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Chuck Bryant
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human mom.
Josh Clark
Are we there yet?
Chuck Bryant
10 more minutes. Only 10 minutes.
Josh Clark
Can you drive slower?
Questlove
What's up with them today?
Dave
Lingokids, that app we downloaded last week.
Chuck Bryant
They love it. The games. Oh, this funny baby bot character. Kids, we're almost there.
Hoda Kotb
No.
Josh Clark
With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows little ones can't get enough of, Lingokids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids.
Questlove
Why didn't we download this sooner?
Chuck Bryant
Lingokids, everything kids love. Download it for free.
Questlove
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Hoda Kotb
Joy is essential, and it's also elusive. But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me. How to KOTB. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats. Listen to Joy 101 on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CBS Montreal.
Josh Clark
Bon soir. It is Josh and Chuck and we are coming to your French ish town.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
That's right. We're going to 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 stuffyouchouldknow.com and click on the on tour button and click on the tickets link there. There are all kinds of ways to find these tickets.
Dave
Yeah, and we'll See you guys next week.
Chuck Bryant
Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartrad.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Well, one of us loved this. We might as well go ahead and get that out of the way.
Dave
What do you mean, mash?
Josh Clark
Yeah, I love mash. You hated mash.
Dave
I don't know what you're talking about.
Josh Clark
Come on.
Dave
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?
Josh Clark
Well, tell me your history. Did you watch it at all?
Dave
Yeah, I watched it with my dad.
Questlove
Okay.
Dave
My dad would laugh out loud, throw his head back and clap sometimes.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Dave
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 sure, you know, I would guess that he probably would have laughed regardless. 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.
Josh Clark
Right. Well, 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.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Yeah, well, I have talked about it before, but it was definitely weird that a 9 year old was into a comedy sometimes serious about alcoholic surgeons during the Korean War. But I was into it. And you know, at one point MASH was on reruns in the evening and then late night and while it was still airing. So on Thursdays, I believe it aired on Thursdays in primetime. At least it did when I. From my recollection, at one point I was watching five episodes of M A S H on Thursday and four episodes of MASH every other day of the week.
Dave
Wow. There's not that many shows you can do that with.
Josh Clark
No, it was like 5 and 5:30 and then something like 10, 10:30 or something like that.
Dave
I can do that with Law and Order. I can just watch Law and Order indefinitely, the original series.
Josh Clark
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, so.
Dave
Wow. And is it still one of your top shows?
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
Definitely different.
Josh Clark
There are no short shows about alcoholic surgeons in the Korean War.
Dave
Now there are no short shows. They're all six or eight hours long at least.
Josh Clark
Yeah. The 30 minute sitcom is on its last legs, it feels like. Huh.
Dave
Are there any out there? Oh, I guess there's a few.
Josh Clark
I mean, main, you know, the main networks still have their shows. I just, I don't watch any of them.
Dave
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. It had a great cast. It wasn't dumb, it was smart. But it was also hilarious. Had a real like, kind of like a slightly different 30 Rock vibe to like the writing.
Hoda Kotb
Yeah.
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
Yeah, yeah, I would say probably before Mr. Mayor. That's as far as it would go back for me too.
Josh Clark
Then you watched the Good Place too, didn't you?
Dave
I did. I didn't watch it. I watched it business 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?
Josh Clark
I did, yeah. Well, why don't you, since this is your favorite show, why don't you tell everybody what it stands for?
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Who also hates match, by the way.
Dave
Yeah, he looked high and low and was like, 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.
Josh Clark
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. Cause people would just say, what in the world does MASH mean? But, oh, wait, it must stand for something. Would be my guess.
Dave
Right. But they didn't use, like, periods after each letter like the military would have.
Josh Clark
Oh, yeah, sure. I get you.
Dave
I'm talking about the asterisks in particular.
Josh Clark
Yeah. An acronym is typically a period. Right.
Dave
All right, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Clark
But it looks good, though.
Dave
You're right. It does. It looks fantastic. Very.
Josh Clark
Signature.
Dave
So Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. And obviously, if you've ever seen mash, it's where the whole thing is set. So. 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?
Josh Clark
Oh, boy, is this what we're in for? I did know that because at some point the show spells that out. So, yeah, I knew that was a thing. What I was curious. And my MASH 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. Unless there was an episode that I missed where they were like, yeah, we're gonna move to this other part of Malibu, which is where it was filmed. The Fox Ranch, which is now Malibu Creek State park, 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.
Dave
You don't know? That's where the Manson family lived for a while.
Josh Clark
Oh, really? No, they lived on Spahn Ranch.
Dave
Right.
Josh Clark
Okay.
Dave
Anytime I hear ranch in California, I just immediately think of the Manson Family.
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
Yeah. I remember my mind being blown when I found out that that was, like, California in the back.
Josh Clark
Like, they didn't go to Korea.
Dave
Yeah. I think that's kind of when I started to get that people cut corners for money.
Josh Clark
Yeah, totally.
Dave
So, yeah. So a MASH thing. A MASH was actually a thing. And I think it was actually first tried out in the Korean War.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure. And the idea is that they put the surgeons close to the front lines so they could save more lives. And it was, you know, they were all kind of temporary. Like they slept on, you know, cot like beds, and they lived in tents. And on the TV show, there's a lot of talk about the front and how close they were. But the real life mass units apparently had a 97% survival rate. If you got there, chances are you lived.
Dave
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 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 the real life MASH surgeons. How often did you have to break down your MASH unit and then move it 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.
Josh Clark
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 Doctor's 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 was a big, big part of that show is that none of, you know, none of them. But the main characters that we're gonna 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.
Dave
Oh, yeah, yeah, 36. So, yeah, 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, reveille stuff and shove it.
Josh Clark
Yeah, that's right. It was actually a book. And this smart guy. I did not know.
Dave
No way I was going to ask you that facetiously. And I didn't.
Josh Clark
I'm sorry, I did not know this. Of course I knew it was a movie. And we'll talk about that in a second. But the movie was optioned from a book written in 1968 called 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 855. The 80, 55th MASH unit was the real life unit that it was based on. And it sounds like it was like what we see on TV and in the movies. They partied a lot, they drank a lot, did a lot of pranks, and on the side did some surgery.
Dave
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. 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. 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.
Josh Clark
But, you know, once Hollywood gets ahold of something, yeah, 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 Aftermash, because we'll talk about that later. The weird spinoff. But post mash, he wrote more MASH books after the movie was a hit. He wrote 14 MASH novels. The first one was called Mash and Main, which published the same year the TV show ended up premiering.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Yeah. Can you say cash in?
Dave
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 optioned 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.
Josh Clark
So you didn't like the movie?
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
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 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.
Dave
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?
Josh Clark
Maybe.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Oh, sure.
Dave
Just completely, completely ignoring, like, the consequences of harming other people.
Josh Clark
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dave
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 it was released right at, you know, the peak of when anti war sentiment was really aroused in America because of the Vietnam War.
Josh Clark
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 head nurse, is. The shower curtain is ripped open and she is fully frontally exposed naked to the rest of the camp. Like this. Played for laughs. So obviously it's a movie of its time. It was written by Ring Lardner Jr. Obviously, son of great short story writer Ring Lardner, and he. I think they called him Pinky. Ring was his nickname.
Dave
No. Oh, you got me. That's a good one.
Josh Clark
Oh, thanks. That'd be a pretty good nickname for Ring Jr. Yeah. Or maybe Toe.
Dave
Ring. No, Pinky.
Josh Clark
Pinky Ring.
Dave
Okay.
Josh Clark
So Altman 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 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, yeah, it's kind of interesting.
Dave
Yeah, I saw he tried to get his name taken off of it and then he won the Oscar. Oh, wow. I guess I'll stick with this.
Josh Clark
That's really funny.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Dave
It was like almost a slightly subversive act in and of itself to hire him in the late 60s after, you know, he was. They were bringing him back, I guess.
Josh Clark
Well, Altman's. He was an old pothead. He was a medium age pothead at that point.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
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 take his life. And so Altman was like, I need a song. That's. He pitched it as I need it to be the stupidest song ever. So he hired a guy, a real musician named Johnny Mandel. Any relation to the man? Oh, that's Mandrill.
Dave
Sorry, close. He's a distant, distant relation. Yeah, that's right.
Josh Clark
He dropped the R and he was like, we need a song for this funeral. I want it 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.
Dave
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. Cause I'm sure they're hilarious.
Josh Clark
I actually meant to do that too, and I did not. I thought, you know. I know. Emily worked with Roger and two of his sons on the Gingerbread man in Savannah. And I asked her if Michael was one of them and she said no, it was two of the others. Or maybe the other two.
Dave
Was it Gingerbread Man? Is that a Grisham thriller?
Josh Clark
I think so.
Dave
Or at least in that vein.
Josh Clark
Yeah, I think it was a Grisham thriller.
Dave
Hey, speaking of movies, I saw something just last night that I want to recommend.
Josh Clark
Let's hear it.
Dave
It's an old Oswald or Osgood. Sorry, Oz. Osgood Perkins movie.
Josh Clark
Oh, you love that guy.
Dave
Gretel and Hansel.
Josh Clark
And I think he's from I think you have it backwards.
Dave
No, no, that's the way it is. That's the title. I'm just kidding because Gretel's older in this one and it's from like 2012. 13. It's great.
Josh Clark
You should start a podcast on Oz, Perkins.
Dave
I wonder if I could get him to come on.
Josh Clark
Call it like, you know, like Finding Oz or the wizard of Oz or something like that.
Dave
Sure. Or behind the curtain.
Josh Clark
Yeah, yeah. Behind the green. Not behind the green door. That's something different. Behind the green curtain.
Dave
Behind the green door. Oh, man.
Josh Clark
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. Learn some stuff with Joshua and character stuff you should know. Mom, are we there yet?
Chuck Bryant
10 more minutes. Only 10 minutes.
Josh Clark
Can you drive slower?
Questlove
What's up with them today?
Chuck Bryant
Lingokids, that app we downloaded last week, they love it. The games, this funny baby bot character. Kids, we're almost there.
Hoda Kotb
No.
Josh Clark
With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows little ones can't get enough of, Lingokids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids. Why didn't we download this sooner?
Chuck Bryant
Lingokids, everything kids love, download it for free.
Hoda Kotb
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Together we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges.
Chuck Bryant
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
Josh Clark
There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Hoda Kotb
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Questlove
This Black Music month. The Questlove show celebrates the artists, innovators and cultural voices who continue to redefine music. We're sitting down with a groundbreaking country artist, Mickey Guyden.
Chuck Bryant
The way that the country music community accepted post Malone vs Beyonce vs Shaboozi, like, those are very eye opening things.
Questlove
Hip hop visionary, Fat five Freddy, genre bending musical genius, Thundercat. And the always legendary revolutionary voice, Chuck D. Yeah, we changed tires, man. I had 18 jobs before this became my occupation, man. Okay, I wrote. I wrote Bum Rush the show as a messenger. From unforgettable stories to deep conversations about creativity, culture and legacy, these are the voices shaping the soundtrack of black music. Past, present, and future, listen to the Questlove show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Oh, okay.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Yeah, yeah, good point.
Dave
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 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.
Josh Clark
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 is stuff like Hogan's Heroes and McHale's Navy. 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 he said, this is the best TV pilot I've ever read. I'm totally gonna audition for this.
Dave
Sure.
Josh Clark
That he decided to do it. But I could see Altman just not going there, you know.
Dave
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 going to 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 Gelbert. I don't know how those two came together, but it was a match made in CBS heaven.
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure. Gelbert 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 smash. 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.
Dave
I saw both. I don't remember the book two, but the first one was so great.
Josh Clark
Yeah, agreed. But 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 really interesting. They walk a really tough fine line. And as we'll see, they ended up doing some really groundbreaking episodes 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 all in the Family was doing.
Dave
Yeah. They actually put it behind all in the Family at some point, which helped bring it out of TV purgatory, I guess. But one of the ways that the producers were able to kind of navigate that narrow margin between just idiocy and over. Over melodramatic stuff.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
Was that the. The studio or 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, 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.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
Which I think is actually kind of useful in contrasting, you know, how these surgeons or these. Not just the surgeons, but everybody at the MASH 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.
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure. 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. It was usually like a studio audience thing. And this was not a studio audience show, but you just sort of accepted it. Apparently the BBC never used the laugh track at all. And then I'm also reminded of, like, I think years back, someone did some Friends episodes without the laugh track and divided them up into clips. And it's just jarring to hear that kind of a show without a laugh track. So Match was sort of a weird case.
Dave
We've talked about that. Because not only is it jarring, it's like, this isn't funny at all.
Josh Clark
It really cues you and you don't. Even 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 it was such an institution in like a certain kind of comedy that. Yeah. Like you said, without it, you don't know when to laugh almost.
Dave
Do you remember in the. I guess the 2000 aughts, it must have been right before Cartoon Network came around. Or Adult Swim. Right before Adult Swim, 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?
Josh Clark
Was that Space Ghost coast to Coast.
Dave
This is before Space Coast. Coast to Coast.
Josh Clark
Oh, okay.
Dave
Because. Yeah, Dave.
Josh Clark
Dave Willis.
Dave
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 an easy, basic idea. But it's so funny to watch them.
Josh Clark
Oh, man, those early years of Cartoon Network were just the best.
Dave
Yeah.
Josh Clark
And Comedy Central, like, it used to be so much better, you know?
Dave
Oh, yeah, everything. I think Comedy Central is just old south park reruns in the Daily show once in a while.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
Yeah.
Josh Clark
That's a real shame. As far as MASH and their storylines go, though, apparently Gelbert 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 on the operating table. Like that apparently really happened, as did a lot of that stuff.
Dave
Yeah, yeah. I was like, did it really happen? And I went and found reference to the actual name of the surgeon who told that story in these interviews.
Josh Clark
Oh, wow.
Dave
Yeah. So, like, it definitely happened. So I Think I said that. Master's 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. Yeah, I mean, for 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.
Josh Clark
Yeah, I mean, Wonderful World of Disney was a juggernaut of a show 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 they moved it, like you said earlier, to after all in the Family, which was a huge hit. And that 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. Pretty good stuff.
Dave
Yeah, I think the Newsweek people really got it.
Josh Clark
Should we talk about the characters?
Dave
Yeah, let's, because we've made reference to some, but I feel like we should get a little more in depth with them.
Josh Clark
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, really. And by all accounts, just one of the best dudes ever. And he is 90 years old now, 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 the TV and movie business, I think.
Dave
Did he write a lot of those movies he was in in the early 80s?
Josh Clark
I think he co wrote, he directed almost all of them, really. 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? Yeah, with the top or whatever. 12 things.
Dave
17.
Josh Clark
17. So a few of these guys actually served, at least in the reserves. Alan Aldo served six months in the army reserves in Korea. Pretty crazy.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
I thought you dictated the Toledo thing. He was always. If you never watch his show, Klinger often referenced the Toledo Mud Hens.
Dave
Toledo Mud Hens. And Tony Paco's, which is a real place in Toledo.
Josh Clark
Oh, I mean, that's your place. I didn't know he talked about that on the show.
Dave
Oh, yeah, he talked about Tony Paco's all the time.
Josh Clark
Oh, see, I didn't know what it was back then. I was like, who the hell is Tony Packos?
Dave
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 Pacos, I would look over at my dad and there'd just be, like, a single tear going down his chest. He was so filled with pride because,
Josh Clark
you know, I'm sure that wasn't Old Milwaukee.
Dave
He got some on his face.
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
Wow.
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
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, which apparently he seemed fine with.
Josh Clark
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 Pharrell. He was actually a US Marine in real life. He was great. I loved Honeycutt. Again, those later seasons after 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.
Dave
Yeah, especially in the beginning. Hawkeye and Trapper John were like prankster, drunk womanizers. They would harass the nurses and try to get them to sleep with them and all sorts of stuff. And then BJ Honeycutt was a lot different. He was a. A breath of fresh air because he was very true to his wife back home.
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure.
Dave
And he had a mustache.
Josh Clark
That's right. Then we have Radar, of course, Corporal Radar O'Reilly, played by Gary Berghoff. 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 him. 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 before you could hear the helicopters. And usually, like, if it was a pretty light episode, there'd be a lot of hijinks that would be kind of halted at the end of the episode when he heard the helicopters coming.
Dave
Right. And then there was Colonel Blake. He was one of my favorites, played by McLane Stevenson. And great. 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 perturbed and befuddled, kind
Josh Clark
of a little bit exasperated.
Dave
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 McClane Stevenson managed to keep him from going down that route.
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure. He was a man. I loved that character. We should mention, too, that Gary Berg, off his radar, was the only one who bridged the movie as far as being in both. Colonel Blake was then replaced by Colonel Sherman T. Potter, 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.
Dave
Yeah. Andy used the term horse feathers a lot. Horse feathers, yes. There was another great character too, who you just love to hate. It was so good. Frank Burns, who's played by Larry Linville. He was. He had what you would term today is 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.
Josh Clark
Yeah, he was a bureaucrat. He was completely the foil of Hawkeye and. 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. Cause 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.
Dave
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 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 gonna 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.
Josh Clark
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 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. Because he 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.
Dave
Yeah, he just didn't blend in with them. Cause he was so snobby. They just had nothing in common, essentially from their backgrounds.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
Then there's Margaret Hot Lips Houlihan, played by Loretta Swit, 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.
Josh Clark
Yeah, Loretta Sweat. She was great. Rest in peace. I think we lost her last year or the year before, like fairly recently. Oh, yeah, she on the show Hot Lips was having an affair with Frank Burns and they were always sort of coupled together against 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.
Dave
Did we talk about Klingers wearing women's clothing?
Josh Clark
Oh, no, that was a big part of it.
Dave
Yeah, 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.
Josh Clark
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 mental unfitness to serve. And that was one of the funny episodes. I guess before we take a break, we should rattle off some of these guest stars because MASH had quite a list of people who came on for one episode, including, but not limited to Ron Howard, Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Swayze, Laurence Fishburne, the great George Wint, Terry Garr. Who else you got?
Dave
Andrew Dice Clay. Yeah, the Dice Man. Yeah. Just one thing. This is apparently where Leslie Nielsen made the transition to comedy.
Josh Clark
Oh, okay.
Dave
Was on his appearance on mash.
Josh Clark
Oh, that's great.
Dave
Yeah.
Josh Clark
Rita Wilson.
Dave
Oh, oh, we're still going. Yeah. Don't Forget Ed Begley Jr. Yeah.
Josh Clark
John Ritter, Shelley Long, Pat Morita. Of course. Pat Morita's in there.
Dave
He was in two.
Josh Clark
It's Hollywood in the 70s. They're like, we don't care what part of Asia you're from.
Dave
Exactly.
Josh Clark
Just sign them up.
Dave
Exactly. We feel pretty progressive that we're actually casting an Asian to play an Asian.
Josh Clark
Yeah. And yeah, for sure. Um, all right. Shall we take that second break?
Dave
Yeah. Yes.
Questlove
All right.
Josh Clark
We'll be right back. Stuff you should know. Mom, are we there yet?
Chuck Bryant
10 more minutes. Only 10 minutes.
Josh Clark
Can you drive slower?
Questlove
What's up with them today?
Dave
Lingokids, that app we downloaded last week.
Chuck Bryant
They love it. The games, this funny baby bot character. Kids, we're almost there.
Hoda Kotb
No.
Josh Clark
With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows, little ones can't get enough of. Lingokids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids. Why didn't we download this sooner?
Chuck Bryant
Lingokids, everything kids love, download it for free.
Hoda Kotb
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Together we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges.
Chuck Bryant
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
Josh Clark
There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Hoda Kotb
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Questlove
This Black Music Month. The Questlove show celebrates the artists, innovators and cultural voices who continue to redefine music. We're sitting down with a groundbreaking country artist, Mickey Guyden.
Chuck Bryant
The way that the country music community accepted post Malone versus Beyonce versus Shaboozy. Like, those are very eye opening things.
Questlove
Hip hop visionary, Fat five Freddy, genre bending musical genius, Thundercat, and the always legendary revolutionary voice, Chuck D. Yeah, we changed tires, man. I had 18 jobs before. Before this became my occupation, man. Okay. I wrote. I wrote Bum Russell show as a messenger. From unforgettable stories to deep conversations about creativity, culture and legacy, these are the voices shaping the soundtrack of black music past, present and future. Listen to the Questlove show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Clark
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 in 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.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
But it's pretty weird.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
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 Humanitas 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 again, a very sort of groundbreaking roll of the dice to do for mainstream TV in the 70s, for sure.
Dave
And then we gotta talk about Abyssinia. Henry.
Josh Clark
Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, this, this episode wrecked little Chuck. Little nine year old Chuck.
Dave
I remember this one too. And I was like, where's the laugh track?
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
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?
Josh Clark
I can't even say it.
Dave
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. 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.
Josh Clark
Like you said, it was brutal. Alan Alden knew this was gonna happen. The story goes that they didn't tell the rest of the cast until they got their sides that morning. Cause they wanted, you know, 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 Berghoff'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 crying. And you just hear like, scalpel. You know, suction. And it's devastating.
Dave
Yeah, it's good stuff.
Josh Clark
Yeah. Very, very tough.
Dave
So, Chuck, I feel like the episode. We can just skip it. You know, the MASH finale. We don't have to talk about that.
Josh Clark
No big deal.
Dave
I don't know if we said, but 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.
Josh Clark
Oh, my God. That's right. I remember it being long. I don't remember it being that long.
Dave
Two and a half hours, man.
Josh Clark
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, Any Men. 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.
Dave
Yeah. And very famously, in this, like, kind of heartrending montage at the very end, it shows how every character dies in the future.
Josh Clark
You're talking about Six Feet Under.
Dave
Yeah, that is because I haven't seen
Josh Clark
it in a while. I was like, did that really happen?
Dave
That is one of the greatest endings to any show ever.
Josh Clark
Of course it was great. Also gut wrenching.
Dave
Yeah, it was. But Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen is fantastic too, for sure.
Josh Clark
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 your 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. Klinger ends up marrying a Korean woman and stays there ironically.
Dave
Yeah. Cause he was always trying to get out of there. Right.
Josh Clark
He's trying to go home.
Dave
Yeah.
Josh Clark
Did you see the urban possible urban legend about the plumbing in New York City? No, 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.
Dave
That's awesome.
Josh Clark
That totally sounds like. It's probably not real, right? They all flushed at once, and it just broke everything.
Dave
All the alligators drowned.
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
Oh, we watched it. My mom videotaped it. We watched it on videotape many times, too.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
Yeah. She'd be like, watch this. Watch this part.
Josh Clark
Watch it again.
Dave
I have a cute little anecdote about watching mash, though.
Josh Clark
All right, let's hear it.
Dave
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 match 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 mass unit, which I've just found endlessly cute.
Josh Clark
Yeah, that's adorable. That's funny. I'm gonna bring that up next time I see Yumi. That's hysterical.
Dave
She'll think that's hilarious. Oh, by the way, Echo and the Bunnymen is Saturday.
Josh Clark
This Saturday in Atlanta at the Tabernacle.
Dave
Remember, I told you I'd remind you again.
Josh Clark
I know. I'm looking to see if I can go. We should probably do this off air.
Dave
Oh, okay. I just wanted to remind you.
Josh Clark
Okay. You're like, I'm not going, but you should go.
Dave
Oh, I'm going.
Josh Clark
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 that 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. Cause the real Colonel Potter was there, Klinger was there, and Father Mulcahy was there, obviously. All in a hospital post war. A veterans hospital.
Dave
Did you watch it? I remember watching Aftermash.
Josh Clark
Yeah, I watched it some, and I remember not loving it, so I don't think I watched at all.
Dave
There was 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. Yeah.
Josh Clark
Kind of weird.
Dave
Yeah.
Josh Clark
Not have. What was his name?
Dave
Wayne Rogers.
Josh Clark
Yeah. Like, they recast it, so it's just, like, why not just call it something else?
Dave
Yeah. I guess because everybody loved the character. But even still, a character like 50 years in the future or something like that, you know, 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.
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
That's what I would guess.
Josh Clark
Yeah. I didn't think that through.
Dave
It almost makes me wonder if they just retrofitted a show that had already been greenlit to Trapper John.
Josh Clark
Yeah. Like the Pit was supposed to be an ER spinoff.
Dave
Oh, yeah.
Josh Clark
Yeah. And 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 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 a paper trail of. Cause 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 Wylie'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.
Dave
Who is that dumb these days?
Josh Clark
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, man.
Dave
There was one more. It was Walter W A L T E R with the asterisks even.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
That was a 1984 pilot that didn't. 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.
Josh Clark
Didn't they do that for our show?
Dave
Pretty much. They tried to cram it all into one night for sure.
Josh Clark
Man, that's crazy. I didn't know that about the west coast thing. That is a brutal move.
Dave
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Clark
So we can't even let the California eyes see the show.
Dave
Right. So it was about Radar O'Reilly in his life after Korea, and it was played by Gary Berghoff, 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.
Josh Clark
So, people, I bet you that's out there. I'm going to have to watch that.
Dave
Yeah. You got anything else?
Josh Clark
I got nothing else. I appreciate you indulging this one. I know it's not your favorite show, but I thank you.
Dave
Hey, I can always talk about MASH for 53 straight minutes anytime you want.
Josh Clark
All right, let's do it again right now.
Dave
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.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
And since Chuck said yeah, that means it's time for listener mail.
Josh Clark
Yeah, not so much a listener mail, even though it was one 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.
Dave
It's my fault.
Josh Clark
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.
Dave
No.
Josh Clark
And 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 it is.
Dave
Rip Torn is That right, Artie?
Josh Clark
Yeah, but he was younger and he was, you know, had tissue boxes on his feet, for God's sakes.
Dave
It fooled me too, Chuck. Yeah.
Josh Clark
Oh, well.
Dave
Fooled me, too.
Josh Clark
And of course that makes sense. There are no pictures of Howard Hughes in Vegas. He didn't allow that.
Dave
At least it was an AI.
Josh Clark
Yeah, that's true.
Dave
You know, at least they got Ripped horn to pose for it.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Dave
So who is that from?
Josh Clark
Martha Black.
Dave
Thanks a lot, Martha Black. She sounds like an MTV VJ from back in the day.
Josh Clark
That's right.
Dave
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 stuffpodcastheartradio.com
Chuck Bryant
Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Josh Clark
For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Chuck Bryant
you listen to your favorite shows. This is Jana Kramer from Wind down with Jana Kramer. Hey, quick question for the parents listening right now. When's the last time your kid asked for something and you actually felt good saying yes? Because lately a lot of families have been hearing the same thing. Can I have lingo kids, please? And here's the thing. LingoKids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids with more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows. Astronauts, wild animals, superheroes, dinosaurs. It's literally everything kids love all in one place. So when they ask for it, you can actually feel good Saying Yes. Download LingoKids for free and start exploring today, or unlock even more amazing content with LingoKids Plus. And if you go with the yearly plan, you can save up to 60%. Search LingoKids in the App Store or Google Play. LingoKids everything kids love.
Hoda Kotb
Joy is essential, and it's also elusive. But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy101 It's a new podcast hosted by me. How to Cop Me. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your journey, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats. Listen to Joy 101 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CBS.
Josh Clark
This is Michael Rapoport and my podcast, the I Am Rappaport Stereo podcast is unlike anyone you've ever heard. If you're looking for strong opinions about sports, entertainment, politics, pop culture, and whatever else catches my attention, then subscribe now. This kid Jafar Jackson should absolutely, positively get nominated for his portrayal as Michael Jackson. Listen to I Am rappaport on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Chuck Bryant
This is an iHeart podcast.
Josh Clark
Guaranteed Human.
Date: June 18, 2026
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Podcast: Stuff You Should Know (iHeartPodcasts)
Josh and Chuck take a deep dive into “MASH,” the legendary TV series set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. The episode covers MASH’s origins (including its real-life context, the novel, and the movie), its innovative blend of comedy and drama, iconic characters, memorable episodes, and lasting cultural impact—including that record-shattering series finale. Along the way, the hosts reflect on TV history, the changing landscape of sitcoms, and their own fond and funny memories of the show.
The episode is a rich, affectionate, and often hilarious tour through all things MASH: the show’s innovative blend of humor and seriousness, its influence on TV drama (and the sitcom format), its unforgettable characters and episodes, and why it still matters in pop culture. Even if you’ve never seen an episode, you’ll come away not only understanding why MASH holds such a special place in television history—but also wanting to go watch it (maybe starting with the surreal “Dreams”).
Chuck: “If you want to know more about MAS*H, just go start watching it.” [59:41]
Notes: