Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Movie Tonight: With Six You Get Eggroll

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Today is the first installment of a segment I'm calling "Movie Tonight", where we discuss a movie with particularly notable M*A*S*H connections.

The film in question for today is the 1968 Doris Day comedy With Six You Get Eggroll. For those of you really steeped in M*A*S*H arcana (and why else are you here?), you already know why this movie is being mentioned at all in the same breath as the show, so please don't spoil it for everyone else!

I'm not going to bother describing the plot details of the movie (I think the words "Doris Day" and "comedy" pretty much do that job), but rather go right to the end of the film, where Doris' character meets some hippie bikers, played by:
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...yep, that's Jamie Farr and William Christopher, a full five years before M*A*S*H started production! Virtually all of their scenes in this movie are together, making them a truly bizarre moment for any M*A*S*H fan, used to to seeing them side-by-side but not looking like this! What are the odds that two character actors would end up on the same show just a few years later?

But upon further examination of the movie, Farr and Christopher are not the only M*A*S*H connection this movie has. Earlier in the film we meet a friend of Doris':
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That's General Clayton himself, Herb Voland!

Unfortunately, Voland doesn't appear much in the later part of the movie, so he shares no scenes with Farr or Christopher. But as fate would have it, his name in the credits was placed right next to theirs:
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Wow, swap fonts and you could think this is a M*A*S*H credit sequence (not really, but go with me on this one). Truly a bizarre grouping of future 4077 regulars, in a setting about as far away from 1950s Korea as possible.

And that's the Movie Tonight!


3 comments:

  1. Cool! I look forward to future episodes of this series!!! ;-)

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  2. Jamie and William look like Frank Zappa and David Crosby in that shot! I can't believe it's just four or so years prior to their turns on "M*A*S*H."

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  3. Actually at the police station Herbert Jamie and Christopher are all on screen together side by side. Crazy

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