with the comedy and the drama. And you live through it all. And it has a very real-world mentality to it. We have all these hard times and we try to laugh our way through the other times. The uh the opening music, the opening credits, mentioned this to you when we first started talking about doing this one, but the uh the credits, the theme song came from the movie, and then they use it for the opening credits, but just the instrumental part.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Oh, there was more?

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Yeah, the words the words were suicide is painless is the name of the song, because ultimately that was that was kind of the theme of the book. It's like, well, I guess you can kill yourself.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

That's that's so sad.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

It's for the purposes of the storyline and and the characters, because the book was a memoir. It was a true is I mean, will you you remember when we talked about Kirk Vonnegut? Yeah, like his traumas through going through war. These are guys who went to Harvard or you know, different medical schools, and they just like got pushed into the military to deal with stuff. They didn't they didn't want to be in the military, but they knew they had to be doctors and they had to help these people, so they did it. So there's a a certain amount of I don't want to have to do this, but the thing that sticks with it is that in MASH is they are doctors, they are there to help people, so they're there regardless. They aren't they aren't just conscripted soldiers who had to go out and fight that have no reason. They still have a reason to help people. So the the storyline I think sticks pretty solidly because of that. It's not nearly as dreadful as um Kurt Vonnegut's life, but it is not pretty because life is never pretty, and a doctor sees plenty of bad stuff, even when they're not in war.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

So it was a neat show. It was a staple and a standby. Hawkeye was the cool guy to look up to for the time, one of them at least. Yeah. He was he was a rebel, uh, as far as like he didn't conform, he didn't he didn't stick to every military code because he didn't. He barely even wore his uniform. But he was there and he did what he had to do because it was his job. I think that's kind of weird because it's a conformist, anti-conformist kind of feel.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Yeah, having a slight rebellious phase. Gotta have something to relate to, I guess. It's very American.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

It's very it's probably more American than anything you can think of. You said you got to watch an episode or part of an episode.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah, I watched one episode on YouTube and it was the episode where the USO came in, and it seemed I could see how it felt very procedural, because it seems very much like any hospital show, I guess, with a little bit of comedy in it. So it felt very much like Scrubs or Grey's Anatomy, but also military, which was kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

I actually think I guess I don't know if you can answer this or not, but I could try. Why do you think all the shows of that time period were based around war? Because you have shown me different Elvis movies and so many different other shows and things that were going on from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, because once we hit the 70s, I think we kind of switch into like here's the doctor show and here's the the family house show. But before that, I feel like it's all very much military focused. Is that just because you're trying to relate to the people and help out the veterans, or do you think it's because people were just fascinated with it, or I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

People are fascinated, but it's a nostalgia because you're looking at everybody who's a writer or producer at this point would be in their 30s or 40s. And anybody who's in their 30s or 40s would have lived through World War II, the Korean War, and currently the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was a definite boiling point for America to not want to be in war. I know it's hard to believe this, but there's a time when people really didn't want to be in war because they still remembered the horrors of the last one. And for some reason, I think that that nostalgia brings us back to ah, the the old military shows and this, that they have structure, they have movement, and they have action. The thing is there was a lot of stuff that was put in that was rebellious, very like Kelly's Heroes, and um there there were several war type shows that were coming out around that time. It I think Baba Blacksheep was one of the other television shows close to uh close to the middle end of the 70s and heading into the 80s. I always liked Baba Blacksheep. So it's a pilot show uh set during World War II. Part of it too is the same reason why there's a lot of westerns because they have the sound stages all over television land for military bases and old west towns. Like Star Trek. I remember one of the big expenses for Star Trek was that they had to go build all new sets for everything. And one of the first things they would do was like, oh, we'll go back in time to the old west, or we'll go back in time to you you can see it in Doctor Who a lot. It's like, oh, we're going to an alien planet. It's funny how it looks like a rock quarry in England, but hey, we got a lot of those, so guess what we're gonna use for background?

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

We got all these tanks and planes, so hey, I guess I know what era we're about to talk about. Let's do that one. With MASH, it was shot, if I remember right, it was shot in California, which the area they shot it in is still there, obviously. The ground hasn't been swallowed up yet, but it looks very similar to the Korean terrain of the area, even though people can point out exactly where those hills are at.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

So it's a lot of it is the cost effectiveness of, oh, all we have to do is get some old choppers and old military equipment from 20 years ago, so it's all junk and cheap for them to buy. And like this is going to be a great cheap movie, TV show, whatever to produce. Later on, it became, like you said, the procedural doctor show because there's there's always an abandoned hospital because you have to build a new one and the old one's still there. What do you do with a building that's almost condemned but not quite, but isn't really useful as a hospital anymore? Use it into a show. Or the family sitcom, which is the simple family stage, and that's been around since the 50s, since TV came up. Like, oh, we'll we'll make the living room and the family comes and goes from the living room, and that's perfect. That's all we ever have to have. You know, what if they go outside of that? No, they'll never leave. This is something you should know from from watching Friends, the uh bottle episode. Everybody's trapped in the one room and the story cannot leave.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Well, it was cheaper that way.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

There's a big reason for that.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

The nostalgia helps because, like I said, anybody who's in their 30s to the 50s, they're they're the ones who have the good jobs that are paying for everything. So they want to see what they find nostalgic. Right now, if you look at television or movies or whatever, it's people that are in their 30s to 50s that are spending their money to do that. They keep saying, like, the the younger generation's the one pumping out the money for it. That's not totally true. It's the older generation that are paying for all that. So you kind of have to hit. That's why it's great when you can get a show that hits everybody for the nostalgia feels. And that's why so many, even currently, uh so many shows repeat and repeat and repeat. Because why make something new that you would risk your money on when you can make something that people already know and want to go see again? So but that's sorry, I kind of jumped a little bit off your question, but yes, that's that is probably why there was more of those type of shows than anything else, was just really partly nostalgia, but mostly money.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. It just seems, wouldn't it be insensitive because all those people are coming back from the war and so they're having those PTSD moments, I guess?

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Well, I think that was where MASH addressed that better because they kept a light-hearted approach while at the same time getting really serious when it got really serious.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

So you you could easily retract yourself if you had too much going. And of course, most people who have PTSD aren't gonna go jump right in and let me just watch that. That should be calm. Like, nah, not always. Especially during I gotta admit, even as a kid, I found some of the the battlefield scenes a little traumatic, which is the battlefield scenes in MASH are way calm compared to many other war-based shows.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

So yeah, it was interesting.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

I don't think there are any current. Well, I guess there's a couple. I think Going Dutch is like a current war-based or military-based comedy.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

That's fair.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

I don't know if you've seen that one or not.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

It's uh I would think more like the rookie, because I think of all the controversy of people trying to militarize the police. Because I think they have that they walk that balance of we're trying to talk about some serious social issues, but also then you've got you know, the comedy aspect of the John Nolan character being silly goofy because Nathan Fillion's just a silly goofy guy. So I think it's walking that fine line. But it's not necessarily military-based, because I don't think we've really thought about being military in a while. And see, that's why I was asking about the MASH military TV era of military being in that zone, because there was a period of time when everything was COVID-based and COVID-centered because at that point we had COVID going on, so it's just easier to be like, hey, now we're all wearing masks because of this weird sickness going on, and we can't talk about it, kind of thing. But they were trying to produce television for people, and it was the safe way to do it was to just have everyone wear their masks and act at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah. Well, it had to go along with what was happening. You couldn't pretend like the rest of the world wasn't happening. That's just weird.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Although MASH did do that because it just kept going, even though the war should have been over.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Yeah, but when you initially brought up MASH, I was confused because I didn't realize that was an actual TV show or a movie or a book. Because growing up, we would play MASH with all your girlfriends, and it was the like random generator for how your life was gonna be.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

No.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Right? Did you ever play that growing up?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Not really.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Well, I mean, I doubt you would have played it, but in MASH, you had you wrote out MASH with all the different pauses in it, and M was for you would get a mansion, A would be an apartment, S would be a shack, and then an H would be a house. And so you'd like select a number, and then you would just go through that number, or no, you would go through MASH and you would go mash and then select your stuff. But you would also randomly select, you know, the different boys you had crushes on, and you would pick which person you'd end up with, and then how many kids you were gonna have, and it would randomly select how many kids you were gonna have, and oh, there was something else, like where you were gonna live and how much money you were gonna make, I think. But you had to select a random number and it would just go through and randomly select your life for you. So I was confused. I'm like, why would he want to talk about MASH?

SPEAKER_00 18:53

I might.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

It doesn't seem like a very boy thing to do, you know. This was a girly pop thing. You would plan your future.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

I wasn't aware.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Yeah, I'm supposed to be living in a shack with ten million dollars by now.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

You're halfway to the shack. Yeah, so there you go. Well, now we both learned something. Yeah, isn't that fun?

SPEAKER_01 19:16

You have your mash and I have my mash.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Yeah, we got both got mashed. Okay. Well, for what you missed when you didn't exist, uh enjoy your shack and ten million dollars.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Yes. Get a laugh about the military? Question mark.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

Sometimes I wonder about us.