Season 7, Episode 4: Our Finest Hour
Special Guest Stars: Captain Entropy and Major Joe Price
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This episode is always jarring to me, because it jerks us back and forth between the serious cinema verite of the interview segments and the slapstick of the earlier episodes. Worse still, the kept the laugh tracks in the flashbacks. I’d have much preferred if they kept this as a direct sequel to the earlier “Interview” episode, in newsreel style only, and then perhaps did a flashback episode at another time, maybe framed with the conceit of Radar trying to write a story about the 4077th, and recollecting those past moments…only to pull the paper out of the typewriter after remembering Henry’s death and throwing it away.
I do think in retrospect that as this episode focused so much on the past, it would have been fun if they had used the first season opening and closing theme music, just for nostalgia’s sake.
As for newsreels themselves, you’re largely right, Rob…by the Fifties many of the studios were no longer doing them, because of television. However, Fox continued with Movietone until 1963, and Universal actually kept theirs going until 1967.
Ah clip shows. Just as an aside to this discussion, what was with all of the bumping sounds?
I think “The Big Bang Theory” did at least one clip show (maybe two) in the traditional sense.
The oddest clip show I ever saw was on “WKRP in Cincinnati” . They did a clip show on episode 9 of season 1. According to IMDB they did this to reintroduce the characters after the series had been taken off the air for a couple of months.
Movietone was produced until 1963.
A question for someone in the business. I know that clip shows are usually easy pay for the cast because the incidentals that are filmed to connect the clips would take much less time than a regular episode. Since this was a double episode did the cast get paid for two episodes? If this is true this episode may have been a concession to the actors and / or agents.
Clip shows are sooo funny to me as an experience. It’s always like ‘oh sweet, this show I like is on’ and then the deflating disappointment of ‘oh it’s just a clip show episode’ which then eventually turns into ‘oh im actually enjoying this because im watching good clips from a show i like’ ?? They trick me into it every time!! And the framing device in Our Finest Hour is full of enough good extra stuff to make it worth it, I think. I never thought about how slightly strange it is when shows and movies use real journalists to report on their fictional events and characters, that was an interesting point! Maybe it didn’t occur to me when I watched MASH because I didn’t realise Clete Roberts was a real guy and not just a very snazzily named journo character. Also loved the point about BJ’s response of ‘made me very, very angry’ being so direct and surprising given BJ’s whole deal. LOVE when we get a peek into the inner world of a guy who spends a lot of time determined not to show any of it. Yaaaaay!!
Always strange to see this one with it’s look back to prior casts and more the more madcap days.
Great episode of MASHCast though. I love hearing from true military folks about their response to the show. Thanks to your guests for their service and their input here.
Thank you for your service, Dr. Anj!
This one would be on the lower end of my rankings. As you brought up, I don’t think a sequel to The Interview is the best idea, and likewise, it’s not the best choice to choose for a clip show. I do agree that there’s some good aspects, like getting to see Margaret get an interview, as well as Charles. And Radar’s “One very bad day” line, followed by the clip of Henry’s death was the best use of a clip, since it showed how much it still affects him. It’s also interesting to see the character who’ve left in the same episode as those who replaced them. But otherwise, it’s a very unremarkable episode to me.
Thank you gents for the episode. I actually really like clip shows, and this is no exception. Is to be noted, this is the episode that got Jeff Maxwell back on MASH after someone high up watched this episode and enjoyed his scenes and brought him back.
I thought using the interviews as a way to introduce flashbacks was great. Much better than the gang sitting around and someone say “Remember when…” and then the screen gets wavy.
I didn’t have a problem with a real newsman in the episode. Yes, the characters aren’t real but it is about a real war and many stories are based on real events.
Not a big fan of clip shows in general but this is pretty good.
Three’s Company did a clip show that was hosted by Lucille Ball. Sounds crazy, but she was a fan of the show and John Ritter’s physical comedy.
The Cheers 200th episode jumps to mind as a great clip show, since it was done as an interview of the actors rather than with a framing story. It’s so great.
I also recall Family Ties doing a fair number of clip shows, to the point that when Justine Bateman hosted Saturday Night Live, they did a skit about clip shows, which turned into nested clips within clips, all starting with “Alex” sitting on the kitchen counter next to the phone and answering a call. It was a hoot!
Maybe this was mentioned, but in the days before YouTube, clip shows were a great way to revisit “greatest hits” of shows. Now content creators make their own clip show videos as “lists” or “bests” or “worsts”, so the shows don’t need to make them any more. I understand the business reasons for making clip shows in the day, but perhaps it’s more a situation where there’s actually more clip shows available, rather than them going out of style. Either way, the TV shows have no need to produce any themselves.
So this is a great artifact of that time, and it’s a really great one IMHO.
I’ve finally had a chance to listen to this! Stupid first week of work after vacation draining all life, joy and energy out of me.
Really enjoyed this discussion about an episode I’m not a huge fan of…. The interview parts are great, I like those looks into the characters inner life. Like BJs anger, Margaret thinking of the people in camp as family, all these things they don’t really talk about with each other.
But the clip show format doesn’t work for me and I wish they would have stuck to just making a The Interview-sequel, I don’t really need to see examples of what the character just said. Radar talking about a very bad day would have been even more powerful without the clip from Henry’s departure. We all know what he is referring to, and we all can recall the sadness of that moment without seeing it again.
I am personally not a fan of the early seasons of MASH, and don’t have any interest in revisiting the earlier episodes, the change of tone is just so noticeable and it truly feels like we’ve slipped into another universe.
I am very happy we get to see Loretta Swit, though. I’m still a bit upset they couldn’t find a way to fit her into The Interview. I know she was away doing a play, and I know things were probably more difficult to arrange back then, but I wish they could have sent a small team to Broadway, turned a corner of her dressing room into a tent, put her in her uniform and filmed an interview with her.
I also think it’s a shame that they chose clips of Margaret focusing on her being romantic with Frank, and of her and Hawkeye interacting (and kissing in the Comrades in Arms-clip). Couldn’t they have chosen clips from Aid Station and Sticky Wicket, for example, where we get to see her as a dedicated nurse, not just her in relation to the men on the show.
I watched this episode with my mom a while back, and when Hawkeye says “Did I mention she’s really something” when he’s talking about Margaret, my mom went “ooohooohoooh”, like she was a thirteen year old girl. She is, in fact, a woman in her 80s, so that reaction was very sweet. She loooves Hawkeye and Margaret, and is very disappointed they never became a couple on the show. She is also a bit sad that Loretta Swit and Alan Alda aren’t a couple in real life, actually, so If I ever happen to meet one of them, I will have to tell them that they have broken my poor mother’s heart 😉 🙂
These were great guests, thank you for sharing your experiences of life in the military with us.
I hadn’t watched this episode in a long time, and, for a clip show, I thought it was pretty good. They properly picked scenes from most of the most classic episodes up to that point, especially Abyssinia Henry, deservedly so. Like you said, clip shows were definitely a thing in this era. I remember Happy Days doing it a lot. You mentioned how Friends was the last major sitcom to do clip shows in a non-ironic way. Indeed, in watching Friends on DVD many years ago I noticed that they did a clip show pretty much every season, which was pretty annoying. Kudos to M*A*S*H and Cheers for each doing it only one time in their entire 11-season runs.
The audio on this episode was terrible.
Love the podcast and this episode but wanted you know that there a lot of background noise and one of the guests audio was much quieter than the rest.
Another great episode.
Thank you all for your kind words about the episode. I think I speak for Major Joe also in this: I’m happy that our experiences in the military, as far away as they are from a MASH unit in Korea, add some value to the show for so many of you. We love having these conversations about the show with Rob, and we’re grateful when others share that experience.
I had read somewhere (which I now can’t recall) that the Columbia House VHS tape had the original uncut hour long episode. I tracked one down and it indeed is presented as a one hour episode. I remember reading tho that some of the flashbacks are also different or edited differently to accommodate the new screen time of two individual episodes. I admit this is one a sometimes skip (I think because I just remember it as a clip show and forget it has new interviews). I haven’t ever sat down to do a side by side comparison but I would like to one day and compare any differences.
I don’t know this for sure, but my uneducated guess for the existence or the timing of the clip show is that CBS had started running daily M*A*S*H reruns in their afternoon lineup, and they expected a new audience would be tuning into the first-run shows… and this was a way to get those viewers filled in on “the story so far.”
Always good to hear those who have served in a military capacity share their insights into the workings of the 4077 – Thanks, Captain & Major. (Or should that be Major & Captain – should it be ordered by rank?!)
Interesting discussion about how clip shows act as a safety back-up for parts of previous shows that have been damaged, lost or wiped. This is especially true for my own “Greatest TV show of all time” nominee, Doctor Who. Since it started on the BBC back in 1963, there’s still 90 or so Doctor Who episodes which are missing, and TV archives around the globe have been raided to get some of them back – sometimes in their entirety, sometimes just snippets gleaned from inclusion in a clip show, or where the censors office in some distant land has trimmed a few seconds of material out for reasons of propriety. The only reason we have any visuals for the First Doctor’s regeneration scene was that the clip was shown on a children’s programme called “Blue Peter”. The original was wiped, but the clip survived!
Long live the clip show – if only for its archival credentials!