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(edited)

I actually use "Gentlemen" all the time.  Such a loss, but there are some really good memorials out there to him.  Every character I ever saw him play, whether long-standing like Charles or one-offs, like his appearance on Frasier, was imbued with layers of humanity.  What an amazing talent and how dearly loved by all who worked with him, as far as I can tell.

I can't believe "The Merchant of Korea" was his first filmed episode.  It's one of my all time favorites, and Charles feels so fully formed at that point.  Another I love from that same introductory season is "The Smell of Music."

Edited by Ailianna
  • Love 5

He was such a great actor and great character. So many times I wanted to smack him and other times you just wanted to hug him. He had so many more layers to him. Arrogant, talent, smart, fun, and could be really kind. Helping the man who stuttered, giving chocolates to the orphanage and understanding when the director explained why he sold them, telling Hawkeye he had father while Hawkeye had a dad, I loved his friendship with Margaret. The two clearly liked and respected each other. My heart broke for him in the finale when he learned the musicians who had been torturing him by pretending they weren't really learning the music were killed. Watching him walk into his tent put on the record and smash it. Later saying he used music to get away from the war and now it'll always remind him of it.    

  • Love 8
2 minutes ago, andromeda331 said:

He was such a great actor and great character. So many times I wanted to smack him and other times you just wanted to hug him. He had so many more layers to him. Arrogant, talent, smart, fun, and could be really kind. Helping the man who stuttered, giving chocolates to the orphanage and understanding when the director explained why he sold them, telling Hawkeye he had father while Hawkeye had a dad, I loved his friendship with Margaret. The two clearly liked and respected each other. My heart broke for him in the finale when he learned the musicians who had been torturing him by pretending they weren't really learning the music were killed. Watching him walk into his tent put on the record and smash it. Later saying he used music to get away from the war and now it'll always remind him of it.    

It's sad but I like to imagine a few years after the war once Elvis and Rock and Roll came along, which he would've hated, he would've started listening to "real" music like Mozart again!

  • Love 5
On 7/10/2017 at 1:10 AM, TigerLynx said:

Given how much experience Margaret and Hawkeye had, I'm not surprised they had great sex.  However, I thought Margaret's marriage to Donald, and their divorce was what made her rethink her relationships with men, and what she really wanted out of life.

Although I do kinda ship them in the fanfic I read and wish the show had “gone there” with them I think by the end they were written as essentially too much alike to really work.  Even in the hot sex episodes they both needed reassurance and constant flattery.  They were both incredibly good people and incredibly good medical professionals but they both had that little touch of narcissism.

 

On 3/3/2018 at 9:32 PM, VCRTracking said:

I was really sad when I heard of DOS death.  I really like his character and enjoy watching the show in reruns when I get home from work.

  • Love 1
(edited)

Sad to see him go but he'd had a good run, nice that he was still working and successful right into his 70s. He had big shoes to fill with replacing Frank but the genius of the role was that he wasn't a Frank clone, we felt for him and often sympathised with him given the antics of Hawkeye and co.  I always loved his final scene where he tells Colonel Potter he will be his inspiration for his new post as the head of a surgery team. 

Edited by Joe Hellandback
  • Love 3
(edited)
On 3/10/2017 at 7:33 PM, TigerLynx said:

DOS was excellent as Charles Emerson Winchester the third.  It was smart of the producers and writers to go in this direction when LL left.  In and interview LL was asked if he ever thought about making Frank different, and LL said Frank can't be Hawkeye, and Frank can't get a complete personality transplant.

One of my favorite scenes with Charles was in the episode when they were trying to find a home for a mixed-race child.  They kept running into roadblocks with the military, politicians, the government in South Korea, etc.  Finally, after exhausting almost all possibilities, they decide to go further up the chain of command with a more diplomatic approach.  At which point, Potter nominates Winchester as being someone who speaks high pooie floo tooie or something like that.  Charles and Hawkeye are in the guys office, and he keeps taking phone calls, and leaving, interrupting them when they try to tell him what is going on.  Hawkeye is getting annoyed, and Charles tell him to, "Simmer down Pierce.  This is why I'm here.  To talk to this guy, not punch his lights out."  Then Charles gets fed up, goes off on the guy, and Hawkeye ends up having to hold Charles back.

That's 1 of the Winchester eps I like, too. It was nice when we could see his more compassionate side (towards the baby at the end, before they took her to the monastery), & that he had 1 instead of just being rather 1-note, & pompous & arrogant, which is what I think (& probably many/most thought) Frank Burns became  1-note) by the time Larry Linville left the show. By the time Frank Burns was written out, about the only thing he had going for him, as far as I was concerned, was that he was supposed to have been from my hometown. And then that made me less than happy because I was worried people would think everybody from here was like that, instead of Burns being an isolated case.

We actually have a VA Hospital & an Outpatient Center here, so I suppose that's where Frank probably ended up getting transferred & promoted to when he had his breakdown & went AWOL, trying to find Margaret in Tokyo when she was on her honeymoon with Donald Penobscot. I keep hoping he was supposedly transferred to any other VA Hospital we might have in the state.

Sorry for the detour. Anyway, the baby episode's 1 of my favorites (although I really hate how they describe mixed race children, of servicemen & locals, were treated back then, if they couldn't be taken in by a monastery or somewhere else helpful). The weird word Potter said Winchester was fluent in, & was part of the reason why he was supposed to go with Pierce to discuss getting the baby sent to the US (they were going to speak to someone at the US Embassy in Seoul), was Hoi polloiPotter thought Winchester had it, he could deal better with the staff at the US Embassy in Seoul, because of his upper crust background.

Edited by BW Manilowe
To remove excess bold type and to add a comment.
  • Love 4
1 hour ago, mmecorday said:

Every time I hear a cast member has died, in my mind I see a cast photo and the image of the deceased grayed out.

My favorite Winchester moment was when Radar gave him the cap his parents sent him because he was so homesick. He looked so genuinely touched in that scene.

I loved that moment too. But I couldn't figure out how Winchester, as an adult, was supposed to still be able to wear a cap he'd worn as a child (Winchester did wear the cap in later episodes, when it was supposed to have been winter/cold weather in Korea). I mean, as an adult his head should've grown enough so the cap wouldn't fit anymore; at least theoretically speaking.

On 9/7/2017 at 5:58 PM, roamyn said:

That's because Gary Burrgoff didn't get along w/his castmates.  Notice he wasn't at any of the reunions, either.

My impressions thru the years, are that he was a problem.

That's what I've always heard, over the years. The guy who played a nice character (Gary Burghoff's Cirporal Walter "Radar" O'Reilly) wasn't very nice offstage, but the guy who played the assholic character (Larry Linville's Major Frank Burns) was, like, supposedly 1 of the nicest guys you could have ever met. Obviously another example of why that profession's called "acting".

  • Love 2
On 9/7/2017 at 7:58 PM, Crs97 said:

I remember an interview that described an encounter between Gary and Mike Farrell in which Mike said, "The problem is you can dish it out, but you can't take it," and Gary responded, "and I am sick and tired of dishing it out."  The story-teller said he never even caught his slip.  Gary still seems defensive about his experience and talks about being burned out.

Well, it doesn't seem he's done a lot of acting since he left M*A*S*H. I don't remember him being in much, if anything, else on TV & in the movies since then, so maybe Gary is/was burned out. I just hope he's invested well & all that kinda stuff, or that he found some other line of work, because I know he had at least a couple of wives & a couple, or 3, children to support (along with himself) over the years.

(edited)

Great write up on Stiers by Mike Ryan on Uproxx:

With Winchester, David Ogden Stiers Showed Just What An Antagonist Could Be

In it he quotes a Roger Ebert review of the 2000 movie Time Regained and I had no idea he went to the same high school as Stiers:

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“And here is Baron de Charlus (John Malkovich), who plays the role of the slightly elevated, bemused observer — a man like the man we all have in our lives, who seems to stand outside and have a wider view. In my high school that was David Ogden Stiers. Yes, the actor who played Winchester on M*A*S*H. He has never attended a reunion, but is discussed every 10 years by the rest of us, who recall in wonder that he always talked like that. He came to Urbana from Peoria. Where did he learn to talk like Winchester? Tall, confident and twinkling, he would ask, “And what have we here?”

Also the time the M.A.S.H. cast tried to prank David:
 

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Farr: To repay Stiers for all his pranks on us, we had his dressing room painted orange and purple over Thanksgiving break. When we came back, we were waiting for him to rant. He said nothing. Finally, one of us asked, “What’s new?”

Farrell: David said, “Oh, I’ve just had my dressing room redecorated. Did you as well?” I responded, “No, how is yours?” He said, “Quite lovely, it’s a fabulous combination of salmon and mauve.” It was his way of letting us know he got it, but no one was going to get him.

 

And this sweet gesture Loretta Switt recalls:

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A few episodes before, Margaret had borrowed a book of poems from Winchester. He got angry with me at one point and made me return it. In real life, we had this running gag. I would tease David all the time that no one had his private phone number. He was very much his own person, very reclusive in a way. So, in the final episode Winchester gives Margaret the book back. I open it and read the inscription. David had written his phone number inside. That’s my real emotion on camera.

Edited by VCRTracking
  • Love 5
On 3/6/2018 at 11:52 AM, BW Manilowe said:

Well, it doesn't seem he's done a lot of acting since he left M*A*S*H. I don't remember him being in much, if anything, else on TV & in the movies since then, so maybe Gary is/was burned out. I just hope he's invested well & all that kinda stuff, or that he found some other line of work, because I know he had at least a couple of wives & a couple, or 3, children to support (along with himself) over the years.

I remember him being in those commercials for BP gas stations in the 90s:

I liked seeing the AfterMASH episodes on YouTube. Even though it seemed like having a show without Hawkeye was weird I liked seeing Colonel Potter back home with his wife in Missouri and now running a veterans hospital. I think it was just ahead of it's time. People weren't ready to watch a show about our servicemen having a hard time after coming home in the middle of the Reagan 80s. They still aren't.

  • Love 5
8 hours ago, VCRTracking said:

I liked seeing the AfterMASH episodes on YouTube. Even though it seemed like having a show without Hawkeye was weird I liked seeing Colonel Potter back home with his wife in Missouri and now running a veterans hospital. I think it was just ahead of it's time. People weren't ready to watch a show about our servicemen having a hard time after coming home in the middle of the Reagan 80s. They still aren't.

That's a really good point. Also the expectations for that show were very, very high, so of course people were going to be disappointed that it wasn't quite M*A*S*H. I watched it at the time, having been a rabid M*A*S*H fan, and I liked it a lot. 

  • Love 2

When I watch Goodbye Radar now,,it's like Gary decided to not try to act young anymore. .his voice doesn't have the aw  shucks quality, his body language is different,it's like a different character with Radars name. But the show never really was the same without him. Add to that the tone of the show changing. I think maybe one season after Radar leaving should have been enough.

  • Love 1

Gary played Radar in the movie as well but in the movie which featured Bud Cort(who later played Harold in Harold & Maude) who had a very minor role as a young private. There's the scene where more serious Frank Burns played by Robert Duvall, made Cort cry because he gave him the wrong needle and a patient died, and Burns says to him "You've killed him.". Radar on the show seemed to start off like the movie version and then slowly became like Cort's character.

I've been thinking about ages ever since someone noted that Gary Burgoff and David Ogden Stiers were close in age despite the character's age differences.  Think about the reality of the show.    Korean War -- most are draftees.    Radar is some kid fresh off the farm, so maybe 18 when the show starts.   Now, the Korean War lasted only 3 years, so even if he had been there when it was over, he would have been 21.    At one point, Charles says that Hawkeye would have been fresh out of residency back home, rather than chief surgeon of the 4077th.    Now, I'm a little fuzzy on how long residency is, but presume 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and a couple years to get out of residency, that is 28 years old.   So presume he is 28 at the beginning of the War and 31 at the end.   That's only 10 years difference between Hawkeye and Radar.     Now, Charles was being considered as Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Bahston General when he was drafted.   So that might put him in his 40s(?)?     Definitely a LOT older than Radar.      

2 hours ago, merylinkid said:

Now, I'm a little fuzzy on how long residency is, but presume 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and a couple years to get out of residency, that is 28 years old.   So presume he is 28 at the beginning of the War and 31 at the end.   That's only 10 years difference between Hawkeye and Radar.     Now, Charles was being considered as Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Bahston General when he was drafted.   So that might put him in his 40s(?)? 

A surgical residency is six to eight years (including the first year as an intern), so they would have been a fair bit older, but otherwise I agree with you that the relative ages are all wonky. I think the show going on for so much longer than the actual war and the actors visibly aging (especially Alan Alda) as time went on made them bend the normal laws of time to suit whatever story they wanted to tell that week. Colonel Potter's age was the worst in this regard. From the M*A*S*H wiki:

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Sherman Potter enlisted in the Army at fifteen, when he lied about his age to get into the cavalry and was a member of the "1st cavalry" {Presumably this is either supposed to be the 1st US Cavalry Regiment, which didn't go oversees in World War I, or the 1st US Cavalry Division which wasn't formed until 1921}. Potter's serious love of horses is noted in several different episodes–he claimed in one episode to be able to shoe his own horse Sophie His exact age during the series is debatable. When Potter first takes command September 19, 1952, he claims to be 51 which would place his birth date in 1900/or 1901. In the episode, "Pressure Points", Potter gives his age as 62. With the episode set in 1952, he would have been born in 1890, and been fifteen years old in 1905; likewise, in a two-part episode when Major Burns is missing {gone from the show} he claims to have smoked cigars for 47 years--since 1905 or 1906 {age 15} In 7.2, he mentions having been in the army for thirty-five years; assuming the year is 1952, he would have joined in 1917, the year the United States entered the First World War. Assuming he did enlist at age fifteen, he was born in 1902. In another episode, he mentions joining the cavalry during the days of Theodore Roosevelt's "Rough Riders", which only existed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 which would have made him 69 in 1952, when the mandatory military retirement age for officers is 60 .

In the Season 5 episode Lt. Radar O'Reilly, when Radar is "promoted" to 2nd Lt. for, among other things "bugling," Potter claims to have been in the army for 40 years, implying he enlisted in 1912 at age 15. In 11.7, Potter rants that someone over 60 shouldn't go to Florida; both the previous and succeeding episodes reveal that the timeline is the June/July of 1953. In 6.22, Potter is one year from retirement {which would be a date of September 2, 1953}. Yet, when he first comes to the 4077th at the end of the Season 4 premiere, "Welcome to Korea," which the P.A. announced to be on September 19, 1952, he claims to retire in 18 months, which would be a date of March 1954.

He married Mildred in 1916. A conversation with a wounded soldier in a season 7 episode reveals their wedding date as September 8. However, in the episode "Settling Debts", he states that his anniversary is Groundhog Day, February 2 (he picked that day so he wouldn't forget it). In "Hey, Doc", Potter writes to Mildred on their 27th wedding anniversary which, with it being 1952, means he was married in 1925; had he married in 1916, it would have been their 36th wedding anniversary in 1952. In "Change Day," Potter claims to have been married 38 years--since 1913. In "Point of View", Potter is angry at himself for forgetting to call Mildred on their 35th anniversary. In "Too Many Cooks," Houlihan remarks Potter's been married 40 years.

Edited by fishcakes
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When I watch Goodbye Radar now,,it's like Gary decided to not try to act young anymore. .his voice doesn't have the aw  shucks quality, his body language is different,it's like a different character with Radars name. But the show never really was the same without him. Add to that the tone of the show changing. I think maybe one season after Radar leaving should have been enough.

This was on yesterday and I made the same observation. I think in Gary Burgoff's mind, he had already divorced himself from the character. Radar was never my favorite (I'm a Trapper girl), but that scene where he's watching the home movie of his family having a picnic kills me every single time, especially when he says "I love you" back to his mother. Even though his mother is Gary Burgoff in drag and the whole thing should be absurd, it's actually very touching.

  • Love 3

I'm watching the one where Margaret is feuding with the nurses and ends up sharing a tent with them for one night while one of them spends the night with her husband in Margaret's tent.  I've always wondered why they didn't put the husband up in the VIP tent.  I mean, I know why -- for plot purposes, since they wouldn't have had an episode at all otherwise -- but they could have at least mentioned that the VIP tent was occupied or something by some random visiting dignitary so they had to use Margaret's tent for the "quarantine".  It's always bothered me.

  • Love 6
On ‎5‎/‎16‎/‎2015 at 2:52 PM, Sir RaiderDuck OMS said:

Favorite Winchester quote: "So...tell me more about Montana. Does it...have a city?"

My favorite Winchester episode is the one where Colonel Baldwin (who had originally sent him to the 4077th to get out paying a gambling debt) visits, and Winchester spends the episode epically brown-nosing Baldwin in the hopes that he'll be sent back to Tokyo. But when Baldwin mistakes Margaret for a prostitute, tries to rape her, then falsely accuses her of attempting to seduce him and asks Winchester to back him up (explicitly promising a transfer to Tokyo in exchange), Winchester wavers briefly, then angrily denounces Baldwin in front of everyone. Even Hawkeye and BJ are impressed.

Being from Montana, I usually roll me eyes and make a smart ass remark when someone makes a comment like that. I probably would have ask Charles about Boston Bake Beans. And yes, I have had people ask me if there really people in Montana more than once.

On 17/6/2018 at 12:22 PM, Fosca said:

When I moved from Montana to Rhode Island, I had more than one person ask me if Montana was a real place.  I think they thought it was something like Narnia or Middle-Earth.  

Back on topic: I always liked (or at least respected) Charles.  I thought he was a much more fitting adversary than poor dumb Frank.  

I agree. Charles may have had his flaws, but he was a more than competent surgeon which made up for them. Frank on the other hand, not so much. 

  • Love 1

Ah, The Nurses....one of my fave eppies, especially when hard assed Margaret broke down at the girls, telling them how she never felt like a part of their gang.  “Did you ever once offer me a lousy cup of coffee?!”

Saw Comrades in Arms this weekend….for me, seeing Hawkeye and Margaret yell at God with the backdrop of loud explosions, holding each other and then passionately kissing is one of the sexiest scenes ever.  I guess it doesn’t hurt that I found Alan Alda hot AF when he was young, lol.

  • Love 2
39 minutes ago, Vixenstud said:

Saw Comrades in Arms this weekend….for me, seeing Hawkeye and Margaret yell at God with the backdrop of loud explosions, holding each other and then passionately kissing is one of the sexiest scenes ever.  I guess it doesn’t hurt that I found Alan Alda hot AF when he was young, lol.

Stop smiling!

  • Love 1

I never really liked The Nurses because I had zero sympathy for Margaret.  She set the tone for all the nurses, and she made it clear she was not someone that anyone could feel safe confiding in.  Why in the world would they ever have invited her to join them for unauthorized fudge while they talked badly about the war or their superior officers or the army in general?  She would have had them on report so fast.  Now suddenly it's their fault that they didn't want to be besties with her?  That episode drove me crazy.  I don't recall that anyone ended up giving Margaret a come to Jesus talk about her attitude toward her "inferiors," but they should have.

On the other hand, one of my favorite episodes is when they all go AWOL to "Rosieland" and Potter has to come find them because he has no one left to command.  The way he handles it and accepts Hawkeye's "We were rebelling against the army and you got caught in the crossfire" type response is my kind of leader.

  • Love 7
8 hours ago, Vixenstud said:

Saw Comrades in Arms this weekend….for me, seeing Hawkeye and Margaret yell at God with the backdrop of loud explosions, holding each other and then passionately kissing is one of the sexiest scenes ever.  I guess it doesn’t hurt that I found Alan Alda hot AF when he was young, lol.

I hate that episode, and try not to watch it, even when I have the DVDs going.  Margaret is so shrill and horrible to Hawkeye, he is so desperate to get some space between them, and while I agree that they might have sought emotional refuge in sex as a life affirmation during the bombing and the overwhelming fear of death, I don't get that either of them would feel like it was the start of a relationship, especially Margaret who was still married and had just started to be disillusioned with Donald, and just learned he was cheating.  It didn't ring true, and I hate the way both of them behave during the aftermath of the sex.

  • Love 5
Quote

I never really liked The Nurses because I had zero sympathy for Margaret.  She set the tone for all the nurses, and she made it clear she was not someone that anyone could feel safe confiding in.  Why in the world would they ever have invited her to join them for unauthorized fudge while they talked badly about the war or their superior officers or the army in general?  She would have had them on report so fast.  Now suddenly it's their fault that they didn't want to be besties with her?  That episode drove me crazy.  I don't recall that anyone ended up giving Margaret a come to Jesus talk about her attitude toward her "inferiors," but they should have.

I generally do not like post-Donald Penobscott Hot Lips. She got way too shrill in the later seasons. I never understood why she thought Frank would be happy for her when she got engaged. Did she get a hold on some bad Japanese sake that wiped out her memory of their affair?

I would like to know what the nurses were using to make that fudge and if it was so bad, why did they make it twice?

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Well. Looks like all of MASH has hit hulu streaming.

Currently, MASH is airing on three networks on Comcast -- WGN, TVLand and MeTV. I cannot get enough of this show, so I'm pretty pleased right now with my cable. :)

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