To be fair, Hogan's Heroes was set in a POW camp, not a concentration camp. 

The thing is, the acting (I said acting, no achtung!) is so over the top it can't possibly be mistaken for anything but a farce.  I think it's quite deliberate and probably only meant for a single episode.  Maybe it was supposed to be so bad that it would bomb.  Hmmmmm...  Sounds like a movie plot.

Unlike the current rage that is the cancel culture, this is an example, taste notwithstanding, of openly confronting the enemy and mocking them -- lest we forget.

I am a HUGE fan of Hogan's Heroes.  The next time CHCH runs Hogan's Heroes, check out the episodes with no laugh track.  In some episodes the humour becomes more dry while in others, it changes the mood of the show completely.
 

Last edited by Peter the K (November 24, 2020 11:02 pm)

Just watched the episode that was posted. Aside from the fact that the subject matter was in extremely poor taste, the episode simply wasn't funny. It makes The Trouble With Tracy worthy of an Emmy award.

mace wrote:

Just watched the episode that was posted. Aside from the fact that the subject matter was in extremely poor taste, the episode simply wasn't funny. It makes The Trouble With Tracy worthy of an Emmy award.

Trouble with Tracy appears to be a better show. 
However, I do have to give credit to the extra effort to animate the opening credits to perhaps draw better attention to the show...?
Here's the =12px"Heil Honey! I'm Home." intro:




 

Apparently, Joseph Stalin appeared in one of the unaired episodes and Hermann Goring was in the 1990 Christmas Special.

Found some commentary via YouTube that summed it up nicely - along the lines that if you're going to delve into absurdist humour, you have to work incredibly hard, and precisely, to make it work.

I'm not really bothered about the use of Hitler as a target of satire, and even the notion of Hitler as your everyday Jackie Gleason - perhaps the right mind could take it somewhere worthwhile. Humour is risky business, and satirists can't feel restrained - at least initially - by the risk of bad taste (airing the material, or it succeeding, is an entirely other matter). Satirists need to be able to dig deep into the well of weirdness during the creative stage. But the rest of the world doesn't really need to hear about it unless true genius emerges.

With the right kind of magic creative juice, could this have worked? The problem is it was just a notion, certainly nothing even remotely close to an idea well thought out. The artist's putty here is the worst of the worst of what humankind has  managed to dredge up, and to make anything of it you absolutely have to dive deep - and deep in this case is extermination camps and genocide and ratting out neighbours and family to death squads. (Conversely, it's also incredible bravery and powerful morality; and a lot of weirdness in between the two extremes). But this pilot is a dud. There's no brilliance, nothing that says 'touché, nothing that does what dark comedy needs to do - somehow hit the nail on the head and shine a light like it's never been shone before.

Certainly, I can't say where you take this. Quite possibly nowhere. Looking around at the contemporary hate in the world around us, I'm not sure what I would do with contemporary material. I'm no Mel Brooks, and far as I know he didn't touch this stuff.

All that said, there's a couple moments that caught my attention: the sense of Hitler wanting to seem like a normal everyday guy. That was played up a few times in the episode, and rings true for populists of our day. That was perhaps one of the rare moments of the episode that worked, IMO.

Mr. Sutherland argues that Heil Hitler is only the second worst television show ever.
He gives the title of worst ever TV show to a show called POOCHINSKI, 
a show about a cop who died and came back to life as a talking dog:

"Well first I'm gonna try licking myself, and then I'm gonna catch my killer"




Mr. Sutherland's view on all this:



 

Last edited by Radiowiz (November 28, 2020 3:54 am)