M*A*S*HCast – Season 5, Episode 22: Souvenirs
Special Guest Star: Chuck Coletta
Air Date: March 1, 1977
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Michael Bell was also the voice of Duke on G.I. Joe, so when you hear “Yo Joe!” in your head, that’s him!
He was at a GI Joe convention I was considering going to earlier this year, but I found out about it two days beforehand.
Thanks for inviting me back to Korea, Rob! It’s certainly a pleasure to talk television with someone so knowledgeable and full of enthusiasm for the topic. So, far I’ve been lucky enough to be a guest on 3 F&W podcasts: MASHcast, Film & Water, and TreasuryCast. I even almost made it over to the Citizen Kane Movie Minute. One of my goals is to make it to the coveted Five-Show Club!
I do hope that you consider taking an episode to look at the various MASH-related TV Guide covers. It would be really interesting to hear comments from an artist’s perspective.
Finally, here’s one more plug for the Browne Popular Culture Library on the BGSU campus in Ohio. For more than 50 years, the BPCL has been a hub of the academic study of “everyday life.” It’s a non-circulating archive but students and guests are welcome to come explore the many treasures (including 60,000 comics & graphic novels) found on the shelves. I hope some folks will consider joining us for our “Spider-Man in Popular Culture” Conference in September 2023. It would be great if we could have a panel based around podcasters.
Thanks again for the many hours of “infotainment” the entire Fire & Water crew has become indispensable to my daily podcast habit!
https://twitter.com/DrPopCultureBG
If I’m not very much mistaken the last person to make reference to Margaret’s “nickname” is Radar in “Goodbye Radar”.
Very much enjoyed the discussion. Glad to see someone else appreciates Frank Burns and wishes they had made some attempt to reform him.
I was once reading an article about bad spin-offs and AfterMASH was mentioned. The author said that for the second season they should have begged Linville to join the cast and make Frank the boss. Don’t know how that would have worked but it is fun to imagine.
Potter’s Irish comment would go viral in a bad way today but like his Italian sissy comment, it’s a different era.
Everyone seemed to hate the 8063rd. Maybe one of the unseen episodes explored this issue and what the problem was.
I also have a collection. I collect commemorative Coke bottles. I probably have over a hundred. I only pay about $5-$10 when I see one I like at a flea market. A lot are sports related so I can think back to watching the event. Others celebrate some community festival. Nothing fancy or exciting, but I enjoy them and nobody gets killed.
Since your guest is from Ohio and has posted in this thread I’ll mention my other hobby. I travel around visiting the graves of US presidents and Vice Presidents. Right now I’m up to 21 (of 39) president graves and seven VPs who weren’t also president.
Anyway, in 2021 we visited Ohio. They are proud of their presidents and have some very impressive tombs. Garfield and McKinley are particularly amazing.
I can see someone wanting the bullet that they had been shot with.
Looking forward to your 50th anniversary special. Thanks for doing this podcast. I really enjoy a well done review of a classic show. I don’t always agree with what was said but I do enjoy the perspective of you and your guests.
Yes, I am very familiar with Lakeview Cemetery. My parents and a number of relatives are there. It’s also the final resting place of Alan Freed, John D. Rockefeller, & Eliot Ness. For comics fans, Lakeview was also the site where several sequences in Captain America: Winter Soldier were filmed – including the scene at Nick Fury’s gravesite.
Comic book writer Harvey Pekar is also there. His grave is marked with pens left behind by his fans. I’m not a comic book guy, but I thought it was kind of cool.
Ness’ grave has beer bottles left behind. I got a picture of myself touching his grave. Although I think he isn’t actually there as his ashes were scattered in the area.
Rockefeller’s grave is surprisingly modest given his wealth.
There’s a small Harvey Pekar statue in one of our local Cleveland libraries.
I’m totally with you on Frank. Larry Linville deserved better. He had the talent to play a more fully developed character, as we saw the few times he was given a serious moment, like in Margaret’s Engagement and Margaret’s Wedding. And the show would have been better served by that in my opinion.
Great episode. One thing however. Rob you mentioned that when the soldier tells BJ that he wanted the bullet as a souvenir, you said that he basically just agrees and didn’t really understand him. I took it however that for all BJ and Hawkeye’s preachiness, that moment was the moment that BJ finally understands why he wanted to take it home. It WAS lucky as it DIDNT kill him. I think BJ realizes that, and for the first time accepted that as a legit reason to keep the souvenir. The same way I guess Hawkeye reluctantly accepts in the next scene the Korean mum saying her son will go back to scavenging as it provided for their family. I have to say though, that the Chopper pilot doesn’t read the room very well at all lol. I mean, after getting lectured and threatened by the doctors, he was still trying to peddle them something in the officers club later on. Best scene is Margaret and Potter. The look of astonishment on her face when he started having a go at her for knocking out an officer is priceless.
This isn’t one of my favorites, but I LOVE the end where BJ tells Stratton that they are out to improve their little corner of the world. I think that sentiment is marvelous.
And BJ’s comment about Frank’s letter to his wife makes me laugh every time. “What a sexy note!”
One more thing I perhaps should have mentioned in light of Frank Burns: I sometimes think the problems writers had with Frank’s character were echoed in later seasons in Hawkeye. I think Alda & the writers ultimately stripped Hawkeye of any flaws that he becomes more a paragon of virtue than an actual human. Back in the 1970s, someone wrote a book on morality & virtues using Edith Bunker as the lens for religious beliefs. I fear Hawkeye is somewhat too “saintly” in later seasons.
So a very small thing from the coverage of this episode, when Father Mulcahy hears Klinger from above on the pole and seems scared or nervous. The humorous connotation being that the Padre thought for a moment he was hearing God’s voice, and you wondered “Shouldn’t Father Mulcahy be happier to hear God?” Well, I can tell you, the bible is full of moments when God speaks to people, and it’s never a good thing! It’s always “I want you to do this really hard thing” or “I’m going to punish people and you can’t stop me”. To convert it for this audience, it’s like when the Watcher or Phantom Stranger shows up. You know stuff’s about to go really badly.
Delightful show, sir!
Well prophets aren’t exactly treated well in the Bible
As far as how one looks at isouvenirs from a war My wife has two things from her grandfather that could be war souvenirs. First his WWII Danish resistance armband. The armband was used to represent a military uniform so that the Danish resistance people could say that they were fighting under a banner and thus protected by the Geneva convention.
The second one is interesting as a souvenir. It is a Japanese officer’s dagger that had been given to a German military personnel that my wife’s grandfather took off of him during the occupation.
I laughed when you mentioned the grenade pins. I have several that I’ve kept from my time in Iraq.
I can’t help but think that they missed an opportunity for a nice “Physician, heal thyself” moment, by having it so that Hawkeye had been buying souvenirs, mostly to give as tokens of affection to the nurses, but he had never thought about it and realized that kids were risking their lives to gather the scrap up. It would have made Hawkeye a little less saintly, but also further explained his newfound opposition to Bell, as he wanted to redeem himself for having contributed to the problem.
And I think it’s criminal that Twentieth Century Fox or CBS didn’t develop a post-M*A*S*H* series for Larry Linville. LOU GRANT debuted in the fall of ’77, after Larry left the 4077…imagine if he had been cast as Charlie Hume, instead of actor Mason Adams. It would have been a complete departure from Frank Burns, and I think Linville could have carried it off marvelously.
Souvenirs- it was the MASH pole sitting record, not the world record. There was a small platform on top of the pole. The other MASH pole sitter probably used a similar basketball hoop backboard.