LIFE M*A*S*H

By Meredith Corporation

There was a book, a movie, and then of course the landmark television series that made M.A.S.H. a cultural force like few others with 11 seasons and 256 episodes. Set during the Korean War, it channeled the anxiety of the Vietnam era at home and explored the absurdism of war viewed through the staff of the mobile hospital. Now, at the 50th anniversary of M.A.S.H.'s cinematic debut, this special edition of LIFE revisits Hawkeye, Trapper, Radar, Hot Lips, Klinger and the rest of the extraordinary ensemble cast through photos and a lively laugh-out-loud narrative. You'll go behind the scenes and explore the most memorable moments and episodes, including the two-hour series finale, seen by over 106 million people, remaining the most-watched series finale of all time. PLUS: The making of the iconic theme song, and the show's enduring legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781547854929

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FOREWORD

FIRST DO NO HARM

M*A*S*H channeled the anxiety of the Vietnam era and boldly explored the absurdism of war through the hijinks of medics whose mission ran counter to combat.

By Steve Rushin

"WE ATE A LOT OF PIZZA TOGETHER. We played chess with beer cans. We filled rubber gloves with water and threw them at each other," said Alan Alda, center, of his downtime moments with the M*A*S*H ensemble, clockwise from left: Gary Burghoff, McLean Stevenson, Alda, Wayne Rogers, Larry Linville, and Loretta Swit.

EACH EPISODE BEGINS with the sound of an acoustic guitar, a B-minor chord strummed even before the first image appears. The subsequent theme song—and those opening images—have been in our heads for nearly half a century now: the back of Radar O’Reilly’s cap as he gazes up at the helicopters soaring in across the foothills; the names of principal cast members yellow-stenciled over the red-crossed rooftops of a tent city strung with loudspeakers; and finally, the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, whose acronym has been familiar for precisely 50 years, since the 1970 release of the film M*A*S*H, which two years later spawned the TV adaptation of the same name. The series endured for 11 seasons and concluded with the most-viewed episodic television event in history.

The theme song’s indelible melody was composed by Johnny Mandel, who wrote The Shadow of Your Smile, a song recorded by Frank Sinatra. But this tune, Suicide Is Painless, is his best-known work. He originally wrote it for the movie, which was drawn from a 1968 novel set during the Korean War, though it soon came to represent the Vietnam conflict, too, and the madness of war more broadly.

Thanks to the ongoing syndication of the television series, M*A*S*H has come to be viewed through a universal scrim of mosquito netting, a khaki-colored landscape of every war, with the olive drab wardrobe inevitably giving way to the olive-infused martinis. Everything is painted green, observes Benjamin Franklin Hawkeye Pierce, the hospital’s chief surgeon, played in the series by Alan Alda. The clothes are green, the food is green—except the vegetables, of course. The only thing that’s not green is the blood.

The helicopters, of course, were Army green, and the whap-whap of their rotors echoed the rhythmic rat-a-tat of the rapid-fire dialogue, which owed a debt to Groucho Marx, a hero of Larry Gelbart’s, the show’s cocreator and most renowned writer. Gelbart was the bard of Incheon. He made Hawkeye the king of the snappy comeback.

Is that an incoming mortar? The mortar merrier, Hawkeye says. Should they toast fellow surgeon Frank Burns? He won’t fit in the toaster, Hawkeye exclaims. In the television iteration of M*A*S*H, Hawkeye channels a peacenik Groucho when he says: 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 Virginny,’ I’ll even hari-kari if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun.

There was other Marxist dialogue as well—Karl Marx, in this instance, not Groucho—for M*A*S*H was often tackling big ideas, though the lofty elements were almost always leavened by low comedy. As Corporal Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), in his never-ending bid to be discharged, tells his commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), Sir, I have to confess: I’m a communist—an atheistic, Marxist, card-carrying, uh . . .

Bolshevik, Blake barks.

No—honest, a defensive Klinger responds.

The umbrage Hawkeye took, combined with the comedy he used as a coping mechanism, conspired to make M*A*S*H a chronicle of war not unlike The Iliad, every bit as epic in scope and timeless in theme. M*A*S*H was set in the 1950s, conceived in the 1960s, debuted in cinemas and on TV in the 1970s, and concluded, before an audience of more than 100 million people, in the 1980s. In the decades since, it has run in syndication without pause, making M*A*S*H—including the best-selling book in 1968 and the Oscar-winning movie in 1970—an indelible fixture in American popular culture. Now that it’s off, it’s on more than ever, Gelbart quipped in his introduction to the The Complete Book of M*A*S*H, published a year after the show ended.

Before M*A*S*H, television comedies set in the military had been laugh-tracked diversions from war, not reflections on its true nature: McHale’s Navy; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; and The Phil Silvers Show (popularly known as Sgt. Bilko) were comforting. Television’s longest-running reflection on World War II was Hogan’s Heroes, set in a grim German prisoner of war camp yet played for guffaws.

The 251 episodes of M*A*S*H spanned 11 seasons, which was eight years longer than the Korean War. When it concluded its initial run, an English professor at Clemson University calculated that the 94.9 hours of episodes—excluding credits and commercials—were nearly the same length of time required to watch the complete works of Shakespeare. One could quibble with the exact math, but one thing is certain: The appeal of M*A*S*H was its Shakespearean melding of drama and humor, high and low, heavy and light. The series embraced timeless themes of love, death, joy, tragedy, war, sex, and booze. Or as Hawkeye once put it: Our motto is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy hour.