A couple of folks have written to me to say that they recall watching the "Abyssinia, Henry" episode of M*A*S*H when it first aired and that they recall the scene where Radar announces Henry's death as being in the tag, not before the last commercial. They're wondering if the show was edited for reruns.
That would make a certain amount of sense. When the show went into syndication, stations had to cut out a few minutes from each episode and much of the time, they'd omit the tag as part of that editing. You wouldn't want that scene to get cut from that episode so I can imagine the syndication version being edited, trimming other things out so they would move it to before the last commercial and creating a new, cuttable tag.
But I don't remember it that way. In fact, I remember that montage tag. I even remember thinking it trivialized the closing scene a bit. Maybe I'm merging the memory of the first viewing with a later viewing.
We're all thinking about the shooting of five police officers in Dallas, trying to figure out what it means or what it should mean or just what's the correct response to it beyond saying murder is a bad thing. Today, I read a number of articles and heard a number of thoughts and two of them really work for me.
One of them is a column by William Saletan. He says there's a war out there but it's not a war of whites versus blacks. It's a war between people who want a race war and those who don't. The minute I read his piece, I thought to myself: Yeah, that's right.
The other speaker of truth (to me) today was a Lyft driver I had this morning. He was a big black guy. If you were a casting director and the producer said, "Find me a big black guy who looks menacing and ghetto and if you saw him walking towards you late at night, even the most liberal person would be a bit worried," you'd try to find a guy who looked like this fellow.
But he was a very nice, affable guy and his car radio was reporting details from Dallas so we got talking about it. He said, "This makes everything worse. Whether you're black, white, whatever, this makes things worse for everybody."
The minute he said that, I thought to myself: Yeah, that's right.
Hey, do you remember the episode of M*A*S*H where they killed off Henry Blake? I'll bet you do but in case you need a refresher, here it is…
I remember watching that episode when it first aired and being jolted by the power of that ending, even though somehow — I forget how — I'd found out in advance what was going to happen. It seemed so perfect for the series and for the character that no one accused the producers of doing it as a "stunt." It also seems to have inspired a lot of stunts on other shows.
M*A*S*H was a great show after McLean Stevenson left it but I always felt something was missing. The thing about that series that I thought made it work is that it was not about war. It was about the effect of war on human beings…in particular, these people doing this horrible job, patching together kids who'd been injured (sometimes, permanently) in a war. How did they cope with doing something that in a saner world, no one would have to do?
No one should be doing that…but in a way, the character who most did not belong there was McLean Stevenson's Henry Blake.
Hawkeye and Trapper John (and later, B.J.) were crackerjack surgeons. You need crackerjack surgeons in a setting like that. Father Mulcahy and Radar O'Reilly…well, you need priests and super-efficient clerks in a time of war as much as you need crackerjack surgeons. Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan were very military-oriented so they were in their natural habitat. Klinger? Well, Klinger didn't belong there but he was showing us the cartoony side of that dilemma.
It was Henry Blake, sitting there trying to straighten out his wife's checkbook while choppers were bringing in wounded soldiers, who was really outta place. He always came across as a doctor who should be back home in Illinois, treating measles and broken ankles and nothing more serious than that. His replacement — Sherman Potter played by Harry Morgan — was strictly G.I. and truly belonged in the commander position.
Here's what I'm talking about: The best single moment I saw on that show occurred in Season Three, which turned out to be the last season for McLean Stevenson and Henry Blake. It was an episode called "O.R." and it was written by Larry Gelbart and Laurence Marks, directed by Gene Reynolds. The entire episode was set in and around the operating room as the personnel of the 4077th works night and day to deal with a flood of incoming wounded. Even Blake, who is usually more suited to shuffling papers and okaying duty rosters is drafted into surgical duties.
At one point, Henry asks Hawkeye for some advice. He shows him an unconscious soldier who has just been brought in on a stretcher. We don't see what Hawkeye sees when he looks under the blanket at the kid's wounds but judging from Hawkeye's face, it's pretty awful. Henry Blake is frustrated at the decision he is being forced to make…
HENRY
It's at least eight hours work.
HAWKEYE
His liver's gone.
HENRY
There's a dozen kids outside that can be saved. He'll take two surgeons and who knows how many units of blood. And what's worse, he'll never make it.
HAWKEYE
And meanwhile, we may lose some of the others.
HENRY
Pierce, I have a lot of trouble with this kind of decision.
HAWKEYE
Henry, he should never have been brought in here in the first place.
And then Henry/McLean takes a telling pause and tells an orderly to take the kid back outside.
If you can ever catch that episode, watch that scene. Watch the whole episode of course but really watch that scene.
You can see the agony of the situation on McLean Stevenson's face. You can see Alan Alda/Hawkeye wisely understanding that while he knows what has to be done, he can't pressure Henry into it. Henry's the guy in charge. He's the one who has to make the decision and then live with it. He supports Henry but gives him the room to make that irrevocable choice. The writing and the acting are just perfect and it's exactly what that show was all about.
It wouldn't have worked as well with any member of that cast as it did with Henry Blake. It wouldn't have been as gut-wrenching for Potter, who'd lived through a lot more wars. Henry was the one who emotionally was least-suited to be deciding that someone would have to die so others could live. M*A*S*H had a lot of great moments and episodes after "Abyssinia, Henry" and the death of Henry Blake…but that's the moment I best remember.
In the interview below, Larry Gelbart talks about the scene that would be a close second and the decision to have Henry not make it home. Larry was a brilliant man when writing and equally brilliant when you were just talking to him. I wish I'd gotten to do more of that.
He's wrong about one thing, though. In the video, he says that the scene where Radar announces Blake's death was in the tag to the episode. Maybe they originally decided to do it that way but if you watch the above video, you see it was in the last scene before the last commercial break. Then the tag was a montage of Henry Blake footage from previous shows.
But otherwise, I'm sure everything Larry said was so. It's a nice bit of insight into an important moment in TV history, described by a guy who created a lot of it…
If you have the stomach to read more about the Bill Cosby case, here's another recap of what he allegedly did, as told by those to whom he allegedly did it. By this point, it's hard to feel anything but anger at this man for what he did to so many women…and for the lesser crime of letting down so many people who once loved him.
I hate it when I see on the news that one or more police officers killed someone who may not have posed a threat to anyone. It feels worse when it's a black guy because it seems to happen more needlessly to black guys. In some cases, it feels like the authorities are in a rush to get to the point where the officer is exonerated in any killing and the rush is three times as great when the victim was black.
But it's also terrible when it happens to people who aren't black guys. Or when it's a police officer or…well, actually anyone.
I am against people being shot…or for that matter, strangled or stabbed or otherwise killed.
The one exception I would make is if there's a real chance that they're about to kill someone else. Even then though, I would prefer they be stopped and apprehended via non-lethal methods. The police are supposed to be trained to detain suspects without resorting to physical harm. We give them weaponry and power because we trust they'll be used responsibly. We expect that and when the killings are investigated, we expect justice, not a fast tap dance and then we're supposed to put the whole thing behind us.
Right now in the news, we have a couple of recent reports of black guys being killed by police officers. And we have reports of at least five police officers being killed last night by snipers. I am against all of that. That may seem like an obvious stance but as I prowl the 'net, I see a lot of people who are horrified by one or the other so I thought I'd point out that you don't have to take sides on this. You can be horrified by both. You don't even have to decide which is worse.
So that's what I wanted to say.
And also, on a related note: I don't think you should use the term "senseless killing" unless you're able to define what would be a sensible one. I've given the matter a lot of thought and the best I've been able to come up with is if someone were to murder the people in some other country who call you up, claim to be from Apple or Microsoft Tech Support and tell you you have a virus and they need remote access to your computer in order to remove it. I'm still against murder but killing them…I could get behind that.
Tickets to the Broadway musical Hamilton can cost upwards of sixty of those pieces of U.S. currency with Alexander's picture on them. I know a few folks who paid the high prices and felt it was good but not worth the price…but I doubt anyone who attended the April 16th performance did.
April 16 was the 40th anniversary of the debut of A Chorus Line on that very same stage. Following the performance of Hamilton, its star-creator Lin-Manual Miranda and the cast presented a post-curtain tribute to its predecessor in that building. Here are some excerpts from it…
[UPDATE: Okay, I was misinformed by a post on another blog. This video is from April 15, 2015 when Hamilton was at the Public Theater, which is where A Chorus Line also premiered. It's still a great video. Sorry for the confusion and thanks to the many folks who wrote in to set me straight.]
The latest revelations concerning Tony Blair and his "massaging" of facts leading up to his nation's involvement in the Iraq War are advancing a belief that many of us already had: That the Iraq War was "sold," here and abroad, dishonestly and with lies. Daniel Larison has more.
Leonard Maltin tells us about some of the great new film restoration work that's being done on silent comedies. It's hard to believe that archivists are finding lost footage and better prints for movies that are close to a century old. But it's so.
Marvel Comics has commissioned a 13-foot bronze statue of Captain America. It'll be unveiled at Comic-Con week after next and then it will be trucked east to its permanent home in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Why there? Because according to the current mythos of the character, Steve "Captain America" Rogers was born in Brooklyn.
But he wasn't always born in Brooklyn. In the original comics by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the hero was born in the lower east side of New York, just like Kirby. As this article notes, some folks are upset about the change. I'm not sure I have an opinion on this.
This is to remind anyone who checks out this blog this evening that I'll be on the radio later. My buddy Ken Gale is guest-hosting The Hour of the Wolf, a long-running fantasy-oriented radio program which is heard in the wee small hours on WBAI FM in New York. He'll be asking me about what I jokingly refer to as my career writing comic books and other things.
It runs from 1:30 AM to 3 AM East Coast time, which is 10:30 PM to Midnight where I am on the West Coast. If you're up at that hour, listening to me answering Ken's questions might be among the more interesting things you could be doing, sleep notwithstanding. If you're near New York, dial up 99.5 on your FM dial. If you're not near New York, it'll be streaming on the WBAI website.
Politifact, which is getting a real workout during this presidential campaign, lists 17 times Donald Trump said something and then denied he'd said it. Remember the good ol' days when if a candidate did this more than about three times, he or see was branded a "congenital liar?" That didn't just mean they lied for personal reasons. It meant they had a mental defect that caused them to lie for no good reason.
Have you seen Bill Maher's closing scold on this week's Real Time? It's pretty good…all about how "Trickle Down" economics has never worked as its advocates predict. Over and over, they try it. Over and over, it fails. I don't know why Democrats aren't selling this message louder…
Like a lot of you — if my e-mail is any indication — I've been watching the Johnny Carson reruns on Antenna TV. I find most of the shows fascinating, if not in an entertainment sense then in a time capsule sense. At least once an episode, someone makes a reference to something then in the news that I've either completely forgotten or vividly recall.
There are also announcements of things that are interesting in a hindsight context. The other night on a show from the eighties, I heard Carl Reiner talk about an upcoming film he'd written and would be directing and was now casting…and it was a film that I'm pretty sure was never made. He also talked a bit about the next movie he planned to make with Steve Martin…and that one was made. It was Dead Man Don't Wear Plaid.
I enjoy these shows but I continually wonder what the audience is for them. Have you noticed a certain trend in the commercials? Here's what was sold during the 90-minute episode that aired last Saturday night. They're grouped by commercial breaks…
Commercial for free samples of a new kind of catheter
Commercial for free samples of O2Pur home oxygen kit
Commercial for Varidesk
Commercial for attorneys who seek to represent patients who took the drug Invokana
Commercial for car insurance from A.A.R.P.
Commercial for Life Alert ("I've fallen and I can't get up!")
Commercial for Miracle Ear hearing device
Commercial for attorneys who seek to represent patients who took the drug Taxotere
Commercial for 4th of July Sale at Sit 'n Sleep mattress stores
Commercial for local (Los Angeles) news show
Commercial for San Diego Zoo
Public Service Spot warning people not to take too much Acetaminophen
Commercial for local (Los Angeles) film festival
Commercial for attorneys who seek to represent people who were victims of nursing home abuse
Commercial for Lipozene quick weight loss drug
Commercial for attorneys who seek to represent women who used the Essure Birth Control device
Commercial for the Atomic Beam military-grade flashlight
Repeat of commercial for free samples of O2Pur home oxygen kit
Commercial seeking donations to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Repeat of commercial for free samples of a new kind of catheter
Repeat of commercial for car insurance from A.A.R.P.
Commercial for the D.R. Power Mower
Repeat of commercial for local (Los Angeles) news show
Third repeat of commercial for free samples of O2Pur home oxygen kit
And then the first thing after the closing credits was a repeat of the commercial for attorneys who seek to represent patients who took the drug Taxotere.
The third break and part of the last one were obviously placed by the local channel, KTLA 5, which retransmits the Antenna TV feed so take that out of consideration. The other commercials were the ones Antenna TV was able to sell. The conclusion we can draw is —
Oh, wait. You may be wondering what a Varidesk is. A Varidesk is a special stand for your computer that raises and lowers it so you can choose to work standing up or sitting down. It's a great invention and I have one for one of my two office computers here. Everything else except the D.R. Power Mower (which may have been placed by KTLA), the auto insurance and the military-grade flashlight relate to illnesses — either trying to treat a medical condition or suing someone because of it.
So the conclusion I make is that people who watch Johnny Carson reruns are in poor health. A lot of them are probably elderly but Invokana is for diabetes at any age and Taxotere is for cancer and there are younger people who need catheters and home oxygen…and I don't think a lot of older people used the Essure Birth Control device. So it's mostly about being sick.
Before a recent recording of his show, Stephen Colbert took an audience question about how he met his wife. It's a great bit of storytelling and if I could figure out how to embed it here, I would. But I can't so you'll have to go see it.
