M*A*S*H Ad: "What's Up, Doc?"

Now this is weird--for this ad promoting Season 6's "What's Up, Doc?", someone made the effort to dig up a picture of Beeson Carroll as Donald Penobscott (oh, excuse me, Lt. Col Donald Penobscott), even though he doesn't appear in the episode! Obviously the ad guy in charge felt the potential viewers needed a little more context to fully understand what they were going to watch.

Even stranger is, they chose Carroll as Penobscott, even though actor Mike Henry had played the Lt. Colonel more recently, in an episode from the very same season as this one.

M*A*S*H Ad - "Bug Out"

For once, a pretty accurate description of the episode, and no use of goofy photos of cast members spliced together!

"The Hot Ones"?

M*A*S*H Ad - "Stars and Stripe"

I wonder how Wayne Rogers felt, having his M*A*S*H past so directly referenced, considering his fairly acrimonious departure. Considering what a great lead-in M*A*S*H was, for any show, he was probably okay with it!

 

M*A*S*H Ad - "Abyssinia, Henry"

Interesting that Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers are listed as "Supporting Cast", and that someone felt that Kimiko Hiroshige should be included in the publicized cast of the episode.

Such a cheery shot of Henry; M*A*S*H really was preparing a gut-punch with this episode.

M*A*S*H Ad - Frank & Hot Lips Week

Some markets put a little extra effort into their M*A*S*H syndication, assembling theme weeks culled from the hundreds of series episodes they had at their disposal. Channel 11 here went even further, apparently getting Larry Linville for a new interview for the occasion. Which had to be kinda weird, since he had long left the show by this point.

Even weirder is the clip art they used for the ad--instead of a shot of Loretta Swit in character, they used this more contemporary photo. A shot that looks like it came from the same photo shoot was used for the Milton Bradley M*A*S*H board game, and I'm no less confused now than I was then why it was so hard finding a pic of Hot Lips Houlihan!

M*A*S*H Ad - Eighth Season

20th Century Fox ran this ad in Variety announcing that M*A*S*H was returning for an eighth season...was that ever really in question, at any point?

M*A*S*H Ad: #1 in Syndication

20th Century Fox was justifiably proud of just how massively popular was, even as a syndicated package of re-runs. As you can see, M*A*S*H was #1 with just about everyone; hence this ad in Variety some time in the mid-80s.



Note: That shot of the cast is the same one used for this ad...apparently no one noticed or cared about the whole "Winchester in Shades" thing.

M*A*S*H 1978 Emmy Ad

20th Century Fox took out this ad (presumably in Variety), crowing about M*A*S*H's eight Emmy nominations for season six! I find the iconography a little grim, myself (and generic; this could be for any hospital/doctor-based show), but...

FYI: Of the eight nominations, M*A*S*H won none that year. And what the heck is Loretta Swit doing being nominated as Best Supporting Actress? Who was the female lead on the show, Nurse Bigelow?

M*A*S*H Ad - "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" Special

How big a cultural event was the final episode of M*A*S*H? So big that some local stations put together their own specials just about that single show!

I've never seen this special (it certainly didn't air in my neck of the woods), but I'd love to. I wonder if its online somewhere, in some dusty corner of the internet...

AfterM*A*S*H Ad - "Snap, Crackle, Plop"

Another awkwardly-staged ad, this time for AfterM*A*S*H's third episode, "Snap, Crackle, Plop."

More awkward is CBS' then-network catchphrase, "We Got The Touch." Do they have the power, too?

M*A*S*H Ad - "Margaret's Marriage"

A very awkwardly-staged ad for Season 5's final show. I guess someone decided they needed to have Frank in the ad, so a weird shot of Burns got pasted in there between Hot Lips and Penobscott!

20th Century Fox Ad

Here's an ad, aimed exclusively at people inside the industry: 20th Century Fox trying to convince local affiliates to buy syndication packages of M*A*S*H, Trapper John MD, and The Fall Guy. I find the tag line interesting, in that Fox is almost daring affiliates not to buy these shows, by suggesting that whatever programming they do put on against these three shows is doomed to fail!

On a side note: whoever shot that promo pic of the M*A*S*H cast forgot to ask David Ogden Stiers to take off his very non-period-accurate shades!

Daytime TV Ad

Interesting daytime programming line-up this CBS affiliate Channel 2 together--a giant block of soaps, with M*A*S*H right in the middle!

I tried pinning down when this ad might have run, by using the one soap I hadn't heard of--Love of Life--assuming it had a shorter run than the rest. But according to IMDB, LOL ran from 1951-1980, just shy of thirty years! Show's what I know.

In any case, I was partly right in my detective work--since LOL ended in 1980, and nobody ran re-runs of soaps, that would peg this ad as somewhere in the very late 1970s, after M*A*S*H went into syndication but while Love of Life was still on the air.

One last thing about Love of Life: from 1966-1967, one of its cast members was Robert Alda--father of Alan, and of course guest-star on M*A*S*H as Dr. Anthony Borelli!

1975 Variety Ad

Here's a unique little item, an ad 20th Century Fox ran in the 11/7/75 edition of Variety promoting the Season Four episode "Quo Vadis, Capt. Chandler?"

This seems like an extraordinary expense for the studio to take, just for one episode of a TV series. Fox must have thought M*A*S*H did something really special this time--which, of course, they did.

M*A*S*H on VHS

In the dark days before DVDs and streaming, everything was put on VHS. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions (the original Dark Shadows, for one), TV shows that had very long runs didn't get put onto VHS, I guess because most studios figured people didn't want to own dozens, hundreds of cassettes. So, for the most part, you got a lot of "Best of" compilations, and that had to do.

But 20th Century Fox obviously thought there was some sort of audience for M*A*S*H, so they put the entire series out through Columbia House Video, where you subscribed to the series for a flat rate, and you got sent tapes of the shows every month or so.

A friend of mine, another obsessive M*A*S*H fan, signed up, and while it was being able to see these shows uncut, whenever we wanted, it was enormously frustrating because the shows weren't put out in order! If you read the ad above (click to see a bigger version), you'll see that they decided to release tapes by theme. At least, that was the idea--the first volume contained Season One's "M*A*S*H The Pilot", Season Two's "Radar's Report", and Season Three's "Bulletin Board"--about an random as it gets.

Actually, strike that--it did get more random. If memory serves, there were other tapes in the series that season hopped even more severely, so you had different mixes of cast members across one tape. A truly bizarre decision, because who else would buy these but die-hard M*A*S*H fans? And what die-hard M*A*S*H fan would want to see the episodes all jumbled up like this?

And also, if memory serves, they never even finished the series--at some point DVDs came in, pushing VHS tapes into the dustbin of history. I wonder how many M*A*S*H fans got left in the lurch?

AfterM*A*S*H Ad - "Klinger Vs. Klinger"

This was a TV Guide ad for AfterM*A*S*H's second episode, "Klinger Vs. Klinger." Nice to see that, at least in the beginning, CBS was genuinely interested in promoting the show. That of course wouldn't last.

M*A*S*H Ad: "Fallen Idol"

I found a couple more TV ads for the show while reading some articles on the passing of Allan Arbus. This one, for SSN 6's "Fallen Idol" is pretty accurate, but I wonder: where does "Alan Alda and Harry Morgan star" come from? As per the show's credits, Alda and Mike Farrell were the top two stars of the show, so whose decision was it to replace Farrell's name with Morgan? Not that it's inaccurate in any way, but I am curious as to how it was decided to do that.

M*A*S*H Ad: "AfterM*A*S*H"

I know CBS meant well, but re-running the classic "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" just one week before the premiere of AfterM*A*S*H was really putting the latter show behind the eightball.


This is the last "M*A*S*H Ad" in my collection; I hope everyone had as much fun seeing these pieces of 4077th Obscura as much as I did!

M*A*S*H Ad: "Springtime"

I find it interesting that the write-up bothered to mention that guest-star Mary Kay Place co-wrote the script of this episode. Pre-auteur TV, scriptwriters' existence were barely acknowledged.

M*A*S*H Ad: "Our Finest Hour"

M*A*S*H's one and only "clip show."