Celebrity Deaths 2019

Noonan didn’t Lauda did

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hard to knock off a fossil

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The reason I couldn’t watch it is that it was classic American soft-centred mush. Every so often someone would say, “War is hell”, or something similarly trite, and that was supposed to be the political comment.

I mentioned Crimes and Misdemeanours above. That’s a film with a hard centre. The bad guy gets the girl and the good guy misses out. The saintly man goes blind for no reason. Another man commits adultery and murder and gets away with it.

Those things wouldn’t happen in the TV Mash. The bad guy always lost. The good guy always won. Those are Hollywood axioms and they still apply today as strictly as ever.

In one episode Hawkeyes best friend growing up is writing a book about war, he joined to get a better idea and to write about it. He ends up getting shot and Hawkeye has to watch him die.

It wasn’t as soft as you thought, maybe early days a bit, it was meant to be a sitcom, but once Alda sank his teeth into control they covered a lot more in depth topics.

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The whole concept of surgeons saving soldiers lives so they can go out and get shot at again (and kill) is pretty dark.
There are parts that undercut that, including the laugh track (which is a whole thing)

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I was going for the Koreans.

Of course you were…

They sort of won.

I’m confused, has Alan Alda died or not?

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Half of them won, the other half not so much

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and it hasn’t actually ended yet

Nope, in a strange twist in conversation we are here. Nicki Lauda had died.

It’s Blitz and it is a discussion about nothing to do with the thread. Pretty standard. Not sure what there is to be confused about?

This should be a poll.

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Except not. Henry Blake never made it home. And I thought the lack of good vs bad moralising was noticeable

Maybe my memory is hazy, but I don’t think anyone would ever take the show as Korea = bad, America = good. And I felt it had more depth than “war is hell” as well. Maybe it hasn’t aged, and maybe I didn’t understand at the time some of it’s faults, but I always felt it was better than a lot of the war stuff that was so common back in the day.

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You may be right. I just couldn’t watch it; in fact I doubt I ever watched an entire episode beginning to end. I was spoiled by the movie MASH, which was a lot tougher, and also by the movie (and book) Catch-22, which really were hard-centred black comedy. I took one look at the TV MASH and thought, mush.

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■■■■.

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Who? and who?

Mac Rebbennack, aka Doctor John, the Night Tripper died Thursday.

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Brian Wise from “Off The Record” on 3RRR played a lengthy tribute to Dr. John yesterday.

Not my cup of tea, but you have to admire his output over a very long period of time.

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