Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know M*A*S*H: The Story of the 4077th About this episode Chuck loved M*A*S*H. Josh didn't. Listen in as they fight to the death.
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Transcript 11,914 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:41 Speaker 02 Montreal, bonsoir. It is Josh and Chuck, and we are coming to your French-ish town.
1:46 Josh Clark? Yeah, and not just Montreal, we're also coming to Ottawa, the capital of Canada itself, and Toronto, one of our favorite cities in the entire world.
1:56 Speaker 02 That's right, we're gonna be in those cities on June 25th, 26th, and 27th, and there are still plenty of great tickets available. We love going to Canada, and we can't wait to go to some of these towns we've never been to, and you can get tickets, well, you can go to the websites of the venues, you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com, click on the on-tour button, and click on the tickets link there. There are all kinds of ways to find these tickets.
2:18 Josh Clark? Yeah, and we'll see you guys next week.
2:25 Speaker 04 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:35 Josh Clark? 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.
2:50 Speaker 02 Well, one of us loved this. We might as well go ahead and get that out of the way.
2:55 Josh Clark? What do you mean?
2:56 Speaker 02 Mash?
2:57 Josh Clark? Yeah.
2:58 Speaker 02 I love Mash. You hated Mash.
3:00 Josh Clark? I don't know what you're talking about.
3:03 Speaker 02 Come on.
3:04 Josh Clark? Um, I don't, I don't hate Mash. It's mostly a put on just to annoy you. I, um, yeah, I don't hate it, hate it. You know what I mean?
3:14 Speaker 02 Well, tell me your history. Did you watch it at all?
3:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, I watched it with my dad.
3:19 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:19 Josh Clark? My dad would laugh out loud, throw his head back and clap sometimes.
3:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:24 Josh Clark? Uh, 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
3:32 Speaker 02 Sure.
3:32 Josh Clark? You know, um, I would guess that he probably would have laughed regardless. Um, and that was it. I mean, that's how I know Mash essentially. And I've seen probably a decent amount of the episodes, but I, you know, it was never like, I love Mash, you know, like, like Head of the Class. I never, never loved Mash like I loved Head of the Class or Perfect Strangers.
3:56 Speaker 02 Right. Well, uh, this is when I remember that you are younger than me. So it's not like you were like me, nine years old and loving a show about alcoholic surgeons in the Korean War.
4:07 Josh Clark? No, but I don't feel like a lot of it was lost on me. I think I got a lot of it. It just, I don't think I was old enough for the comedy.
4:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, I have talked about it before, but, uh, it was definitely weird that a nine-year-old was into a comedy, sometimes serious, about alcoholic surgeons during the Korean War.
4:27 Josh Clark? Right.
4:28 Speaker 02 But I was into it. And, uh, you know, at one point, uh, Mash was on, um, reruns in the evening and then late night. And while it was still airing, so on Thursdays, I believe it aired on Thursdays in prime time, at least it did when I From my recollection, at one point I was watching five episodes of MASH on Thursday and four episodes of MASH every other day of the week.
4:52 Josh Clark? Wow, there's not that many shows you can do that with.
4:55 Speaker 02 No, it was like five and 5:30 and then something like 10 and 10:30 or something like that.
5:01 Josh Clark? I can do that with Law and Order. I can just watch Law and Order indefinitely, the original series.
5:07 Speaker 02 But it was, I was into it. It was a formative show for me. It was, you know, it was a top five show as a kid, so.
5:12 Josh Clark? Wow. And is it still one of your top shows?
5:15 Speaker 02 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?
5:25 Josh Clark? It's different.
5:27 Speaker 02 Very different.
5:27 Josh Clark? Definitely different.
5:28 Speaker 02 There are no short shows about alcoholic surgeons in the Korean War now.
5:32 Josh Clark? There are no short shows. They're all six or eight hours long at least.
5:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, the 30 minute sitcom is, is on its last legs, it feels like, huh?
5:40 Josh Clark? Are there any out there? Oh, I guess there's a few.
5:44 Speaker 02 I mean, you know, the main networks still have their shows. I just, I don't watch any of them.
5:48 Josh Clark? The last mainstream network show that I saw that I really liked was a Ted Danson show called Mr. Mayor. And it's, it was funny. I don't know why it got canceled. They had a great cast. It wasn't dumb. It was, it's smart, but it was also hilarious. Had a real, like, kinda, like a slightly different 30 Rock vibe to like the writing.
6:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know what, man? I'd have to really dig to see what the last major network half hour sitcom was I watched, because I feel like it was like Arrested Development, but maybe there's been one since then?
6:22 Josh Clark? Yeah. Yeah, I would say probably before Mr. Mayor. That's as far as it would go back for me, too.
6:27 Speaker 02 And you watched The Good Place, too, didn't you?
6:29 Josh Clark? 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. Um, yeah. So obviously all this is barreling us toward MASH, which is an acronym. Did you know that, Mr. Smart Guy?
6:48 Speaker 02 I did. Yeah. Well, why don't you, since this is your favorite show, why don't you tell everybody what it stands for?
6:54 Josh Clark? 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 he-
7:09 Speaker 02 Who also hates MASH, by the way.
7:11 Josh Clark? Yeah. He looked high and low and was like, um, there's no, there's no reason for the asterisks. He thinks that it was just a design thing and I couldn't find anything that contradicted that.
7:23 Speaker 02 Well, my feeling is that it, I think it clearly was meant to show that it is an acronym, even though that's not how the military necessarily distinguished it. Cause people would just say, what in the world does MASH mean? But oh, wait, it's, it must stand for something, would be my guess.
7:38 Josh Clark? Right. But they didn't use like periods after each letter, like the military would have.
7:44 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, sure. I get you.
7:45 Josh Clark? I'm talking about the asterisks in particular.
7:48 Speaker 02 Yeah. An acronym is typically a period, right?
7:50 Josh Clark? All right. Yeah.
7:51 Speaker 02 Yeah. But it looks good though. You're right.
7:53 Josh Clark? It does. It looks fantastic.
7:56 Speaker 02 Very signature.
7:56 Josh Clark? So Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, um, and obviously if you've ever seen MASH, it's where the whole thing is set. Set during the Korean War in a mobile surgical hospital, hence the name. And those were actually a real thing. Did you know that, Mr. Smart Guy, who loves MASH so much?
8:14 Speaker 02 Oh, boy. Is this what we're in for? Uh, I did know that because, you know, at some point the show spells that out.
8:22 Speaker 02 So yeah, I knew, I knew that was a thing. What I was curious and, you know, my MASH recollection, this is from a long time ago. I don't remember them ever moving at all. Uh, so I feel like they kind of stayed there.
8:33 Josh Clark? Yeah.
8:34 Speaker 02 Unless there was an episode that I missed where they were like, yeah, we're going to move to this other part of Malibu.
8:40 Speaker 02 Which, which is where it was filmed, the Fox Ranch, which is now Malibu Creek State Park. Uh, which is why, and 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.
8:53 Josh Clark? You don't know. That's where the Manson family lived for a while.
8:58 Speaker 02 Uh, oh, really?
8:59 Josh Clark? No.
8:59 Speaker 02 No, they lived on Spawn Ranch.
9:00 Josh Clark? Right.
9:01 Speaker 02 Okay.
9:02 Josh Clark? Anytime I hear ranch in California, I just immediately think of the Manson family.
9:06 Speaker 02 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.
9:14 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
9:15 Speaker 02 Ambulance and I think, I mean, who knows what's there now, but there were still a few remnants back then.
9:20 Josh Clark? Right. Yeah, I remember my mind being blown when I found out that that was like California in the back.
9:25 Speaker 02 Like they didn't go to Korea?
9:27 Josh Clark? Yeah. I think that's kind of when I started to get that people cut corners for money.
9:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally.
9:34 Josh Clark? Um, so yeah, so a MASH thing, a MASH was actually a thing and I think it was actually first, um, tried out in the Korean War.
9:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:42 Josh Clark? Um, which I think was a three year war, but something interesting that I noticed about MASH is that it ran for 11 seasons. So it was almost four times longer than the actual war that was the setting for this TV show. But in reality, like I was saying, a MASH hospital was, was tried out in the Korean War in real life.
10:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And the idea is that they put the surgeons close to the front line so they could save more lives. Uh, and it was, you know, they're all kind of temporary, like they slept on, you know, cot like beds and they lived in tents. And there was on the TV show, there's a lot of talk about the front and how close they were.
10:21 Josh Clark? Yeah.
10:21 Speaker 02 Uh, but the real life MASH units apparently had a 97% survival rate. If you got there, your chances are you lived.
10:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, so it was a really good idea that panned out.
10:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:32 Josh Clark? Um, yeah, and in the show you can hear bombs going off sometimes. Occasionally the overhead lights will flicker and sway.
10:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:40 Josh Clark? 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. Um, and if it's supposed to be four to five miles behind front lines, then that would have to be a completely static frontline 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, 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
11:25 Josh Clark? scalpel, kind of like surgical outfit.
11:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And that was conveyed very well on the show. The doctors on the show, you know, just like in real life, the, 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, as a doctor or surgeon or nurse or whatever, you didn't have, you could, 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
12:13 Speaker 02 main characters that we're going to talk about, like the protagonist, not the Foils, the Foils kind of liked 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.
12:28 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah?
12:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, 36.
12:30 Josh Clark? So, yeah, the, I think that's almost one of the cornerstones of this show is that these are civilian doctors who were drafted in the military and they're kind of bristling against this, the regimentedness that's required of them just from being in the military. They're like, just get out of our hair. We're here to save lives, you know? Take that whole like revelry stuff and shove it.
12:55 Speaker 02 Yeah. That's right. It was actually a book and this, smart guy, I did not know.
13:01 Josh Clark? No way. I was going to ask you that facetiously and I didn't.
13:06 Speaker 02 I'm sorry. I did not know this. Of course, I knew it was a movie and we'll talk about it in a second. But the movie was optioned from a book written in 1968 called MASH: 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 came 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 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.
13:50 Josh Clark? 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.
14:20 Josh Clark? 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, 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.
15:00 Speaker 02 But you know, once Hollywood gets a hold of something.
15:01 Josh Clark? Yeah.
15:03 Speaker 02 They're gonna 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.
15:30 Josh Clark? Yeah, 14 novels, a movie and a TV show off of a book that he had to bring a sports writer in to help, you know, whip into shape.
15:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, can you say cash in?
15:40 Josh Clark? Exactly. So, yeah, and he was just basically trying to get his anecdotes across, which were mostly like drunken prank stuff. Like you said, like you see on the TV show, like that was based on this guy's book. So, like I said, it was turned into a movie. 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.
16:09 Speaker 02 So you didn't like the movie?
16:10 Josh Clark? I've only seen it once. I'm not entirely certain I saw the whole thing. I didn't, 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, so somebody say it's a masterpiece of 20th century comedy.
16:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, see, that's where I veer off. Like, I love, love, love the TV show. I liked the movie, okay? 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. But it's like, I think maybe I was too young the first time I saw it and I loved the TV show so much. I was like, oh, I gotta go see the movie version. And the movie version's 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.
17:10 Josh Clark? 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?
17:22 Speaker 02 Maybe, maybe.
17:24 Josh Clark? That's just kind of the tone that I got. But anyway, the movie was a little closer to the book. And-
17:31 Josh Clark? In that it's like,
17:34 Josh Clark? it portrays everything that the younger generations dislike about the oldest generation right now.
17:45 Speaker 02 Explain.
17:46 Josh Clark? Sexism, racism.
17:48 Speaker 02 Oh, sure.
17:49 Josh Clark? Just completely, completely ignoring like the consequences of harming other people.
17:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:57 Josh Clark? Like essentially everything like those are the main themes throughout this, this movie. Right. Although, again, the subtext is that this is an anti-war movie. At the very least, again, questioning the morality of war. And, and it was released right at, you know, the peak of when anti-war sentiment was really aroused in America because of the Vietnam War.
18:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And I didn't know where you were going, but you totally nailed it. Like in this movie, it's like, it's supposed to be funny that Hot Lips Houlihan, the, the head nurse is, the shower curtain is ripped open and she is full, fully frontally exposed naked to the rest of the camp.
18:34 Josh Clark? Yeah.
18:35 Speaker 02 Uh, like this played for laughs. So, uh, obviously it's a movie of its time. It was written by Ring Lardner Jr., um, obviously son of great short story writer, Ring Lardner.
18:45 Josh Clark? Oh.
18:46 Speaker 02 And he, I think they called him Pinky Ring was his nickname.
18:49 Josh Clark? No.
18:51 Josh Clark? Oh, you got me. That's a good one.
18:53 Speaker 02 Oh, thanks. That'd be a pretty good nickname for, uh, Ring Junior.
18:57 Josh Clark? Yeah.
18:58 Speaker 02 Or maybe Toe Ring?
18:59 Josh Clark? No, Pinky.
19:00 Speaker 02 Pinky Ring, okay. So Altman, you know, does his Altman thing, which is a lot of improvisation, a lot of overlapping dialogue. It's his hallmark as a filmmaker. Ring Lardner Jr. Did not, uh, care for that evidently and said, like, you ruined what I wrote. And I don't know if he took that back after he won the Oscar for screenplay or not, but, uh, yeah, it's kind of interesting.
19:22 Josh Clark? Yeah. So he tried to get his name taken off of it and then he won the Oscar.
19:25 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
19:25 Josh Clark? Like, oh, I guess I'll stick with this.
19:28 Speaker 02 That's really funny.
19:29 Josh Clark? One other thing about Ring Lardner Jr. I saw is that he was one of the Hollywood 10 who was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings.
19:36 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, for sure.
19:37 Josh Clark? It was like, it, it almost a slightly subversive act in and of itself to hire him in the late 60s. After, you know, he was, they, they were bringing him back, I guess.
19:48 Speaker 02 Well, Altman's, he was an old pothead. He was a medium aged pothead at that point.
19:52 Josh Clark? So, let's talk about the theme song, which I'm sure a lot of people know the title of it, but many people might not actually, because they played it, if you're a fan of the TV show, it was always instrumental.
20:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, they changed it from the movie. In the movie, it had words, the name of the song is Suicide is Painless. And the story behind it, I did not know. In the MASH movie, there was a character, I did know this stuff, Captain Walt Waldowski, who says he wants to take his own life because he's gay and he's in the army and he can't bear it. And so they do a fake, sort of a fake funeral, a living funeral, and give him a placebo pill, telling him it's a big sedative that's gonna, you know, take his life.
20:37 Josh Clark? Right.
20:38 Speaker 02 And so Altman's like, I need a song that's, he pitched it as, I needed to be the stupidest song ever. So he hired a guy, a real musician named Johnny Mandell. Any relation to the man? Oh, that's Mandrell, sorry.
20:52 Josh Clark? Close. He's a distant, distant relation.
20:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. He dropped the R. And he was like, we need a song for this funeral. I want to be the dumbest song ever. And Altman tried to write it, but couldn't come up with anything that he liked. So as the story goes, he hired his 15-year-old son, Michael, to co-write this thing with this pro musician, and that's what they came up with.
21:15 Josh Clark? Yeah. And like, that explains, like, it was a purposefully stupid song, which explains just the only lyrics I know, which is Suicide is painless. It brings on many changes. And I've always been like, that seems a little tongue in cheek. Like, what's the, like, I don't get that. Now I do. It made me want to go back and read the rest of the lyrics, because I'm sure they're hilarious.
21:40 Speaker 02 I actually meant to do that, too, and I did not. I thought, you know, I know Emily worked with two Alt, with Roger and two of his sons on The Gingerbread Man and Savannah. And I asked her if Michael was one of them, and she said no. It was, it was two of the others, or maybe the other two.
21:57 Josh Clark? Was it Gingerbread Man, is that a Grisham thriller?
22:01 Speaker 02 I think so.
22:02 Josh Clark? Or at least in that vein.
22:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think it was a Grisham thriller.
22:06 Josh Clark? Hey, speaking of movies, I saw something just last night that I want to recommend.
22:11 Speaker 02 Let's hear it.
22:12 Josh Clark? It's an old Oswald or Osgood, sorry, Oz, Osgood Perkins movie.
22:18 Speaker 02 You love that guy.
22:19 Josh Clark? Gretel and Hansel. And I think it's from like-
22:22 Speaker 02 No, I think you have it backwards.
22:23 Josh Clark? No, no, that's the way it is, the title.
22:25 Speaker 02 I'm just kidding.
22:26 Josh Clark? Because Gretel's older in this one. And it's from like 2012, 13. It's great.
22:34 Speaker 02 You should start a podcast on Oz Perkins.
22:37 Josh Clark? I wonder if I could get him to come on.
22:39 Speaker 02 Call it like, you know, like Finding Oz or The Wizard of Oz or something like that.
22:44 Josh Clark? Sure, or Behind the Curtain.
22:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, find the, the green, not the behind the green door, that's something different. Behind the green curtain.
22:52 Josh Clark? Behind the green door.
22:55 Josh Clark? Oh, man.
22:56 Speaker 02 All right, I feel like we should take a break. We told the song story and we'll be right back to finally get to the TV show after this.
23:17 Speaker 02 You know, you're never done decorating your home. You know what I mean?
23:20 Josh Clark? Sure.
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25:22 Josh Clark? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep, but what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong?
25:39 Speaker 02 That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
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26:26 Josh Clark? Okay Chuck, so you said we'd get to the TV show, but you lied, lied, lied, because there's a little more about the movie we have to talk about.
26:33 Speaker 02 Oh, okay.
26:34 Josh Clark? Chiefly, that it was nominated for five Oscars. Like you said, Ring Lardner Jr. won for Best Screenplay, but most importantly is that Robert Altman hated the TV show.
26:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, good point.
26:48 Josh Clark? I'm guessing that Robert Altman never even saw the TV show. I'll bet that he like, heard it, heard that they were making it on CBS and that they were turning it into a 30-minute comedy. And was like, this is the, it's the worst thing I've ever seen, even though I've never seen it. That would be my guess.
27:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, maybe. And, you know, to be fair, at the time, and you know, we'll see Alan Alda's reaction to being pitched this idea and him not wanting to try to audition at first, is that the history of TV and war shows and Army and Navy shows, the stuff like Hogan's Heroes and McHale's Navy.
27:25 Josh Clark? Right.
27:26 Speaker 02 And that's the kind of thing that somebody like Robert Altman and Alan Alda wouldn't have liked. And it was only after Alan Alda read the pilot and then he said, this is the best TV pilot I've ever read. I'm totally going to audition for this.
27:38 Josh Clark? Sure.
27:39 Speaker 02 That he decided to do it, but I could see Altman just not going there, you know?
27:44 Josh Clark? Yeah, I mean, that's a really risky thing. That's actually, in retrospect, quite surprising. It's retrospect, by the way. That's the German pronunciation. It's really surprising that anybody was able to pull it off, because if you know the book or the movie, the idea of adapting those into a TV show, a family-friendly TV show in the late 60s, early 70s is like, wait, what are you gonna do? The only way you could possibly do that is to make it like screwball hijinks like McHale's Navy where the war just happens to be the setting. It could also be an office comedy, essentially. And that's not at all what they did, thanks to a producer named Gene Reynolds and a writer named Larry Gilbert.
28:27 Josh Clark? I don't know how those two came together, but it was a match made in CBS heaven.
28:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. Gilbert was an experienced writer. He wrote, or at least co-wrote the musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Later on, after Post-Mash, he wrote the movie Tootsie, which is great, and the movie Oh God with George Burns and John Denver, which to me is great, and I guess to you too. Not so much Oh God book two, but that first Oh God was awesome.
28:57 Josh Clark? I saw both. I don't remember the book two, but the first one was so great.
29:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, agreed. But they, you know, they didn't want, they wanted to walk that fine line between having laughs and it being a quote unquote comedy and an anti-war movie and a movie about the horrors of combat. And it's, it's really interesting. They walk a really tough, fine line. And as we'll see, you know, they ended up doing some, some really groundbreaking episodes, you know, in later seasons. The first few seasons were definitely leaned way more into the sort of hijinks of it all. And then I think they realized like, hey, we have a real chance here to have some incredible character arcs and really do something a little bit more like, like All in the Family was doing.
29:46 Josh Clark? Yeah, they actually put it behind All in the Family at some point, which helped bring it out of TV purgatory, I guess. But the, one of the ways that the producers were able to kind of navigate that narrow margin between just idiocy and over, over melodramatic stuff.
30:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:10 Josh Clark? Was that the, the studio, the network was like, obviously, we're going to have a laugh track, 30 minutes, comedy, have to have a laugh track. And the producers kept pushing back and pushing back. And they finally reached a compromise where the OR scenes could not have a laugh track. And then there were other, sometimes other episodes or scenes where they were real downers.
30:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:31 Josh Clark? Where they didn't have the laugh track either. But if you watch MASH today, it's easy to kind of miss the laugh track until they get into the OR and then it's glaringly missing.
30:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:43 Josh Clark? Um, which I think is actually kind of useful in kind of contrasting, you know, how these surgeons or these, not just the surgeons, but everybody at the mass unit is having to get jerked around by reality, like just messing around, getting drunk on homemade gin. And then all of a sudden you have like both of your hands in a 18 year old soldier's chest. Like that's what they were trying to portray. And the kind of smart use of a laugh track actually helped with that.
31:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. Uh, and you know, as a kid, and just as an American in general at the time, like the laugh track was so ubiquitous that you didn't really think about it much as being like weird. Uh, it was usually like a studio audience thing. And this was not a studio audience show. Um, but you just sort of accepted it. Like apparently the BBC never used the laugh track at all. Um, and then I'm also reminded of like, uh, I think it years back, someone did some, uh, Friends episodes without the laugh track and invited them up into clips. And it's just jarring to hear that kind of a show without a laugh track. So Match was a, was sort of a weird case.
31:50 Josh Clark? We've talked about that because not only is it jarring, it's like, this isn't funny at all.
31:55 Speaker 02 It really cues you and you don't even, uh, the laugh track sounds like such a dumb thing, like a hundred years from now. People say like, they really did that on shows, but you, it was such an institution and like a certain kind of comedy that yeah, like you said, without it, you don't know when to laugh almost.
32:13 Josh Clark? Do you remember in the, I guess the 2000 aughts, it must've been right before Cartoon Network came around or Adult Swim, right before Adult Swim. Uh, somebody put out like old episodes of Birdman and Space Ghost, like the original 60s episodes, but then they peppered them with laugh tracks, often inappropriately placed where nothing even remotely funny is going on, but the audience, this canned laughter just kind of comes in and it made it so bizarrely funny. Have you not seen those?
32:47 Speaker 02 Was that Space Ghost Coast to Coast?
32:49 Josh Clark? This was before Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
32:51 Speaker 02 Oh, okay.
32:51 Josh Clark? Because yeah, Dave, um,
32:54 Speaker 02 Dave Willis.
32:54 Josh Clark? Yeah, Dave Willis was on Space Coast, Coast to Coast, or he co-founded it, I guess. He might have had something to do with this because it was clearly attached to Space Coast, Coast to Coast because it happened, you know, right before it. But if you watch those, they're just, it's such as an easy, basic idea, but it's so funny to watch them.
33:15 Speaker 02 Oh, man, those early years of Cartoon Network were just the best.
33:18 Josh Clark? Yeah.
33:18 Speaker 02 And Comedy Central, like, it used to be so much better, you know?
33:22 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
33:23 Speaker 02 Everything.
33:24 Josh Clark? I think Comedy Central's just old South Park reruns in The Daily Show once in a while.
33:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, that's a real shame. As far as MASH and their storylines go, though, apparently Gilbert and Reynolds interviewed a lot of veterans from the Korean War and got a lot of stuff from that and worked into episodes, like the episode where a wounded North Korean soldier is in the ER there and he pulls a pin out of a hand grenade that he was hiding, hiding on the operating table. Like, that apparently really happened, as did a lot of that stuff.
33:57 Josh Clark? Yeah. Yeah, I was like, did it really happen? And I went and found reference to the actual name of the surgeon who's, who told that story in these interviews.
34:07 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
34:08 Josh Clark? So like, it definitely happened. So I think I said that MASH was on for 11 years and it premiered in September 72 and ran all the way to February 1983. That is a long run for a show.
34:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:21 Josh Clark? I mean, for
34:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, pretty good.
34:22 Josh Clark? Back then, now, like, 11 years is a really long time. But at first, it was not very well received, or at the very least, people didn't know about it because it was put up against the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. And it was not doing very well there.
34:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, Wonderful World of Disney was a juggernaut of a show
34:41 Josh Clark? Sure.
34:42 Speaker 02 for mainstream America, so Alan Alda apparently used to joke that MASH was one of the top 78 shows on TV early on. And very Alan Alda kind of thing to say. And he, they moved it like, like you've said earlier to After All in the Family, which was a huge hit and that made, gave MASH a lot more visibility, obviously. And all of a sudden, MASH was the number two show on TV. And that was it. And Dave found a great quote from Newsweek as far as the critical acclaim that I think kind of sums it up. And it is this. "Without ever moralizing, MASH is the most moral entertainment on commercial television. It proposes craft against butchery, humor against despair, wit as a defense mechanism against the senseless enormity of the situation."
35:27 Speaker 02 Pretty good stuff.
35:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, I think the Newsweek people really got it.
35:32 Speaker 02 Should we talk about the characters?
35:33 Josh Clark? Yeah, let's, because we've made reference to some, but I feel like we should get a little more in depth with them.
35:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, so Hawkeye, we've mentioned a few times. He's, I guess you would just call the main character, and that was Alan Alda. By the way, the great Alan Alda, like, he's one of my heroes in entertainment. And by all accounts, just one of the best dudes ever. And he is 90 years old now, and, which is great. He's still around and he is one of the great writers and great directors and great actors and great human beings in the history of, of the TV and movie business, I think.
36:09 Josh Clark? Did he write a lot of those movies he was in, in the early 80s?
36:13 Speaker 02 I think he co-wrote, he directed almost all of them. He co-wrote 13 MASH episodes, directed 31. And he played, you know, Hawkeye Pierce. This is a little known fact, did you get that Mental Floss article I sent over?
36:27 Josh Clark? Yeah.
36:28 Speaker 02 With the top, or whatever, 12 things?
36:31 Josh Clark? 17.
36:32 Speaker 02 17. So a few of these guys actually served in the, in the, at least in the reserves. Alan Alda was, served six months in the Army Reserves in Korea. Pretty crazy.
36:44 Josh Clark? So did Jamie Farr, who played Corporal Klinger, who is essentially far and away the most famous person until Katie Holmes came along to have come from Toledo.
36:55 Speaker 02 I thought you did the Toledo thing. He was always, if you never watched the show, Klinger, often referenced the Toledo Mud Hens.
37:02 Josh Clark? Toledo Mud Hens and Tony Paco's, which is a real place in Toledo.
37:06 Speaker 02 Oh, I mean, that's your place. I didn't know he talked about that on the show.
37:08 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, he talked about Tony Paco's all the time.
37:11 Speaker 02 Oh, see, I didn't know what it was back then. I was like, who the hell is Tony Paco?
37:14 Josh Clark? No, Tony Paco's is like a hot dog place, a Hungarian hot dog place. And every time he would mention the Mud Hens or the Tony Paco's, I would look over at my dad and there'd just be like a single tear going down his cheek. He was so filled with pride because, you know,
37:28 Speaker 02 You sure that wasn't old Milwaukee?
37:31 Josh Clark? He's, he got some on his face.
37:33 Speaker 02 All right. So Hawkeye's the main guy. He, Alan Alda, for what it's worth, is the first person to win an Emmy for acting, writing, and directing on the same show.
37:43 Josh Clark? Wow.
37:44 Speaker 02 Then we have his buddy, Trapper John, played by Wayne Rogers, who was in real life in the Navy. And he is the, you know, the tent mate and confidant. Apparently, Robert Klein, the great comedian, turned down that role and regretted it.
37:58 Josh Clark? I could see that. Although Wayne Rogers, the guy who played Trapper John, was like, you know, this guy's not fully fleshed out. I'm basically Hawkeye's sidekick, right? I'm in the sidecar. I'm laughing along with him. We're doing like pranks together, but there's no me. Who is me? And the director was like, I think it's who is I. And they got into a really long disagreement about whether it was I or me. And Wayne Rogers eventually left after the third season. And the reason he was able to was because he never signed a contract with the producers. I guess there was like a morality clause. He was like, I'm not signing this. And they forgot to go back and get him to sign something. So he left after the third season,
38:42 Josh Clark? which apparently he seemed fine with.
38:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, MASH is one of those shows like Cheers that was able to withstand some pretty drastic cast changes. It's hard to pull off as a TV show. Cheers did it very well and MASH did it very well because three of the main characters ended up being replaced. Trapper was replaced by Honeycutt, BJ Honeycutt, played by Mike Farrell, or maybe it's Farrell. He was actually a US Marine in real life. He was great. I loved Honeycutt. I, you know, again, those- Later seasons after like Trapper left and as we'll see some of the other characters left, there were some tonal changes, but I was along for the whole ride. I was in for all of it.
39:25 Josh Clark? Yeah, especially in the beginning Hawkeye and Trapper John were like prankster drunk womanizers. They would harass the nurses and try to get him to sleep with them and all sorts of stuff. And then BJ Honeycutt was a lot different. He was a breath of fresh air because he was very true to his wife back home.
39:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure.
39:43 Josh Clark? And he had a mustache.
39:45 Speaker 02 That's right. Then we have Radar, of course, Corporal Radar O'Reilly, played by Gary Bergoff.
39:52 Speaker 02 He was named Radar because he was very much a recurring thing on the show, like every single episode, he would either kind of finish somebody's sentences, usually Colonel Blake's sentence, or know what somebody needed like before they needed it and kind of just hand it to them. Or he would, and this is a lot of times at the end of an episode, he would always sense the helicopters coming in with wounded.
40:15 Josh Clark? Right.
40:15 Speaker 02 Before you could hear the helicopters. And usually like if it was a pretty light episode, there'd be a lot of high jinks that would be kind of halted at the end of the episode when he heard the helicopters coming.
40:25 Josh Clark? Right. And then there was Colonel Blake. He was one of my favorites, played by McLean Stevenson.
40:32 Speaker 02 Great.
40:32 Josh Clark? He was an actual doctor who was put in charge of this mass unit and he's like, I have no idea how to run any kind of army outfit. So he was always kind of in over his depth, but he tried really hard and he would get perturbed, which was kind of funny sometimes because he never got mad. He just got
40:50 Speaker 02 Right.
40:50 Josh Clark? perturbed and befuddled kind of a little bit.
40:52 Speaker 02 Exasperated.
40:53 Josh Clark? But he wasn't an idiot. Like it was, it would have been really easy for any actor to portray him as kind of a dummy, but McLean Stevenson managed to keep him from, from going down that route.
41:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. He was a man. I love that character. We should mention too, that Gary Bergoff as Radar was the only one who bridged the movie as far as, you know, being in both.
41:14 Speaker 02 Colonel Blake was then replaced by Colonel Sherman T. Potter.
41:19 Josh Clark? Yeah.
41:20 Speaker 02 Played by Harry Morgan and he was a very different character than Blake in that he was an old school soldier. But he also kind of, he wasn't as by the book as you would think for an old school soldier and sort of indulged the antics for the most part.
41:34 Josh Clark? Yeah. And he used the term horse feathers a lot.
41:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:38 Josh Clark? To mean BS.
41:41 Josh Clark? There was another great character too, who you just love to hate. He was so good. Frank Burns, who's played by Larry Linville. He was, he had what you would term today as justice sensitivity. He liked to follow the rules. He was fine with the military and the requirements for its conformity. And anyone who didn't conform to it was, it just drove him up the wall and he tried to get them in trouble. So he was like a tried and true fascist, essentially.
42:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was a bureaucrat. He was completely the foil of Hawkeye and Trapper. He was played by Robert Duvall in the film, but Larry Linville, as ferret face, as they called him, was just, I mean, I always felt bad for the guy in real life because he was able to play one of the more unlikable characters in like TV history. And he just did it so well. He was a really good actor.
42:34 Josh Clark? Yeah, we should say also Frank Burns was not a good surgeon. And at the end of the day, in this mass unit, that's what, that's what mattered, right? That's why Hawkeye and Trapper John got away with all of their antics was because they were really good surgeons. And when it came to it, they were going to save people's lives. Frank Burns, what made him even worse is that he wasn't even a good surgeon. Like you could die on his operating table because he wasn't that good. And yet he would still go tell on you for, you know, drinking gin that you made in your tent. You know, it made him so much worse.
43:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, they were tent mates, the three of them. Yeah, the two guys and then Burns lived together. And then he was replaced after the fifth season in season six by David Ogden's Steers as Charles Emerson Winchester III, who was a major. I always thought he was kind of British, but he just sort of did that mid Atlantic thing.
43:30 Josh Clark? Right.
43:31 Speaker 02 Because he was a, came from a wealthy family in Boston, a family of doctors, apparently. And he was a little less of a foil, but still a bit of a foil.
43:39 Josh Clark? Yeah, he just didn't blend in with them because he was so snobby. They just had no, nothing in common essentially from their backgrounds. Then there's Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, played by Loretta Swett, who I've seen, just from reading up on MASH, the TV show, is roundly credited as taking like a pretty one dimensional victim angry character and turning her into something like really respectable and three dimensional over the course of the 11 seasons. And that she actually got better, like the character got more involved and impressive and interesting over the years, thanks to this actor.
44:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, Loretta Swett, she was great. Rest in peace. I think we lost her last year or the year before, like fairly recently.
44:28 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
44:29 Speaker 02 She, on the show, Hot Lips was having an affair with Frank Burns, and they were always sort of coupled together against the, you know, the other guys, and they were bureaucrats. But like you said, she had a great character arc, ended up really developing into something special. And then rounding it out, I guess we already talked about Klinger. We have Father Mulcahy, played by William Christopher, who is the chaplain. And that's about all we need to say about him. He was just sort of there.
44:55 Josh Clark? Did we talk about Klinger's wearing women's clothing?
44:59 Speaker 02 Oh, no, that was, that was a big part of it. Yeah.
45:01 Josh Clark? Hugely. Apparently, he was written as a one off character initially. And he was written as a gay character who wore women's clothes, like full on frilly dresses and sun hats, like Sunday, like going to church kind of stuff. And Jamie Farr was like, look, I think I can do this a little differently. Like, imagine if this is a straight guy dressing like this because he wants to get out of the army for some psych thing. And he did such a good job in this one off episode that they brought him back as a character, not just a recurring character, he became one of the characters.
45:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And he, yeah, he was one of the great characters. He tried to eat a Jeep in one episode to further prove his, his mental unfitness to serve. And that was in one of the funny episodes. I guess before we take a break, we should rattle off some of these guest stars.
45:52 Josh Clark? Yeah.
45:52 Speaker 02 Because MASH had a, quite a list of people who came on for one episode, including, but not limited to, Ron Howard.
45:59 Josh Clark? Sure.
46:00 Speaker 02 Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Swayze, Laurence Fishburne, the great George Wendt, Terry Gar. Who else you got?
46:08 Josh Clark? Andrew Dice Clay.
46:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:10 Josh Clark? The Dice Man. Yeah, well, just one thing. This is apparently where Leslie Nielsen made the transition to comedy.
46:19 Speaker 02 Oh, okay.
46:20 Josh Clark? Was on his appearance on MASH.
46:22 Speaker 02 Oh, that's great.
46:23 Josh Clark? Yeah.
46:24 Speaker 02 Rita Wilson?
46:25 Josh Clark? Oh, oh, we're still going. Yeah. Don't forget Ed Begley Jr.
46:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, John Ritter, Shelley Long.
46:30 Josh Clark? Pat Morita.
46:32 Speaker 02 Of course, Pat Morita's in there.
46:33 Josh Clark? He was in two.
46:35 Speaker 02 It's Hollywood in the 70s. They're like, we don't care what part of Asia you're from.
46:38 Josh Clark? Exactly.
46:39 Speaker 02 Just sign them up.
46:41 Josh Clark? Exactly. We feel pretty progressive that we're actually casting an Asian to play an Asian.
46:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, and yeah, for sure. All right. Shall we take that second break?
46:51 Josh Clark? Yeah. Yes.
46:54 Speaker 02 All right, we'll be right back.
46:55 Speaker 05 Learn some stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know.
47:09 Josh Clark? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong?
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48:04 Josh Clark? You know, eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us, it brings us together, and it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next unless something starts to feel off. Because what we eat and how our bodies respond to it is complicated.
48:20 Speaker 02 That's right. From the very first bite, food kicks Off a chain reaction, signals moving between the gut, the brain and the immune system, the constant back and forth we can't see and often don't fully understand. So we want to introduce to you Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from iHeart Ruby Studio. It's hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient Cynthia McFadden. Eating Interrupted explores everything from food allergies and intolerance and why they seem to be on the rise to how digestion changes as we age and what it's really like to live with a chronic GI condition.
48:48 Josh Clark? Through personal stories and expert insight, listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating Interrupted on the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
49:07 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
49:10 Josh Clark? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
49:13 Speaker 02 That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, redefining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
49:29 Speaker 03 It was going to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
49:37 Josh Clark? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
49:43 Speaker 06 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
49:49 Speaker 02 And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
49:52 Speaker 06 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.
49:56 Speaker 03 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
50:00 Josh Clark? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
50:03 Speaker 07 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
50:19 Speaker 02 All right, so earlier we talked about some, what you would call very special episodes. This was a thing back then on a lot of shows, like, you know, when Arnold and Willis find drugs and different strokes, like when a comedy takes a more serious tone. Mash added quite a few, and we can go through these kind of quickly. I'm gonna pick Sometimes You Hear a Bullet from season one, because that is an episode in which Hawkeye's childhood friend comes over as a journalist to write a book about the war, and he ends up dying on Hawkeye's operating table. And that was the first episode that was really very heavy, where like Hawkeye cries, and it gets kind of serious about the horrors of war.
51:00 Josh Clark? Yes. Okay, all right. I'm gonna pick Dreams from season eight, which is apparently its most controversial episode, because it is very jarring, very disturbing, where it covers the, each of the main characters is taking a rest from like a long day in the OR, where they saw 211 patients over 33 hours. And it goes through each one of their dreams, and it's very surreal, all sorts of weird, disturbing stuff happens. And I haven't seen it, but I want to watch it, because it sounds just totally nuts, but-
51:32 Speaker 02 It's pretty weird.
51:33 Josh Clark? It's completely contrary to any other episode. So I imagine if you were tuning in on Saturday night on CBS, expecting, you know, to kind of laugh and maybe cry, and you saw this horrible weirdness, you might have had a bad reaction to it.
51:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. There were two more episodes that were definitely weird, as far as mainstream television goes. A documentary-style one, called The Interview, where it was like a black and white, you know, like a Vietnam-era, black and white documentary about war. That one was kind of crazy to see on TV at the time. It won a Humanitist Prize for a work that explores the human condition in a meaningful way. And then the other one was called Point of View, and the whole thing is shot from, like, the camera's point of view is from a wounded soldier who can't talk. And so all the actors are just coming up and addressing camera as the soldier. And it's, you know, again, a very sort of
52:30 Speaker 02 groundbreaking roll of the dice to do for mainstream TV in the 70s.
52:35 Josh Clark? For sure.
52:37 Josh Clark? And then we got to talk about Abyssinia, Henry.
52:40 Speaker 02 Oh, God. Yeah, I mean, this this episode wrecked little Chuck, little nine year old Chuck.
52:46 Josh Clark? I remember this one, too. And I was like, where's the laugh track?
52:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:51 Josh Clark? So Colonel Colonel Blake, who we both love, played by McLean Stevenson, this is the season three finale. He gets word that he's going home, like his his tour is over. He's he's out of the army now. And so he leaves and that's it. Like, everybody's saying bye. Everybody's happy for him. He's happy. And then at the end of the episode, Radar comes into the OR and he's holding a telegram. And what does the telegram say, Chuck?
53:18 Speaker 02 I can't even say it.
53:19 Josh Clark? It says that Colonel Blake's plane went down with Colonel Blake aboard and that there were no survivors. So on his way back home after his tour, after becoming beloved by all viewers, Colonel Blake is dead. The writers killed him after he was already off the show. And it just wrecked everybody, like you said.
53:40 Speaker 02 It was brutal. Alan Alda knew this is gonna happen. The story goes that they didn't tell the rest of the cast until they got their sides that morning. And because they wanted, you know, a real reaction, or maybe they didn't even have the sides. Maybe they I think they just learned when Radar walked in in the scene. And Gary Burgoff's acting in that is incredible. And, you know, there's no reaction, like, no one's like, oh, my God, no, it's just very quietly. They keep operating and you just hear they're they're crying and you just hear like scalpel, you know, suction. And it's it's devastating.
54:14 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's good stuff.
54:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, very, very tough.
54:18 Josh Clark? So Chuck, I feel like the the episode, we can just skip it, you know, the MASH finale. We don't have to talk about that.
54:26 Speaker 02 No big deal.
54:28 Josh Clark? I don't know if we said, but we I surely we've mentioned this before, that the most watched television episode is the final episode of MASH, which is really saying something because it was two and a half hours long.
54:43 Speaker 02 Oh my God, that's right. It was, I remember it being long. I don't remember it being that long.
54:47 Josh Clark? Two and a half hours, man.
54:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. And of course, that includes commercials. A 30 second spot apparently was $450,000, which would be $1.36 million today. It was called Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, and it was, you know, the war ends, basically. It's the last episode, but it is very dramatic for a lot of it. And like, the things the characters go through at the end are all pretty, you know, take pretty dramatic turns.
55:14 Josh Clark? Yeah. And very famously, in this like, kind of heartrending montage at the very end, it shows how every character dies in the future.
55:24 Speaker 02 You're talking about 6'100?
55:25 Josh Clark? Yeah.
55:26 Speaker 02 Cause I haven't seen it in a while. I was like, did that really happen?
55:29 Josh Clark? That is one of the greatest endings to any show ever.
55:33 Speaker 02 Of course. It was great. Also gut wrenching.
55:35 Josh Clark? Yeah, it was. But Goodbye, Farewell and Amen is fantastic too, for sure.
55:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. So like you said, the biggest rated TV show of all time, and that was like, including sports events up until Super Bowl 2010, finally surpassed it. But MASH is still, as far as just a regular TV show goes, the finale is the most watched. I think 75% of America tuned into that, which is a staggering number. You know, you see Hawkeye in a mental hospital. Father Mulcahy loses his faith in God. He loses his hearing and his faith in God. Klingor ends up marrying a Korean woman and stays there ironically.
56:13 Josh Clark? Yeah, because he was always trying to get out of there, right?
56:16 Speaker 02 He's trying to go home.
56:17 Josh Clark? Yeah.
56:18 Speaker 02 Did you see the urban, possible urban legend about the plumbing in New York City?
56:22 Josh Clark? No.
56:23 Speaker 02 That was in the mental floss thing. I don't know if this is true, but I've always heard this, that the plumbing in New York City supposedly broke during the first commercial break because everybody got up to pee at the same time in New York.
56:35 Josh Clark? That's awesome.
56:36 Speaker 02 Totally sounds like it's probably not real.
56:39 Josh Clark? Right.
56:39 Speaker 02 They all flushed at once and it just broke everything.
56:41 Josh Clark? All the alligators drowned.
56:44 Speaker 02 But yeah, that's funny. It's a good story, though, regardless. But 121 million people tuned in to that episode and I was one of them. My whole family sat around and we didn't do that kind of thing much.
56:56 Josh Clark? Oh, we watched it. My mom videotaped it. We watched it on videotape many times, too.
57:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:02 Josh Clark? Yeah, she'd be like, watch this, watch this part.
57:05 Speaker 02 Watch it again.
57:06 Josh Clark? I have a cute little anecdote about watching MASH, though.
57:09 Speaker 02 All right, let's hear it.
57:09 Josh Clark? Yumi. So her older brother Bobby, he has special needs. And one day when they were much, much younger, Yumi must have probably been five or six or something. Bobby had to go to the ER and her dad was a Marine. So they were living on a Marine base at the time. And her mom, like, her dad whisks Bobby off to the ER. And her mom tells her that Bobby's going to the hospital. And so Yumi's only frame of reference for military hospitals is a MASH unit, where there's always bombs going off and everything is kind of nuts. So she was really worried her brother was going to a MASH unit, which I've just found endlessly cute.
57:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's adorable. That's funny. I'm gonna bring that up next time and see Yumi. That's hysterical.
57:51 Josh Clark? She'll think that's hilarious. Oh, by the way, Echo and the Bunny Men is Saturday.
57:56 Speaker 02 This Saturday in Atlanta?
57:59 Josh Clark? At the Tabernacle. Remember, I told you I'd remind you again.
58:02 Speaker 02 I know. I'm looking to see if I can go. We should probably do this off air.
58:06 Josh Clark? Okay. I just wanted to remind you.
58:08 Speaker 02 Okay. You're like, I'm not going, but you should go.
58:11 Josh Clark? Oh, I'm going.
58:13 Speaker 02 We will quickly mention the MASH spinoffs. I teased After MASH a few times as saying Post MASH, but that was the name of one of the spinoffs. It didn't run long, about a season and a half. And it was one of the ones that had the most characters, I guess, from the show. Because the real Colonel Potter was there, Klinger was there, and Father Mokai, Mokai was there, you know, obviously all in a hospital, post-war, a veterans hospital.
58:40 Josh Clark? Did you watch it? I remember watching After MASH.
58:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, I watched it some and I remember not loving it, so I don't think I watched it all.
58:47 Josh Clark? There's also Trapper John, M.D., which was on for seven seasons. And it even was running concurrently at the same time as MASH itself for a lot of that time.
58:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, kinda weird.
58:57 Josh Clark? Yeah.
58:58 Speaker 02 To not have, uh, what was his name?
59:00 Josh Clark? Wayne Rogers.
59:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, like they recast it, so it's just like, why not just call it something else?
59:05 Josh Clark? Yeah, I guess because everybody loved the character, but even still, it's his character like 50 years in the future or something like that, you know, or 30 or 30 years in the future. So he's an old band, so they had another actor, Purnell Roberts, who you probably know from the 60s touring company of Camelot, but he played Trapper John as an older man.
59:25 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. So of course now, I'm a dummy, like the reason they called it that was so they could bank on the success of MASH.
59:32 Josh Clark? That's what I would guess.
59:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, I would, I didn't think that through.
59:35 Josh Clark? It almost makes me wonder if they just retrofitted a show that had already been greenlit
59:39 Speaker 02 Right.
59:40 Josh Clark? to Trapper John.
59:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, like The Pit was supposed to be an ER spinoff.
59:45 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
59:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, and there's, I think there's still a lawsuit because apparently there's, and of course, I'm speaking completely as someone who doesn't know a lot about this, so look it up if you really want to know, but I think the Michael Crichton estate got involved and they're like, wait a minute, you can't do an ER spinoff without like giving us some juice. Because he, he came up with the idea for ER or whatever, or wrote the book that it was based on or something. And I think there's like an, like a paper trail of, because The Pit was like, no, no, no, that wasn't the deal. It's just a new show. It's not supposed to be Noah Wiley's character, but I think there's an email trail where they were like, oh, you want money, huh? Let's just call it something else and change the character's name.
1:00:27 Josh Clark? Who is that dumb these days?
1:00:30 Speaker 02 I don't know. And I don't know if, I mean, I'm sure I'm getting some details wrong, but I know that it is an ongoing issue.
1:00:35 Josh Clark? Man. Uh, there was one more. It was Walter, W A L T E R with the asterix even.
1:00:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:43 Josh Clark? That was a 1984 pilot that didn't, I, I think it aired one time and it was aired in the eastern and central time zones. It was apparently so bad, they didn't even air it in the west that same night.
1:00:57 Speaker 02 Didn't they do that for our show?
1:00:58 Josh Clark? Pretty much. They tried to cram it all into one night, for sure.
1:01:02 Speaker 02 Man, that's crazy. I didn't know that about the West Coast thing. That is a brutal move.
1:01:06 Josh Clark? Yeah, yeah.
1:01:07 Speaker 02 It's like, we can't even let the California eyes see the show.
1:01:10 Josh Clark? Right. So it was about Radar O'Reilly and his life after, after Korea. And it was played by Gary Bergoff and he was going to become a cop. And his wife had just left him and he was contemplating suicide. And this was a comedy, a half hour comedy, from what I understand. So people didn't like it.
1:01:29 Speaker 02 I bet you that's out there. I'm gonna have to watch that.
1:01:31 Josh Clark? Yeah. You got anything else?
1:01:34 Speaker 02 I got nothing else. I appreciate you indulging this one. I know it's not your favorite show, but I thank you.
1:01:38 Josh Clark? Hey, I can always talk about MASH for 53 straight minutes, anytime you want.
1:01:44 Speaker 02 All right, let's do it again right now.
1:01:45 Josh Clark? Okay. If you want to know more about MASH, just go start watching it. I propose watching the episode Dreams first. Maybe just to get it out of the way.
1:01:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:56 Josh Clark? And since Chuck said yeah, that means it's time for listener mail.
1:02:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, not so much a listener mail, even though it was one, a little inside baseball. But our email has been screwed up for a couple of months now, as far as, if you haven't heard back from us, by the way, and you've sent an email lately, it's because our email is super screwed up.
1:02:15 Josh Clark? It's my fault.
1:02:16 Speaker 02 The good news is we're now getting them again, but they are being forwarded, so you can't directly reply. Long way of saying, this comes from Martha Black, and there's really no need in even reading the email. Because all it was, was, hey Chuck, by the way, that Howard Hughes picture of him as an old guy in Vegas, is actor Rip Torn.
1:02:37 Josh Clark? No.
1:02:39 Speaker 02 It even says so in the caption that she found, so I definitely have egg on my face for that one. Because now that I see it, I'm like, yeah, I guess, I guess it is Rip Torn.
1:02:47 Josh Clark? Is that right, Artie?
1:02:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, but he was younger and he was, you know, had tissue boxes on his feet, for God's sakes.
1:02:54 Josh Clark? It fooled me too, Chuck.
1:02:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, oh, well.
1:02:57 Josh Clark? Fooled me too.
1:02:58 Speaker 02 And of course, that makes sense. There are no pictures of Howard Hughes in Vegas. You didn't allow that.
1:03:02 Josh Clark? At least it wasn't AI.
1:03:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's true.
1:03:05 Josh Clark? You know, at least they got ripped torn to post for it.
1:03:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:10 Josh Clark? So who is that from?
1:03:12 Speaker 02 Martha Black.
1:03:13 Josh Clark? Thanks a lot, Martha Black. She sounds like an MTV VJ from back in the day.
1:03:18 Speaker 02 That's right.
1:03:19 Josh Clark? If you want to be like Martha Black and show off your name, you can email us too. Hopefully, we'll get it these days. Send it off to [email protected] .
1:03:32 Speaker 04 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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