Hogan's Heroes

By Robert R. Shandley

Analyzes the unique satirical social and political commentary offered by Hogan’s Heroes during a volatile period in American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780814336007

Robert R. Shandley

Robert R. Shandley is professor of film studies and German at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Runaway Romances: Hollywood’s Postwar Tour of Europe and Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich.

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© 2011 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shandley, Robert R.

Hogan’s heroes / Robert R. Shandley.

p. cm. — (TV milestones)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3416-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Hogan’s heroes (Television program) I. Title.

PN1992.77.H56S53 2011

791.45’7—dc22

2011006747

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8143-3600-7

HOGAN’S HEROES

Robert R. Shandley

TV MILESTONES SERIES

Hogan’s Heroes

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

Ursinus College

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

Lisa Parks

University of California–Santa Barbara

For Ann, John, Tom, Betty, Cathy, and Janet

CONTENTS

COVER

COPYRIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

1. Hogan’s Heroes and the Late 1960s America

2. Removing the History from World War II

3. Hogan’s Heroes and Generational Change

Conclusion

NOTES

FILMOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Even small volumes need friends and this one has had a few. Texas A&M University has provided me with an institutional home, brilliant colleagues, and energetic students for fifteen years. The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University provided me an internal leave during which time I finished the first draft of this project and began another. The Department of European and Classical Languages and Cultures and the Film Studies Program have proven to be verdant fields of discussion and exchange.

I would like to thank the series editors, Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, for supporting the project from the start. Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press has shown great patience in shepherding this project to completion. As always, my colleague Anne Morey has provided both intellectual support and critical feedback to my ideas.

My wife, Linda Radzik, is my first and best reader. She took particular pleasure in cutting large chunks of needless verbiage from the manuscript. I am glad to have offered her a place to take out her aggressions.

I am not sure I will ever have another project that our daughter, Mary, will appreciate as much as this one. She watched all 168 episodes of Hogan’s Heroes with me, including multiple viewings of some of them. Somehow she has still become literate, talented, and intelligent, though the show certainly added to her goofiness.

My own siblings have been a far more important part of my life than they will ever realize. Whether well or poorly, they raised me. I watched my first episode of Hogan’s Heroes in their company. Because of them I got to view age-inappropriate 1960s television shows such as Laugh-In, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and Love, American Style. More importantly, they did their best to look after me, keep me out of trouble, and challenge me. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

Introduction

In the creative offices of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the network that gave us a talking horse (Mister Ed, 1961–66), a stranded extraterrestrial (My Favorite Martian, 1963), and a beautiful domesticated robot (My Living Doll, 1964), it is not hard to imagine a show pitch like the following: Hey, what if we did a comedy about a World War II German POW camp with a bunch of funny Nazis, where the prisoners are really in charge of the camp? The network, which was leading the ratings in prime-time programming at the time, must have been rather certain of its ability to turn anything into comedy. And that confidence was well justified. Hogan’s Heroes ran on CBS from September 1965 through April 1971. Set in World War II, the show presents a band of talented and irreverent prisoners of war who constantly outwit their German captors and use espionage and sabotage to thwart the Nazi war machine.

U.S. Air Force colonel Robert E. Hogan, the senior officer among the prisoners, operates a sabotage ring from the confines of Stalag 13, a camp run by toady Prussian officer Colonel Wilhelm Klink and his idiotic assistant, Sergeant Schultz. Hogan’s band of coconspirators includes a mix of British, French, and American enlisted men. A series with a relatively large recurring cast, the show’s regulars also include Klink’s superior, General Burkhalter, Major Hochstetter of the Gestapo, and a set of Wagnerian blond-wigged secretaries. In generic terms, Hogan’s Heroes is a mix of the military comedy and the spy thriller, a combination that would provide room for the series to stay ideologically relevant.

Moderately successful in its network run, remaining among the top twenty-five most highly rated programs for all six seasons, Hogan’s Heroes has enjoyed constant play in syndicated rerelease since its cancellation by CBS. As I will argue in this book, Hogan’s Heroes reveals the parameters of comedy about the absurdities of militarism and war in an age before American television embraced the conventions of comedic social realism that would define the more critically acclaimed M*A*S*H. Unlike this latter series, Hogan’s Heroes faced the challenge of satirizing war during the most uncertain period of the most controversial war in American history. The run of Hogan’s Heroes corresponds with the crucial period of America’s presence in Vietnam, from the escalation of hostilities in 1965 to the beginning of the American military withdrawal from Southeast Asia in the early 1970s. In an era in which attitudes about the military, patriotism, and authority were undergoing a sea change, Hogan’s Heroes’ response to those issues tells us much about the possibilities and limits of prime-time television to engage those changes.

Klink (Werner Klemperer), Schultz (John Banner), and Hogan (Bob Crane) in Stalag 13. (Operation Briefcase, October 7, 1966)

To succeed the show had to speak to its moment, but the drive to put television properties into syndication for as long as possible also motivated the producers to avoid cultural references that were likely to feel outdated in a few years. It is in this conflicted effort to keep the show in the moment without necessarily appearing to be topical that I will be able to locate how Hogan’s Heroes engages with its own historical context. Hogan’s Heroes’ ability to negotiate this difficult terrain during an incredibly tumultuous period in American history may well serve as its most important contribution to television history.

Negotiating the political currents of the mid- to late 1960s was difficult enough, but the setting of Hogan’s Heroes required it to negotiate the past as well. The ridiculousness of the show’s premise—namely, a cheery sitcom set in a World War II German POW camp—led to considerable critical discontent. In fact, it is hard to disagree with the show’s detractors. The laugh track is the cuing device of almost all sitcoms of the era that assures the viewer that it is all right to laugh at what might otherwise be deemed inappropriate. In Hogan’s Heroes, the real, horrific history of National Socialism and German military aggression has given way to a satire about something else, something about which it is acceptable to laugh. Perhaps the most consistent source of the series’ humor was the presumed reverence with which the war had been treated to that point. CBS publicist Stan Freberg’s suggestion for a publicity campaign for the series addresses the full range of absurdity the network faced in fitting Hogan’s Heroes into the moment: "If you liked World War II, you’ll love Hogan’s Heroes."¹ While it is unclear whether the tagline was ever used, it captures the confrontation of values that is at the heart of Hogan’s Heroes’ premise.

Method

The book is divided into three chapters. First I will place Hogan’s Heroes within its generic and television history contexts. I will then place the series within the historical, filmic, and televisual discourses surrounding World War II. Finally I will demonstrate how the series uses its generic framework to engage in the debates about the conflict in Vietnam and American militarism.

Hogan’s Heroes presents war as an unending series of small events rather than a steady progress to victory. Indeed contrary to the standard teleological history of World War II that necessarily culminates in an Allied victory, Hogan’s Heroes offers a war filled with infinite recurrence. No matter how many times Hogan and his saboteurs destroy the Nazis’ latest miracle weapon or munitions depot, subsequent missions will require them to do the same. Not unlike the helicopters that deliver the wounded in every episode of M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83), each episode of Hogan’s Heroes presents an endless war with enduring obstacles, one that looks more like Walter Cronkite’s description of the Vietnam conflict as mired in a stalemate than a certain march toward victory in the European theater of World War II.

While the book will argue for Hogan’s Heroes’ usefulness as a meter of attitudes regarding the Southeast Asian war, I would not want to overstate the case. Hogan’s Heroes’ importance lies in its function as a transition between the least-common-denominator programming of the early 1960s and the representation of much more modern lifestyles and political sensibilities that CBS introduced with shows such as All in the Family (1971–79), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), The Bob Newhart Show (1972–78), and, of course, M*A*S*H, all of which eventually ran together in the CBS Saturday night lineup. Throughout most

Reviews for Hogan's Heroes

[Jan Dumas · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Far more serious than expicted. Makes me take a more serious look at what I thought of as a very silly show. I wish the book had been longer.