ClarkKent_DC > Jeff of Earth-JFebruary 1, 2026 at 11:24pm
I've only seen "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" once, the night it originally aired. I started watching M*A*S*H about halfway into its run; I've seen many (not most) of the earlier episodes during that run and since. I don't know how well it holds up. I think at the time I appreciated them doing a long-form story with moments like #4077 crew having to flee a forest fire, and the (seemingly improvised) bit when the nurses are asked what they'll do when they get home. Some of the other things were so obviously sappy -- Major Winchester's grief over the musicians being killed, Klinger choosing to stay behind, etc. -- they made me roll my eyes as I watched it.
Those early-season episodes of M*A*S*H are hard to watch because of the much-too-casual sexism of Hawkeye and Trapper John; Trapper John was married but I never realized that because he was an inveterate philanderer. The later episodes of the run are hard to watch because the program devolved into "The Alan Alda Show."
The Baron > ClarkKent_DCFebruary 2, 2026 at 1:33am
I watched M*A*S*H regularly back in the day. It ran from around the time when I started fourth grade, until the latter half of my sophomore year of college. I haven't watched it since college, so I don't know how well it would hold up. I remember considering doing a timeline of the series, but thinking that it would be impossible to do a consistent one because the show ran something like three times the length of the war.
I was in third grade and too young to fully understand the show when I first started watching it. My parents watched it semi-regularly during the first four seasons, and we would tune in even if they didn't. Henry Blake's farewell remains a significant memory for me. I continued to follow the show, with viewing becoming increasingly sporadic in season seven, and I finally stopped watching altogether in Season 8. It was less consistently well-written, I couldn't imagine the show without Radar, and I had other outside interests. Nearly everyone I knew tuned in for the finale, and I caught some of the reruns and ones I'd missed later, in university, when a station was running it around the dinner hour.
Just watched this fan-made tribute to Doctor Who, which first aired 62 years ago today, the day after a certain historical event. Producer Verity Lambert persuaded her superiors at the BBC to take the extraordinary step of re-airing the program's first episode the next week, before the airing of the second episode. I wonder whether even she - or the show's creator, Sydney Newman, ever imagined that people would still be watching it 62 years later.
A small boy has an "adventure" with badly-made and occasionally racist balloons. We then cut to a badly-shot Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade, narrated by a woman who seems to have been doing some drugs or other, while Nelson, Murphy and Corbett do not so much "riff" this as recoil in horror from it, Must be seen to be believed.
I won't say it was the best MST3K ever, but it may well be my favorite. For most of my life, Thanksgiving had been may second favorite holiday after Christmas (and in more recent years it has become my very favorite), except for one thing: That Goddamned Parade™. Oh, how I hated that thing! The only thing worse than watching a parade was listening to people talk about watching a parade. TGP was both! My parents insisted on having it on, and to make matters worse, no one was even watching it... except me. They were all busy doing one thing or another in preparation for the meal, but they wouldn't let me change the channel or turn it off. I swore to myself that once I was out of that house I would never watch TGP again, and I never have. For all I know, it may not even be on anymore (although I strongly suspect it is). After all these years I finally feel I have achieved some level of vidication.
The Baron > Jeff of Earth-JNovember 28, 2025 at 11:00am
I won't say it was the best MST3K ever, but it may well be my favorite.
Well, technically, it wasn't an MST3k at all, although one could argue that RiffTrax is essentially SciFi Channel-Era MST3K without the host segments or network censors.
I liked the Macy's parade when I was little, but I haven't seen it in years. I noticed it was available on YouTube yesterday, but I couldn't be bothered to watch it. Fifteen years ago, I went into the City to watch the parade in person. It's one of those things where I was glad that I did it just to see what it was like, but I have no desire to ever do it again. (There's a Japanese saying to the effect that everyone should climb Mount Fuji once, but only a fool climbs it more than once. That's kind of how I feel about this.) What it was like was getting up at the crack of dawn on Thanksgiving and taking the LIRR* into the City, only to find that it was already super crowded - there was no way on God's Green Earth that I was going to get up early enough to take the 4:30 a.m. train into the City, which is what I would've needed to do to get a good spot - and that I was lucky to be Cyberman-sized because I wouldn't have seen sh*t, otherwise. Then there was the standing outside in 40 degree weather (4.4 C for our friends in metric lands) for several hours waiting for the parade to start, and more afterwards waiting for the crowd to disperse enough for me to walk back to Penn Station to catch a train home. I'm sure that it would be much better if you knew someone who could get access to one of the buildings along the parade route.
MY THREE SONS: I recently mentioned in another thread that my local TV market while I was growing up carried only the color, post-Mike episodes and that I wasn't able to watch any of the William Frawley b&w episodes until I went away to college. still, I never became nearly as familiar with the early episodes as I was with the color ones. My plan had been to wait until I was finished with season four of The Beverly Hillbillies (the last one I will be watching at this time) before delving into My Three Sons, but I just couldn't wait. So far I have watched onthe first episode. I couldn't tell which which of the early episodes I have seen, but I can tell you for sure I haven't seen the very first episode (nor, I'm guessing, any of the first seasons ones) so these will likely all be new to me.
The first thing I noticed about S1 E1 is the oppressive laugh track. If I haven't mentioned it before, I hate laugh tracks. When Tracy and I decided to watch all of M*A*S*H several years ago, we bought the entire series set because that's the only format in which turning off the laugh track is an option. (I wish more sit-coms on DVD had that option.) I have learned to tolerate it on Leave it to Beaver and The Beverly Hillbillies, but the one on My Three Sons is obnoxious. The "audience" laughs uproarioulsy at lines that should rate a mild chuckle at best, drowning out other dialogue. I'm only one episode in, but I really hope they get better at this, and soon.
On laugh tracks: On a recent episode of Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage (set in the mid-'90s), I forget which TV show they were watching, but it didn't have a laugh track. Georgie protested, "But this is a comedy. Without a laugh track, how are you supposed to know when something's funny?"
The Baron > Jeff of Earth-JDecember 7, 2025 at 1:52pm
I remember when I was very little and did not yet know that laugh tracks were a thing, I began to suspect something when I would hear the exact same laughter on different episodes of a given show.
I also remember watching I Love Lucy (which I read years later did not use a laugh track) and hearing Desi Arnaz's distinct laughter coming from off-camera during scenes in which he was not participating.
Replies
I've only seen "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" once, the night it originally aired. I started watching M*A*S*H about halfway into its run; I've seen many (not most) of the earlier episodes during that run and since. I don't know how well it holds up. I think at the time I appreciated them doing a long-form story with moments like #4077 crew having to flee a forest fire, and the (seemingly improvised) bit when the nurses are asked what they'll do when they get home. Some of the other things were so obviously sappy -- Major Winchester's grief over the musicians being killed, Klinger choosing to stay behind, etc. -- they made me roll my eyes as I watched it.
Those early-season episodes of M*A*S*H are hard to watch because of the much-too-casual sexism of Hawkeye and Trapper John; Trapper John was married but I never realized that because he was an inveterate philanderer. The later episodes of the run are hard to watch because the program devolved into "The Alan Alda Show."
I watched M*A*S*H regularly back in the day. It ran from around the time when I started fourth grade, until the latter half of my sophomore year of college. I haven't watched it since college, so I don't know how well it would hold up. I remember considering doing a timeline of the series, but thinking that it would be impossible to do a consistent one because the show ran something like three times the length of the war.
I was in third grade and too young to fully understand the show when I first started watching it. My parents watched it semi-regularly during the first four seasons, and we would tune in even if they didn't. Henry Blake's farewell remains a significant memory for me. I continued to follow the show, with viewing becoming increasingly sporadic in season seven, and I finally stopped watching altogether in Season 8. It was less consistently well-written, I couldn't imagine the show without Radar, and I had other outside interests. Nearly everyone I knew tuned in for the finale, and I caught some of the reruns and ones I'd missed later, in university, when a station was running it around the dinner hour.
Just watched this fan-made tribute to Doctor Who, which first aired 62 years ago today, the day after a certain historical event. Producer Verity Lambert persuaded her superiors at the BBC to take the extraordinary step of re-airing the program's first episode the next week, before the airing of the second episode. I wonder whether even she - or the show's creator, Sydney Newman, ever imagined that people would still be watching it 62 years later.
A small boy has an "adventure" with badly-made and occasionally racist balloons. We then cut to a badly-shot Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade, narrated by a woman who seems to have been doing some drugs or other, while Nelson, Murphy and Corbett do not so much "riff" this as recoil in horror from it, Must be seen to be believed.
That was hilarious.
I won't say it was the best MST3K ever, but it may well be my favorite. For most of my life, Thanksgiving had been may second favorite holiday after Christmas (and in more recent years it has become my very favorite), except for one thing: That Goddamned Parade™. Oh, how I hated that thing! The only thing worse than watching a parade was listening to people talk about watching a parade. TGP was both! My parents insisted on having it on, and to make matters worse, no one was even watching it... except me. They were all busy doing one thing or another in preparation for the meal, but they wouldn't let me change the channel or turn it off. I swore to myself that once I was out of that house I would never watch TGP again, and I never have. For all I know, it may not even be on anymore (although I strongly suspect it is). After all these years I finally feel I have achieved some level of vidication.
I won't say it was the best MST3K ever, but it may well be my favorite.
Well, technically, it wasn't an MST3k at all, although one could argue that RiffTrax is essentially SciFi Channel-Era MST3K without the host segments or network censors.
I liked the Macy's parade when I was little, but I haven't seen it in years. I noticed it was available on YouTube yesterday, but I couldn't be bothered to watch it. Fifteen years ago, I went into the City to watch the parade in person. It's one of those things where I was glad that I did it just to see what it was like, but I have no desire to ever do it again. (There's a Japanese saying to the effect that everyone should climb Mount Fuji once, but only a fool climbs it more than once. That's kind of how I feel about this.) What it was like was getting up at the crack of dawn on Thanksgiving and taking the LIRR* into the City, only to find that it was already super crowded - there was no way on God's Green Earth that I was going to get up early enough to take the 4:30 a.m. train into the City, which is what I would've needed to do to get a good spot - and that I was lucky to be Cyberman-sized because I wouldn't have seen sh*t, otherwise. Then there was the standing outside in 40 degree weather (4.4 C for our friends in metric lands) for several hours waiting for the parade to start, and more afterwards waiting for the crowd to disperse enough for me to walk back to Penn Station to catch a train home. I'm sure that it would be much better if you knew someone who could get access to one of the buildings along the parade route.
*Stands for "Long Island Rail Road"
There's a Japanese saying to the effect that everyone should climb Mount Fuji once, but only a fool climbs it more than once.
I like that. Similar to your story, I went to Times Square on New Year's Eve once, but I have no need to ever do so again.
MY THREE SONS: I recently mentioned in another thread that my local TV market while I was growing up carried only the color, post-Mike episodes and that I wasn't able to watch any of the William Frawley b&w episodes until I went away to college. still, I never became nearly as familiar with the early episodes as I was with the color ones. My plan had been to wait until I was finished with season four of The Beverly Hillbillies (the last one I will be watching at this time) before delving into My Three Sons, but I just couldn't wait. So far I have watched onthe first episode. I couldn't tell which which of the early episodes I have seen, but I can tell you for sure I haven't seen the very first episode (nor, I'm guessing, any of the first seasons ones) so these will likely all be new to me.
The first thing I noticed about S1 E1 is the oppressive laugh track. If I haven't mentioned it before, I hate laugh tracks. When Tracy and I decided to watch all of M*A*S*H several years ago, we bought the entire series set because that's the only format in which turning off the laugh track is an option. (I wish more sit-coms on DVD had that option.) I have learned to tolerate it on Leave it to Beaver and The Beverly Hillbillies, but the one on My Three Sons is obnoxious. The "audience" laughs uproarioulsy at lines that should rate a mild chuckle at best, drowning out other dialogue. I'm only one episode in, but I really hope they get better at this, and soon.
On laugh tracks: On a recent episode of Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage (set in the mid-'90s), I forget which TV show they were watching, but it didn't have a laugh track. Georgie protested, "But this is a comedy. Without a laugh track, how are you supposed to know when something's funny?"
I remember when I was very little and did not yet know that laugh tracks were a thing, I began to suspect something when I would hear the exact same laughter on different episodes of a given show.
I also remember watching I Love Lucy (which I read years later did not use a laugh track) and hearing Desi Arnaz's distinct laughter coming from off-camera during scenes in which he was not participating.
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