KOREAN War comedy M*A*S*H premiered on September 17, 1972, and ended on February 28, 1983, with the finale the most-watched television episode in US history until surpassed only by recent gridiron Super Bowls.
Featuring an ensemble cast led by Alan Alda, Loretta Swit, Harry Morgan, Gary Burghoff and Jamie Farr, the series still cycles around on TV, as hip and irresistible as it was 30 years ago. Watch a couple of episodes and you won't be able to look at nearby mountains without humming Suicide is Painless and waiting for the choppers to show up.
This fascinating doco traces the original stories and people that inspired the series including that of Richard Hornberger. Under the pseudonym "Richard Hooker", Dr Hornberger wrote the book MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors (1968) based on his own experiences in the Korean War. In 1970, the book was turned into the famous movie, directed by Robert Altman and starring Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould.
With nearly an entirely new cast but the same MASH characters from the book and movie, the series immortalised the army doctors stationed at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital located in the village of Uijeongbu just north of Seoul in South Korea.
The documentary film features interviews with some of the actors, including Farr, Swit and Burghoff and co-creator Gene Reynolds, along with many of the surgeons, doctors, nurses and pilots and enlisted men who served in Korea. The series initially mirrored America's cultural war over Vietnam, when the radical counterculture was still in a battle with traditional values embodied in government and the military. There's little doubt that the real-life MASH units -- with female nurses working on the frontlines for the first time and African-American medics staffing them -- anticipated the widespread social changes that followed.
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