Shark Bytes

Yes, I'm sure the writers sat around and said "how can we soft-sell this Hitler guy". "Oh I know, we'll do a goofy POW show. with stupid Nazis and smart prisoners!" "Then it's back to the Sudetenland !!"

Mis-understood show? Hardly. This show was a comedy about one of the most horrific episodes in world history. There was absolutely nothing funny about Hitler, the Nazis, or the Gestapo. They were monsters who slaughtered millions of innocent people. To make light of them is to take away some of the stigma that surrounds them and, by doing so, make them just a bit more acceptable to polite society. That's unacceptable. The comment about "burying our heads and forgetting about Hitler and Nazi's" is just what shows like HH try to accomplish -- ignore the horrors and make the instigators out to be harmless fools instead.

We need to recognize just what happened in Nazi Germany and learn from it, not make light of it and hope that the nightmares go away.

This must be the most mis-understood show on TV. For the 104 votes for same character/different actor- Wrong! check your facts - Ivan Dixon was Kinchloe, and Kenneth Washington was Baker...2 different people. In a way, I can sorta understand people being upset about a show about Nazi's...but...if you watch the show...the Nazi's lost every time! Nothing better than laughing at a person _portraying a Nazi on tv and gaining a laugh at his expense.
in today's polictically correct world HH would not make it along with All in the Family, Married with Children and maybe only Family Guy gets away with it because it is a cartoon...
How do people that watched the Stalag 17 movie feel...that had Nazi's in it too and they still can't find William Holden. The Indiana Jones movies spoof on Nazi's (even Hitler in Last Crusade).
Indy could've gunned (not sure if he had one with him) him down right there - so it's all his fault.
The same people who say we don't do enough to show victims of the Holocaust also want to bury their head and forget about Hitler and Nazi's etc...Unfortunately the guy and his ideas are a part of history, but also we can learn from that so it will never happen again "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it"
But hey, if you don't like it, you don't like it - it's your opinion.
Besides, maybe they were ahead of their time, because one episode recently they were discussing warplanes that wouldn't be detected by radar...Stealth fighter, anyone?

Ken and Wheelz need to re-watch this show -- they don't seem to understand what they watched, or it's been so long since they watched it that they've completely forgotten it.

Yes, HH was about WWII, which was all about the Nazis and death camps and the Holocaust. Like it or not, if you talk about WWII, you are talking about those things. To say, "oh, but this was just a nice little comedy about WWII that had nothing to do with all those nasty bits..." is naive and ignorant of the facts. It is perhaps even more insidious for the very fact that the show tried to act as though those things never happened. Making all light and fun of the war that killed millions...not a wonderful thing.

As for Wheelz' historical accuracy, he is wrong that Werner Klemperer and John Banner were in concentration camps during the war. They both had left Europe to come to the US before the war started. Check your facts.

As for the humor on the show, you say it's sophisticated? In what way? Sex jokes abound on HH. There are big-bosomed women in tight skirts running around in almost every episode, with salivating men ogling them. Or are you speaking of the highbrow humor of people falling through holes in the ground? That's extremely sophisticated. Or the big ox standing around constantly claiming that he's seen nothing? Hilarious. The humor on HH was in no way sophisticated...it was as low-brow as any other show of its day.

Today's political environment has nothing at all to do with resentment toward the show -- it's all about the political environment of the time that the show originally ran. It was a time of "ignore the man behind the curtain" in order to bury the horrors of what happened. HH also was a crappy propaganda piece used to soften the image of the US military and increase feelings of patriotism in order to help motivate young men to enlist.

There isn't much need to 'dumb down' anyone to get the jokes on HH. They were low-brow enough that it doesn't take a high-school education to understand them. It's hilarious that someone thinks the humor on this show was sophisticated and that it takes some high level of comedic appreciation to unravel the mysteries of Hogan. Um, yeah, right. Sure.

The show never jumped the shark. It was one of the best shows on TV. It was a satirical show and those people who don't know that should study WWII history and then rewatch the show.

I don't think that a lot of the people who have posted have ever watched this show. This show may just be the funniest sitcom ever produced. The acting was excellent (Marya notwithstanding), the jokes were hysterical and the on-screen chemistry was perfect. The show was not about Hitler, the Holocaust, and concentration camps. It was about prisoners of war in a prisoner of war camp fighting the enemy from the inside. Countless war movies along that line have ben made and no one ever whines about them. The critics who almost religously complain, "There's no such thing as a funny Nazi," need to get their history straight. There were no Nazis on the show. Army officers, soldiers and personnel were not allowed to join the party. Furthermore, at least three of the main actors (Werner Klemperer\Klink, John Banner\Schultz and Robert Clary\LeBeau) were in concentration camps during WWII. If they didn't see a problem with it, why should you? I think the main reason people just don't get the show are threefold: One, the culture has changed from sophisticated humor to toilet humor. There are no sex jokes so it can't possibly be funny (sarcasm). Two, in today's politically environment, everbody is looking for ways to be offended. And three, America in general has been dumbed down to the point where the viewing public just doesn't get the jokes. Why else would Hogan's Heroes be voted the fifth worst show ever produced while Gilligan's Island didn't even make the top 50? In closing, the show stopped in 1971. Stop whining about it. If you cannot appreciate even the smallest detail of the comedic gold that is Hogan's Heroes, than truly, "You see nothing. Nothing!"

Rather than a great series as Mary feels it to be, HH was a very bad show with tired jokes and wooden acting. If it showed anything beyond a superficial good vs evil morality, it was only as yet another of the many "America first" nationalistic displays of the God-given superiority of the American state common at that time.

Yes, Hitler and the Nazis were bad, evil, hateful beings that needed to be stood up against. But so are many other things in the world -- and not all of them were outside of our borders. Where is the outcry against the sins of our own making?

It IS a great series. Americans do forgive, but we are not showing how dumb they are but how smart we are. The most you can really get is: Hogan's wit. It never dies and teachs us to never let the stronger power run us over. It is a very apt thing to add to your ecletic of morals.
I wish somone would take the show and mold it for something new. I luv this show, and someday in the future 2008+ I will try to bring it back to life!

Horrible show. Some things CANNOT be made funny or have comic relief.

Many of the cast were imprisoned by the Nazis--Leon Askin's family were killed in one of the death camps.

Bob Crane--the PERVERT never looked right in this show--I wonder if he had something in his contract stipulating he always got the German women.

To add to the refrain: How in the world could this show have jumped because of Bob Crane's death? Are you people idiots? The show went out of production in 1971. Bob Crane died in 1978. How in the hell do 51 people explain Crane's death as a reason for the show jumping?

So, this show comes on twenty-years after we declared peace with Germany, making fun of the Germans. Some deeply-seated hostility hanging around in the minds of middle America, huh?

Nobody can ever say we Americans don't know how to forgive and forget...

While I don't find the show particularly funny, I do find the characters very appealing. Klink and Schultz make me laugh more with their facial expressions than their dialogue. And Burkhalter, for some reason, reminds me of a German Boss Hogg. Yikes! ;p
Hasn't JTS for me since I started watching it on TV Land, but I'm getting that feeling of uncertainty as the series rolls on- sort of like "Will they ever get off that island?"

i;m sure this has been said before but i cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive of trying to make a comedy about WWII, Adolf Hitler, Nazis and the horrific Holocaust. Sorry, folks, just don't get that one. Maybe we can do one about 9/11.

The name of the company Schultz owned was the Schatzie Toy Company. "Schatz" is the German word for "treasure"; "Schatzie" is colloquial for "sweetheart," "love," or "darling."

I just watched an episode of Hogan's Heroes and learned while watching that Sgt. Shultz was an owner of a very well known toy store in Germany. He said he was going to go back once the war was over.The name of the toy store I think he said was "Shotz".