Hogan's Heroes (TV Series) (DVD)

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When "Hogan's Heroes" first aired in 1965, it quickly became a hit. Though the show never finished higher than the 9th place it earned its first season, it fared better than most sitcoms that ran multiple years. While other shows suffered from tired or rehashed plots or felt the need to add new characters, situations, or sites to hold audiences' attention, the writers for "Hogan's Heroes" never seemed to run out of creative new ways for chief POW Col. Hogan (Bob Crane) to get the best of his captors and sabotage the Nazi war effort. "Hogan's Heroes" was a success in every country but one: Germany.

But in 2002, TV Guide released a list of the worst TV shows of all-time, and guess which show was No. 5 on the "my bad" list? Yep. "Hogan's Heroes." So how can a smartly written show that was thrice nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series and earned two supporting actor Emmys end up on the same list as the consummately bad "My Mother the Car," "The Jerry Springer Show," and "The Brady Bunch Hour"? Simple. It was the same thing that caused CBS chief William S. Paley to balk at the series concept when it was first proposed. He thought the idea of Nazis as comic characters was reprehensible, and this TV show aired three years before Mel Brooks gave us that hilarious "Springtime for Hitler" bit in "The Producers." But more pointedly, Paley didn't know the difference or draw the distinction between concentration camps and POW. camps. He couldn't shake the image of emaciated human beings and crematoriums. But there was a distinction. POWs were mostly aviators shot down behind enemy lines, and they were kept in camps operated by the German air force, the Luftwaffe, and not the SS who ran the Jewish concentration camps.

Well, political correctness aside, "Hogan's Heroes" was popular then, and it's obviously still popular now, or else CBS/Paramount wouldn't be spending the money to produce a gift set in time for the holiday season. It's still hovering around 8 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database, and I would submit that even if you haven't heard of this show, the cast and smart writing are going to be enough to win you over.

For six seasons, "Hogan's Heroes" kept the Allied war effort going on America's home front, coincidentally during the Vietnam War years. Crane was a natural as the affable but smarmy Col. Hogan, the ranking prisoner of war at a camp famous for never having had any successful escapes. It's a record Col. Wilhelm Klink (Werner Klemperer) holds because of Hogan's help. It's in the prisoners' best interest to have the Germans thinking the Kommandant is the toughest in all Germany (though he's really an incompetent), because it allows them to use Stalag 13 for a base of operations that would boggle the Germans' minds, if they only knew. Lift up a bunk and a staircase drops down to the second level. Lift up the dog house inside the "vicious" guard dog compound and there's access to another series of tunnel operations. Sections of barbed wire fence raise and lower with the convenience of blinds, and a tree trunk outside the camp opens to admit people with the regularity of a revolving door. Hogan and his men have bugged Klink's office and listen in on a radio that's disguised as a coffee pot-the same device they use to communicate with an Allied submarine that picks up prisoners they help to escape. Think of Stalag 13 as a WWII version of the Underground Railway. Prisoners, defectors, and the local oppressed needed help avoiding capture and getting out of Germany, and that's the service Hogan and his bunch provided. They weren't really prisoners, because they could leave any time. They were STATIONED at the camp.

But the two most lovable characters weren't even part of Hogan's team. Just as Don Diego/Zorro had the portly and comic Sergeant Garcia to "fraternize" with, Hogan gets along so famously with Sergeant Schultz (John Banner) that they could be brothers-in-law. Schultz's trademark "I see Nuth-thing, NUTH-THING!" became a catch-phrase as popular as Fonzie's "He-ey!" or Jimmie Walker's "Dy-no-MITE!" It was also his code to live by: See nothing, report nothing, and just get through the war in one piece without being sent to the Russian front. That was his strategy, and it was a match made in heaven. Every week, Hogan and the gang would commit outrageous acts with Schultz turning a deaf ear or a blind eye. Klink, too, was a man who was promoted far beyond his natural intellect or ability. Compared to the scar-faced General Burkhalter (Leon Askin) or Gestapo Major Hochstetter (Howard Caine), Klink was as much of a pussycat and ally-in-spirit as Sergeant Schultz. Having those two incompetents caught up in a world beyond their control was a stroke of genius, because it's make made the show acceptable.

Over the years, loonies came and went--none more so than the "what, what?" by-the-book Colonel Crittendon (Bernard Fox), who didn't quite get the point of the operation. Romantic interests included Klink's secretaries Helga (Cynthia Lynn) and then Hilda (Sigrid Valdis), as well as spies and underground leaders like Marya (Nita Talbot) and Tiger (Arlene Martel). Even Klink had a love interest, though it was over his dead body: Burkhalter's sister, Frau Linkmeyer (Kathleen Freeman). But from 1942 until the end of the war, Hogan's heroes kept doing their part and enjoying life as best they could in the process. It was the main cast that kept viewers coming back from more, like the lover-AND-fighter Frenchman LeBeau (Robert Clary), the sometimes clueless American Carter (Larry Hovis), savvy radio operator and impersonator Kinchloe (Ivan Dixon), and the wisecracking British former magician Newkirk (Richard Dawson), all of whom had as many funny lines as the stars.