HOGAN'S HEROES (TV SERIES) - DVD review

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.

This "Kommandant's Kollection" is a 27-disc complete series set that includes all the same discs from the previously released six seasons on DVD plus a bonus disc of extras not previously seen. The discs are slipped into six cardboard folding holders that have numbers on their spines and a portion of a picture, so that collectively they show the guard tower. The six folder-holders are housed inside a sturdy cardboard slipcase, and that slipcase has an acetate sleeve that's printed on the spine and back. It can be a tight fit, since the six folders don't lay flat. This complete series set replaces a bulkier edition that's now out-of-print. The "Kommandant's Kollection" measures just two-and-a-half inches wide. But the trade-off is that the discs are now just tucked inside cardboard pockets, with half the disc left exposed. That means if you're shipping it, discs can easily get dislodged.

Video: The first episode was presented in black and white, and the remaining 167 are shown in color, all of them in 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The quality is actually pretty good for the time period in which the show was produced. There are occasional white flickers of dirt and imperfections, but for the most part the colors are bright and natural-looking and the picture isn't nearly as grainy as other shows on DVD that were made during the same period.

Audio: The audio is a simple Dolby Digital Mono, but with mostly dialogue, that's not a problem. There is a slight hollowness to the sound--but one which stops way short of being in an echo chamber, the way the worst transfers seem. Sometimes the volume fades in and out, but overall it's a decent audio that doesn't get in the way of enjoyment.

Extras:
Bonus-starved fans get some, finally, but if you already own the series in single-season releases, I don't know that you'll want to upgrade. Here's what's on that bonus disc:

"The Informer" extended pilot with introduction. A little promo intro from CBS shows Fred MacMurray getting fitted for an outfit while talking about the upcoming season of "My Three Sons," and Gilligan and the Skipper in their island togs talking about another group that lives on a different kind of island. They were talking about the insular Stalag 13, and that lead-in went right to a full episode pilot for "Hogan's Heroes."

Two color promos of 30-seconds are included, but they're not much to see: fuzzy clips spliced together.

"Seven Wonderful Nights" is a vintage CBS fall preview show, but only the "Hogan's Heroes" clip is shown. I frankly had more interest in the other six shows to see the context for "Hogan's Heroes."

Richard Dawson is the only surviving cast member, and though he looks great and his voice is strong, his stories (broken into three sections: The Early Days, The Cast, Fond Memories) are slowly delivered and frankly not as lively as the better stories and anecdotes can be. And he's not helped one bit by the decision to just keep a fixed camera on him the entire time. Cutaways to clips of the show or vintage stills might have helped a bit.

They certainly helped a 1966 audio of Bob Crane and his band playing the "Hogan's Heroes" theme song in a novelty song release. Some of the photos in the montage are publicity stills, but some are behind-the-scenes candids. So why didn't someone think to ask Dawson to do a slideshow narration?

Two more short clips follow, both of Werner Klemperer at the Emmys receiving his awards. The first is a black-and-white clip with Steve Allen introducing; the second is a color bit with Don Knotts and Goldie Hawn doing the honors. These are short clips, but award show segments from this era are always interesting to see because they were such low-key affairs and the speeches were so brief and concise that you'd swear the recipients just wanted to get back to their dinners before they got cold. Yes, it was a dinner setting, like the Golden Globes.

"A Conversation with Albert S. Ruddy," co-creator of Hogan's Heroes, is another fixed-camera interview, and while he has some interesting things to say, this too might have been edited. It also drags a big.

Then there's the Criterion-like inclusion of this bit of ephemera: a "Hokum's Heroes" spoof that was published in Mad Magazine in January 1967. It's not as funny as the Mad spoofs that make you laugh out loud, but it does touch on that POW vs. concentration camp controversy. You have two options for viewing, a slideshow (with magnifying monocle optional) or the original layout as it was published.

The final bonus feature is "The Safecracker Suite" episode introduced by Albert S. Ruddy, in which Ruddy talks about the show's "tortured past."

Frankly, I enjoyed the Emmy clips and prop-room promo the most, but the rest are just shrugs. This boxed set is decent, but the bonus features aren't enough to make single-season owners upgrade.

Bottom Line:
"Hogan's Heroes" was a unique sitcom because the plots weren't just hooks to hang the jokes on. Each episode involved a convoluted scheme that was as much fun to watch as the ensemble characters, and watching all the episodes in a marathon you realize that the writers worked with a formula but successfully varied it week after week.