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It’s the last GLoP of the summer, but we’re not relaxing. The GLoP-sters (one of whom is working injured with a summer cold), cover which sections of the newspapers actually make money, a review of the current Broadway production of Oklahoma!, some Rank Punditry® on the Democratic race, John can’t hear us (a feature, not a bug?) and Dave Chapelle conquers the politics of comedy.
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Where was “Oklahoma” filmed? In the grass lands of Southern Arizona, as most of Oklahoma had already been cultivated!
It was also filmed TWICE. When Rodgers & Hammerstein began producing their own movies in the early 1950’s not all theaters were equipped to carry it in the new Todd-AO 70mm format which ran at 30 fps. So they also shot it in the 24 fps Cinemascope anamorphic 35mm. They are two totally different movies.
They also did this with Carousel and Frank Sinatra, who was signed for the part of Billy Bigelow, bailed on the project because of it.
EJHill
It was also filmed TWICE. When Rodgers & Hammerstein began producing their own movies in the early 1950’s not all theaters were equipped to carry it in the new Todd-AO 70mm format which ran at 30 fps. So they also shot it in the 24 fps Cinemascope anamorphic 35mm. They are two totally different movies.
They also did this with Carousel and Frank Sinatra, who was signed for the part of Billy Bigelow, bailed on the project because of it.
Hating rehearsals, “The Chairman of the Board” was known as “One-Take Charlie” (he hated both nicknames.)
Yellow Springs, Ohio — home to Antioch College, which makes Oberlin look like Oral Roberts.
How can you discuss the cast of McHale’s Navy and leave out the great Gavin MacLeod? Before he was Murray Slaughter or Capt. Stubing, he was “Happy”.
19:40 possibly the best segway ever.
Segway:
Segue
https://www.merriam-webster.com › dictionary › segue
segued; segueing. Definition of segue (Entry 2 of 3) intransitive verb. 1 : to proceed without pause from one musical number or theme to another. 2 : to make a transition without interruption from one activity, topic, scene, or part to another segued smoothly into the next story.
At ~7:45 John confuses Maurice Sendak with Jules Feiffer and a book with a short film. The drafted little boy was Munro in a movie with the same name. Maybe somebody will straighten him out later, but I’m going to bed now, wonderfully reassured that someone else has a long, oddly-furnished, but occasionally defective memory. John, it just gets worse, youngster.
Great, now I feel like one of those memento mori, Death and the Maiden, Et in Arcadia Ego kill-joys. Kinda liking it.
Here’s the actual film. Gene Deitch directed it in Prague, where he moved after he was fired from Terrytoons in New York, where Feiffer had been one of his story men before he became better known for his Village Voice comic panels. They also got another ex-New Yorker, Howard Morris, to do the voices (though unlike Deitch, Morris moved out to California instead of behind the Iron Curtain):
Rob thinks the scolds on the Left would bust out laughing involuntarily were they ever exposed to unPC comedy.
But they wouldn’t. The religious values of the “woke” Left (for “woke”-ness is definitely a religion) would never allow them to laugh along with anything that runs counter to PC orthodoxy.
It’s like expecting a prissy ladies’ church group circa 1975 to bust out laughing at George Carlin or Richard Pryor. Never happen. They would just sit there in their seats with arms folded, scowling at the stage.
And Jonah is 100% correct when he says that the “woke” values of an entire generation amount to a massive cultural tsunami that is heading our way. It dwarfs anything going on in politics right now, and the wave should be breaking in the next 10-12 years.
But most Conservatives simply can’t bring themselves to believe this. Or else they just don’t pay enough attention to the culture to care very much. (“Meh.”)
They’re wrong, though. Because culture trumps everything. And it’s time to head for higher ground.
Gun control? She gave it a shot?
Interesting phrasing.
If it’s Woke-lahoma, wouldn’t it have to be vegetarian or vegan chili and corn bread?
And I think a more interesting thing about Hogan’s Heroes is that their D-Day episode was early in season 3. The war only lasted one more year after D-Day. The show went on 4 more years after that episode.
MASH ran 11 seasons, about a war that lasted 3 years, not all of that with US presence. And it seems like they had more than 3 Christmas episodes during the course of the show, etc. Certainly the actors aged more than 3 years. Leaving aside that most of the characters shown wouldn’t have been there for “the duration” in any event.
@blueyeti thanks for not cutting out the funny technical stuff!
McHale’s Navy was not anti-war at all. It should be compared with Sgt. Bilko.
Basically those programs catered to men who served in World War II in the enlisted ranks. It was a way to make mostly light hearted fun of officers with the enlisted men out smarting them.
In McHale’s the only officer who had his act together was McHale himself, and he acted like Sgt Bilko really. And as an aside Ernest Borgnine was an enlisted man in the Navy for 10 years before the war started and rose to the rate (enlisted rank) of 1st Class Petty Officer. He was later made an honorary Chief Petty Officer of some national CPO association. He had that in his bones.
M*A*S*H was all around anti-military, and almost ignored the officer vs enlisted dynamic. There’s no comparison.
Really the worst part about MASH was the continual in-your-face assertion that if just the Americans (and other UN forces) had left, there would be peace, harmony, unicorns, etc. Because China really only attacked because Korea and the other allies were defending Korea. Hollyweird – and especially Alan Alda and the writers – apparently believed that if you just stop trying to keep robbers from robbing the bank, they won’t rob the bank. Or something. Total BS.
The first three seasons of MASH with Henry Blake and Trapper John were ok.
Once Frank Burns left the show became unwatchable.
But the real jump-the-shark moment came when they stopped calling Loretta Swit “Hot Lips” and started calling her “Margaret”.
On Cheers and Viet Nam: The very first Cold Open for Cheers on the pilot episode was a Viet Nam joke. Obviously underage kid trying to use a fake ID at the bar, Sam says “This ID says you’re 28. That means you were old enough to be in Nam. What was it like over there?” Kid shakes his head and says “Gross”. Sam: “Yeah, that’s what they say – War is Gross”. Sam tosses the kid out of the bar. As he’s leaving, kid stops at the door and says “And this is the thanks we get”.
Edit: That’s all from memory. Probably 10-15 years since I’ve seen that episode. But I’ll be I’m 95% accurate on the dialogue.
That was awesome.
I’m not a fan of the long involved Lileksian fade-in segue. I prefer the SSEU segue method of just yelling ‘Transition” and switching topics.
But the non-sequiter “and that’s why we like Lending Club” transition has a lot to recommend.
Both McHale and Bilko shared the same producer, Edward Montagne, so the similarities aren’t a shock, though some of Bilko’s more huckster traits were given to Carl Ballentine’s Lester Gruber. (Fun Trivia Fact! — The guy who wrote the McHale’s Navy pilot, Gene L. Coon, went on to create the Klingons as writer and producer on Star Trek five years later).
Season 1 of the show and Season 1 of M*A*S*H are closer in tone than a lot of people would want to admit; McHale’s stories got more slapstick after that, with the focus shifting to the Tim Conway-Joe Flynn gags. There’s even one episode of McHale’s Navy from that opening season (featuring Mike Farrell at the start) that M*A*S*H ripped off for it’s “Five O’Clock Charlie” episode, where the difference was the more anti-military tone (M*A*S*H just kept getting more serious, so that by the final three seasons the comedy bits were a perfunctory annoyance the crew had to work their way through to focus on the ‘war is evil’ dramatic parts they really wanted to do by the early 1980s).
Larry Gelbart was talented, and the joke writing on M*A*S*H was actually very good for the first couple years when it was still a bona fide comedy show and not a friggin’ sermon.
So the first 2 (and arguably 3) seasons of the show were pretty funny. But the next 9 were sanctimonious. And generally insufferable.
In Seasons 4-7, they still realized they were a comedy show with occassional trips into drama, so I can live with that. The real trip downhill came in Season 8, and Seasons 9-11 M*A*S*H thought it was a drama, where the comedy consisted of everyone yelling their lines and telegraphing the meager jokes (there was one final season episode, where Hawkeye and B.J. are seeking to get a copy of the film “The Moon is Blue” that was amazing for Season 11, because it was an all-comedy episode. The comedy was far lamer than a decade earlier, but it was just a shock by 1983 to see an episode without a dramatic plot at the forefront).
Yeah, every decision they made after the departure of Wayne Rogers seemed designed to push the show away from comedy and into the realm of treacle and sanctimony.
Hiring Mike Farrell, for one thing. A talented enough actor but one who never came within a stone’s throw of funny. Hell, he never came within a moon shot of funny. Ditto Harry Morgan. Ditto the guy who played Winchester. What’s more, their characters weren’t even supposed to be funny. And maybe that was more the result of Alan Alda’s ego (“I’m the funny guy here!!”) than anything else, who knows.
And then, of course, there was the “rehabilitation” of Hot Lips Hoolihan.
Criminey.
So it was just one wrong-footed, non-comedic decision after another after another. And this went on for years. And that couldn’t have been just a coincidence.
But, incredibly, this manifestly unfunny screed of a TV show remained a fixture of the Nielsen top 10 until the end of its run.
Something I still can’t account for.
filmklassik
Ditto the guy who played Winchester.
That actor, of course, was David Ogen Stiers. Larry Linville was very funny playing the incompetent, hypocritical idiot. I remember when the character of Winchester was brought on, there was talk of giving Hawkeye a more formidable opponent. That makes some sense, but the problem is Winchester wasn’t really an opponent. Sure, he was a stuffed shirt, but we soon learn he is really a good guy inside, and more often than not he ended up siding with Hawkeye and BJ to help patients and fight the bureaucracy.
This was a great problem with the show as the years went on. Everyone turned out to be nice. Adulterers Trapper and Henry were replaced by faithful married men, Hunnicut and Potter (except for that one special episode where BJ slipped and felt awful about it.) Hawkeye went from a lecher to a feminist. Hot Lips, as stated earlier, became Margaret. Father Mulcahy went from being a boob to a wise man.
Everyone’s sharp edges over the years were softened, making things less funny. (Except for the great Col. Flagg of the CIA, who was not used enough.)
I think this was part of the anti-war strategy. As Alda gained more control, there was a desire to show that everyone is basically good inside, so there is no reason for war. Why can’t we all just get along? The problem is this isn’t’ true, and without truth, there is no comedy.
That’s pretty much true of any show that runs that many seasons though. All the characters become “Nice”. Look at Detective Sipowicz on NYPD Blue.
Name a character on a show that lasted more than five season that didn’t turn nice.
Did Tony Soprano become nice?
Flagg made it all the way to a late Season 7 episode, which was funny. But his cartoon-y character by then was simply played as a toy for Winchester, because he was a far more serious character than Frank Burns. But in the direction the show was going, Frank’s departure fit in — once they had Hot Lips get engaged and start becoming Margaret in Season 5, there was no longer an ally for Burns, ad in many of the Season 5 shows, he’s alone and a pretty pathetic figure.
Yeah, I’ve seen this pointed out elsewhere and it’s a great insight: Where series regulars are concerned, rare is the ***hole who isn’t softened eventually, and, at a certain point, redeemed.
Mostly this is a function of actors who don’t want to keep playing The Jerk every week applying pressure on the producers.
Stupid.
I was a kid when it ran, but the veil of ignorance fell from my eyes the episode when the Chinese American super commando was injured once again on a dangerous volunteer mission.
Turns out Sydney (?) the psychiatrist discerns that it is his first time facing an Asian enemy, and the commando feels he could only be a good American by killing the enemy, and only be a good Chinese by dying rather than kill people who could be relatives. So he volunteers and hopes for both to be true.
To which Hawkeye says, “It’s like me declaring war on Crabapple cove!” and cue the sad music.
Really Alda? No sense that maybe people of European descent had to go Europe and fight two World Wars? Yeesh!
They mentioned Klink was played by a Jew. All the major Germans on Hogan’s Heroes were played by Jews. John Banner was an Austrian Jew who was lucky enough to be in Switzerland with an acting troupe during the Anschluß. Gestapo Major Wolfgang Hochstetter was played by Howard Caine whose birth name was Howard Cohen. (General Albert Hans “Hansi” Burkhalter) Leon Askin’s birth name was Leon Aschkenasy. If that ain’t an Ashkenazim name, nothing is. It was arguably the best part of that show was being clued in that the Germans were played by Jews.
Ironically, the guy who wrote that episode, Burt Prelutsky, is now a hard-core conservative.