M*A*S*H — A nostalgic look back

A nostalgic look back at one of my favorite TV shows

Since turning 50 back in May, I have written a number of essays in which I have waxed nostalgic about my favorite albums, movies, meals, songs, and television shows. What’s been most interesting about sitting down and writing these essays are the things I have learned about myself in terms of not only what I like but also those things that have come to define me.

Like most people of my generation, I grew up with television. Let me rephrase that, television was a surrogate baby sitter for me that kept me entertained and pacified when mom and dad were not around. From my earliest memories of watching Combat! The Twilight Zone, and Gunsmoke to All in the Family, Happy Days, and M*A*S*H when I was a teenager in the 70s, television filled up the free time in my life when I wasn’t studying (which was not much) or going out (movies and underage drinking) when I was in high school.

Recently, I rediscovered one of the TV shows that I enjoyed a lot when I was in high school, in the military and right up to the show’s grand finale in 1982 – M*A*S*H. I say rediscovered because I had pretty much stopped watching the show in syndication (when I was visiting the States) after I came in Korea in 1990.

I have to confess that a lot of my knowledge of Korea, in particular the 1950-53 Korean War was gleaned and learned from that show and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Boy, was in for a big surprise when I did finally arrive in Korea and later, when I started reading up on the Korean War. Let’s just say for semantic, not to mention historical purposes, the creators of the show took certain liberties with their depiction of a MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) operating behind the “front lines” (as far as I know from all the shows I watched there was never any mention of where the front lines were located, but considering Seoul was a jeep ride away and the occasional mention of Uijongbu, it was north or slightly northeast of Seoul).

Some of those liberties included the obvious “Japanese influence” in some of the earlier episodes (in one episode some Koreans were wearing kimonos that would have been a serious affront to Koreans given the fact that they had been a colony of Japan from the early 1900s to 1945), not the least of which was using any Asian to portray a Korean (a common and unfair stereotyping routine in Hollywood—not just on M*A*S*H but in movies and other TV shows).

If you could suspend your disbelief as it were with these so-called liberties the show’s creators took (after all, it was supposed to be all for entertainment and not educating the TV viewing public on the war or Korea) it was an enjoyable show to watch. Of course, what was always interesting about M*A*S*H was that the show was based on the movie M*A*S*H—and both were an allegory about the Vietnam War still going on when the movie came out and to a lesser extent the reduced U.S. involvement in the conflict when the TV show premiered in September 1972.

In the first season, a lot of that “anti-war” feel was quite noticeable in many of the episodes. While the movie was much “darker” than the TV series in terms of its view of war and its effects on individuals, the allergorical nature of the movie and its “anti-war” feel did make it to the small screen. For example, in one episode Hawkeye is offended when another soldier continually refers to North Koreans as “gooks” –a derogatory term for Asians, specifically the Vietnamese—and tells the soldier that they shouldn’t be called that. Interestingly, the Korean word “guk” along with “saram” means person—a Korean would be “Han-guk saram” and American “Mi-guk saram.” Perhaps, that is how the word “gook” first got its unfortunate derogatory label.

All of these things aside, M*A*S*H is still quite enjoyable to watch even today and that was what I discovered when I started watching some episodes from the first season the other day. If you had seen the movie with Donald Sutherland, Eliott Gould, Robert Duvall and Sally Kellerman it might have hard at first to see other actors in the roles of Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Maj. Frank Burns and Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan—but Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, Larry Linville and Loretta Swit pulled it off. (Interestingly, the movie M*A*S*H was the first R-rated movie I saw.)

There’s no question when you watch that first few seasons that Alda was the show and it’s probably no surprise why he never had much of a career after the show ended. Of course he got a lot of help from the stellar ensemble cast—McLean Stevenson, Gary Burghoff (who reprised the role of Radar from the movie), William Christopher (as Father Mulcahy), Jamie Farr (as Klinger), Linville, Rogers, and Swit. After the departure of Stevenson as Lt. Col Henry Blake (who was killed in an airplane crash—what a terrible way to be written off a show) Rogers, and Linville, Mike Farrell, Harry Morgan, and David Ogden Stiers joined the ensemble.

There was certainly no dearth of superb writing and wonderfully crafted dialogue like in this spiel by Hawkeye when he tells Frank that he will not carry a gun: “I will not carry a gun, Frank. When I got thrown into this war I had a clear understanding with the Pentagon: no guns. I’ll carry your books, I’ll carry a torch, I’ll carry a tune, I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even hari-kari if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!”

In later seasons, the shows also became slicker and more dramatic (like the episode “Life Time” that was first broadcast in 1979 that takes place in real time as the surgeons perform an operation that must be done within 22 minutes as a clock in the corner of the screen counts down the time) and pushed the envelope for what “good” television could be like. Likewise, many of the episodes became more emotionally rounded. It was no wonder then that the show’s grand finale has remained one of the most watched episodes in U.S. television history

Up until two weeks ago when I started watching some of those episodes from the first season it had been almost 20 years since I last watched M*A*S*H and when I heard that famous opening theme music my Johnny Mandel I have to admit that I felt some goose bumps and got a little nostalgic for the 70s. At the same time it felt weird to be finally watching the show here in Korea about the Korean War after having been here for all these years. Weirdness aside, it’s nice to wax a little nostalgic these days and enjoy a TV show again that had brought me immense viewing pleasure in the past.