trapper john passes away-RIP doc

[rocket surgeon]

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/12/31/wayne-rogers-trapper-john-on-mash-dies-at-82/?intcmp=hpbt4

spent many an hour forgetting about stuff watching these knuckleheads make me laugh

[Skitch]

Netflix has the whole series on watch instantly (except, strangely, the finale).  Every now and then when I don't have anything I'm marathoning I'll watch a few random episodes.  Holds up very well.

[MU82]

A great show before Trapper left, and still a very good show until Frank Burns split.

After that, pretty freakin' bad.

It had a heck of a run, though. Lots of people disagreed with me and kept right on watching.

[mu03eng]

I really only watch the seasons that involve Trapper and Colonel Blake.  Once McClean Stevenson left I was no longer interested.  Hated they killed Colonel Blake but it was pretty ground breaking and something later shows picked up.

FYI, too young to watch them live, caught them in syndication when I was a kid.

[keefe]

The TV show was entirely inconsequential compared with the movie. Save for Radar, every character on TV was a shallow. marginal representation of the movie personae.

Loretta Swit and whoever played Frank Burns on TV cannot begin to compete with the complexity and depth of Sally Kellerman's Hot Lips or Robert Duvall's Maj. Burns. Whereas Duvall showed Frank as a flawed everyman who used religion to mask his overwhelming insecurities the TV Burns is so brutally incompetent and inadequate as to be wholly unbelievable.

And trying to compare Alan Alda's Hawkeye with Donald Sutherland's is ludicrous. The TV Hawkeye is little more than a hollow, trivial poor man's Groucho Marx whose incessant one-liners would be tiring at best and inappropriate in the extreme. Humor is a common safety valve for men in combat but it is never articulated in the crass, outlandish stand-up silliness of Alan Alda. Alan Alda's Hawkeye is an annoying self-righteous boor spouting predictably tepid shibboleths from the 1960's despite being set in the early 1950's.

One glaring omission from the movie was in not casting Duke Forrest. Tom Skerritt was absolutely brilliant as Duke and he was the necessary social  complement to Sutherland's and Gould's New Englanders.

I have refrained from comparing Wayne Rogers' version of Trapper John with Elliot Gould's since Rogers passed away yesterday but suffice it to say that he was no Elliot Gould.         

Altman's direction and Lardner's screen play crackled with wry observations on many things without grandstanding, soap boxing, or cheapening the human dimensions of common people thrown together by cataclysmic circumstances. The TV show was little more than a 23 minute vehicle for Alan Alda's hackneyed comic routine.   

[rocket surgeon]

would it be fair to say that the show was merely a caricature of the movie?  the show however digressed from it's roots as it mirrored it's writers/producers political persuasions.  when that became more apparent, the quality left the building.  mash seemed to have 3 phases-the movie, t.v part I and tv part II.  the movie was fabulous, tv. part I was entertaining and amusing, part II was wtf

[WellsstreetWanderer]

Lived near the set in the Santa Monicas and frequently hiked out to it. I still laugh at some of the stuff in the movie. The t.v. show...Not so much. When shows get preachy I'm gone

[MU82]

Agree totally with keefe that the show wasn't nearly as good as the movie.

I nonetheless still enjoyed the show immensely its first three seasons -- warts and all -- and even continued watching it some until the season after Frank Burns left. I know Linville's Burns was a sniveling incompetent compared to Duvall's but it used to provide a laugh or two an episode for me. Once I realized that there the Winchester character couldn't replace the Burns character for laughs, I stopped watching.

CBS' Saturday night lineup in 1973 -- with MASH, All in the Family, Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett -- remains the gold standard in TV history, IMHO. Five iconic shows, each different from the other.

That's just my opinion, though, and I know others have their own.

[CTWarrior]

And trying to compare Alan Alda's Hawkeye with Donald Sutherland's is ludicrous. The TV Hawkeye is little more than a hollow, trivial poor man's Groucho Marx whose incessant one-liners would be tiring at best and inappropriate in the extreme. Humor is a common safety valve for men in combat but it is never articulated in the crass, outlandish stand-up silliness of Alan Alda. Alan Alda's Hawkeye is an annoying self-righteous boor spouting predictably tepid shibboleths from the 1960's despite being set in the early 1950's.

... The TV show was little more than a 23 minute vehicle for Alan Alda's hackneyed comic routine.

I was not a big fan of the TV show because I HATED the Hawkeye character.  I can't imagine that if there was actually a guy like that, he wouldn't get punched in the face every day.  There was a stretch of time in mass entertainment that the audience was supposed to identify with and like a character even though he was a complete a-hole just because he was talented (think every early Tom Cruise movie).

I may be wrong, but I think Wayne Rogers quite M*A*S*H because he was sick of his character being just a second banana to Hawkeye and not having much else to do.

[mu03eng]

The TV show was entirely inconsequential compared with the movie. Save for Radar, every character on TV was a shallow. marginal representation of the movie personae.

Loretta Swit and whoever played Frank Burns on TV cannot begin to compete with the complexity and depth of Sally Kellerman's Hot Lips or Robert Duvall's Maj. Burns. Whereas Duvall showed Frank as a flawed everyman who used religion to mask his overwhelming insecurities the TV Burns is so brutally incompetent and inadequate as to be wholly unbelievable.

And trying to compare Alan Alda's Hawkeye with Donald Sutherland's is ludicrous. The TV Hawkeye is little more than a hollow, trivial poor man's Groucho Marx whose incessant one-liners would be tiring at best and inappropriate in the extreme. Humor is a common safety valve for men in combat but it is never articulated in the crass, outlandish stand-up silliness of Alan Alda. Alan Alda's Hawkeye is an annoying self-righteous boor spouting predictably tepid shibboleths from the 1960's despite being set in the early 1950's.

One glaring omission from the movie was in not casting Duke Forrest. Tom Skerritt was absolutely brilliant as Duke and he was the necessary social  complement to Sutherland's and Gould's New Englanders.

I have refrained from comparing Wayne Rogers' version of Trapper John with Elliot Gould's since Rogers passed away yesterday but suffice it to say that he was no Elliot Gould.         

Altman's direction and Lardner's screen play crackled with wry observations on many things without grandstanding, soap boxing, or cheapening the human dimensions of common people thrown together by cataclysmic circumstances. The TV show was little more than a 23 minute vehicle for Alan Alda's hackneyed comic routine.

I don't disagree with any of this, but MASH the movie and MASH the tv show are two different aesthetics and two different audiences. I enjoyed the screwball, non-preachy first 4 seasons of MASH as casual entertainment that required no heavy lifting mentally. The movie was totally different obviously, but to compare the movie to the tv show is to compare a Warthog to an Apache...they're both CAS platforms but do two very different things for different reasons and one is certainly better at what it does than the other but that doesn't mean they don't both have value.

[HouWarrior]

Rogers shifted to work in finance, and became successful at it. I recall he testified before congress to retain Glass Stegall...I wish they listened to him

[GGGG]

Hold on.  Are you telling me that a 1970s network sitcom had a different vibe than a 2 hour long, ironic anti-war movie?

I'm shocked.

[mu03eng]

Hold on.  Are you telling me that a 1970s network sitcom had a different vibe than a 2 hour long, ironic anti-war movie?

I'm shocked.

[brandx]

I really only watch the seasons that involve Trapper and Colonel Blake.  Once McClean Stevenson left I was no longer interested.  Hated they killed Colonel Blake but it was pretty ground breaking and something later shows picked up.

FYI, too young to watch them live, caught them in syndication when I was a kid.

If I remember correctly, they "killed" Blake because Stevenson wanted to leave and get a TV show of his own where he was the star.

I think it was a bomb and never even lasted a full year.

[GGGG]

If I remember correctly, they "killed" Blake because Stevenson wanted to leave and get a TV show of his own where he was the star.

I think it was a bomb and never even lasted a full year.

I think he had a number of them in the 70s and 80s that didn't make it.  He always killed it on the Match Game though.

[GooooMarquette]

CBS' Saturday night lineup in 1973 -- with MASH, All in the Family, Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett -- remains the gold standard in TV history, IMHO. Five iconic shows, each different from the other.

I was never a big Carol Burnett fan, but agree that the lineup overall was amazing.  Bob Newhart and Mary Tyler Moore in particular were fantastic.

[rocket surgeon]

bob had many a people spitting up on there shoes by the end of the show-heyna?

[keefe]

If I remember correctly, they "killed" Blake because Stevenson wanted to leave and get a TV show of his own where he was the star.

I think it was a bomb and never even lasted a full year.

Stevenson was related to Adlai.

[warriorchick]

If I remember correctly, they "killed" Blake because Stevenson wanted to leave and get a TV show of his own where he was the star.

I think it was a bomb and never even lasted a full year.

Yes.  "Hello, Larry" was a joke catch phrase (mostly by Johnny Carson, IIRC) for many years after that.

[Dr. Blackheart]

If I remember correctly, they "killed" Blake because Stevenson wanted to leave and get a TV show of his own where he was the star.

I think it was a bomb and never even lasted a full year.

Yes.  "Hello, Larry" was a joke catch phrase (mostly by Johnny Carson, IIRC) for many years after that.

Was this based on the Larry Williams Story?