Mitchell's Top Ten, #6: Hogan's Heroes

I've never understood, frankly, the hostility some people have toward Hogan's Heroes. If it's that they just don't like the show, that's one thing; I don't like I Love Lucy. As some wise philosopher once said, your mileage may vary.  

There are, however, some people who seem intent on making a cottage history out of hating on Hogan. For some, it might be discomfort with Bob Crane's personal life, which is actually worthy of sympathy more than scorn, and, in any event, has little to do with the merits of the program. Others claim that the show is silly, or, even worse, stupid; in fact the funniest of the episodes, and there are many, are far from that: they're clever, literate, and witty in addition to being laugh-out-loud funny. Presumably, the show's just not sophisticated enough for them.

The biggest bone of contention, though, seems to be from those who consider the show to be in bad taste because it deals with a POW camp in World War II. Some of them confuse POW camps with concentration camps, an error that's easily rectified for those who take the time to research the difference. Others believe there's nothing funny about Nazis (notwithstanding that not all German soldiers were Nazis) or prisons or wartime, even though it's all part of the human condition, and therefore the human comedy. 

Most of these critics presume to speak for the two groups who would most have the right to be offended by Hogan's Heroes: World War II veterans and Jews. They conveniently overlook the fact that some of the show's biggest fans were veterans (Bob Crane refused to accept the role unless the concept was first vetted and approved by vets), and many of the principal actors, including all of the regulars playing Germans, were Jews who well knew the difference between POWs and concentration camp survivors; Robert Clary, who played the French POW LeBeau, was himself a survivor of Buchenwald. If anyone had that right to be offended by the content of Hogan's Heroes, it was the men of these two groups, yet they weren't. 

Moreover, the Nazis aren’t glorified; in fact, Schultz and Klink show more than a trace of humanity. Hogan’s Heroes owes less to shows like M*A*S*H, and more to another military comedy: The Phil Silvers Show, and the incorrigible Sergeant Bilko. At heart, it’s a show about a bunch of guys working together, trying to pull one over on the none-too-bright boss. It’s just that in this case the guys are soldiers who happen to be working together as part of the underground, and the boss is the camp commandant.

All that has nothing to do with how a kid views Hogan's Heroes, though, and when I was growing up I enjoyed the show in first-run immensely, before kind of forgetting about it while living in the World's Worst Town™. By the time I returned to civilization, the show had long been off of CBS, but it had continued in syndication, and in 1978 it was a constant presence on Channel 5 at 5:00pm, just before the national news. It was back in my life, and it hasn't left since.

Considering the number of times I've written on this blog about Hogan's Heroes, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.  Few sitcoms have displayed its cleverness, combined with almost perfect casting, to achieve a show that can simply be enjoyed on its own merits. There are no "very special episodes," no attempts at dramedy, no underlying message. It's just a show that manages to be both very entertaining and very funny. There aren’t that many shows that can make me laugh out loud—the only two I can think of off the top of my head, Top Gear and MST3K, are both on this list as well—and Hogan was constantly able to do it.

What I’ve always liked about this show over the years is what lies just under the surface. Hogan is the glib, cocky colonel, the quintessential American who has a way with the one-liners as well as the ladies with the curvy lines. Make no mistake, though: the writers gave Hogan a dimension that many sitcom characters lacked. When push came to shove you knew Hogan meant business, and he’d do whatever was necessary to make the mission a success. In one story, pointing a pistol at a reluctant turncoat, he warned that "You can go to England my way, or you can die my way," and though I’m not sure you ever saw him actually kill someone in that manner, enemy soldiers did die as a result of those successful missions. That could have been a major flaw in some series, but the way the role had been written and acted, it was completely plausible. The show never came close to drifting into pious dramedy, but there was a serious context in which it existed, and the war itself was never taken lightly.

You can’t say enough about the cast, starting with Bob Crane and the rest. And imagine the challenge that was presented to Werner Klemperer and John Banner as Klink and Schultz. To make Nazis funny, to make them real characters, rather than cardboard buffoons, while still enabling the audience to look at them affectionately, is quite the job. Not one that you’d ask, say, Dabney Coleman to undertake. Unlike Burkhalter, who may have harbored some doubts but was nonetheless a loyal lieutenant of Hitler, or the SS colonel Hockstetter, who probably did believe the party line, I don't think Klink was really that dedicated to Nazi ideology, and I'm almost positive that Schultz wasn't; they were soldiers doing their jobs, but at heart they weren't killers. They were, however, very funny.

Hogan’s Heroes was the first complete TV series I collected on DVD, and one of the few that I can watch repeatedly. The only reason I tend not to watch it on broadcast TV nowadays is because the prints are faded and cut up, while the DVDs are the real deal, crisp and uncut. Having said that, though, there have been times when a Hogan marathon would pop up on one of the oldies stations. Running across it, I’d pause to see how the Heroes’ latest scheme turned out; I already knew the answer, of course, but the payoff is always in the punch line. And, of course, the next thing I knew it would be two hours later, and I’d sat through four episodes and was well into a fifth.

*Although who knows? I wouldn’t have thought you could make a sitcom about Hitler, either.

Hogan’s Heroes is one of the few comedies on my favorites list, as I tend to be more of a sucker for the heavy, existentialist stuff. But, as Agent Cooper once said in Twin Peaks, you have to treat yourself every day, and Hogan’s Heroes is one of my favorite treats. One that I don’t feel guilty about. TV