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Post-55th Anniversary Viewing
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Hogan's Heroes
"Funny Thing Happened on the Way to London"
Originally aired October 7, 1967
IMDb said:
The Germans plot to send an impostor of a captured English officer to kill Winston Churchill. Hogan plots how to foil the plan and keep the real officer alive.
Klink allows the officers to watch as Hochstetter (back in uniform) brings in RAF Group Captain James Roberts (Lloyd Bochner), an old friend of Hogan's, and has him put in quarters. Listening in on the coffee pot, the prisoners hear Hochstetter toasting to "the elimination of the number one enemy of the Third Reich, Winston Churchill". (Roosevelt and Stalin should try harder.) Hogan demands to see Roberts and is surprised to be allowed without resistance. Roberts tells Hogan of how he was questioned--particularly about his access to Churchill--photographed, and had his voice recorded. The prisoners subsequently listen in as Hochstetter gives Roberts his assignment to let Hogan help him escape and assassinate Churchill. Then the real Roberts is brought into Klink's office for the obligatory split-screen moment, and the Roberts who was assigned the mission is revealed to be a Lt. Baumann.
Roberts is taken to the cooler and Baumann is assigned a concealed, wrist-mounted gun to use on Churchill. Hogan is taken to see Fake Roberts, who wants to escape using wire cutters. Hogan plays up how canny Klink is and escape-proof the stalag is for the benefit of a bug that he discovered on his previous visit. Newkirk and Carter use the cooler tunnel to spring Roberts and replace him with a dummy. Then, as Hogan and Baumann are making their escape, LeBeau enables Schultz to discover Roberts's escape and catch Hogan and Baumann--whom he doesn't know about--in their escape attempt. Meanwhile, the real Roberts is taken to a rendezvous with a Gestapo car meant for Baumann, the first stage in a Luftwaffe-protected escape to England. In the coda, Hochstetter and Klink discover that Schultz caught Baumann, and Hogan takes the opportunity to set off his wrist gun, putting a hole in Klink's hat.
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Hogan's Heroes
"Casanova Klink"
Originally aired October 14, 1967
IMDb said:
General Burkhalter comes to Stalag 13 determined to marry off his sister to Klink. Hogan has to find a planted German agent in the Underground.
With some help from Schultz, Hogan learns that Klink is holed up in his office in a secret meeting. The prisoners listen in to find that Klink's guests are Burkhalter and a Gestapo agent named Hindmann (Woodrow Parfrey), who's infiltrated the German underground and asks to put documents in Klink's safe. The next day, Burkhalter has his sister, Gertrude Linkmeyer (Kathleen Freeman, reprising her role from Season 1), to serve as a substitute secretary while Hilda's away. As Frau Linkmeyer takes charge of the office, Burkhalter again gets the idea of hooking her up with Klink.
The prisoners learn that Linkmeyer plans to pull an all-nighter in the office the night that they plan to sneak in, crack the safe, and photograph the documents, so Hogan convinces Klink that she's a Gestapo agent sent to spy on him and that he needs to wine and dine her to win her over. The initial attempt at the safe is botched by a series of wrong-number calls to Klink's office, thwarting Newkirk's stethoscope; but after a second attempt, enabled by a second Klink/Linkmeyer date, the prisoners develop the photos to discover that Hindmann plans to entrap the Underground when they try to blow up an oil refinery. Hogan gets on the radio to the underground and asks to speak to a series of agents so Newkirk can identify Hindmann by voice. Hogan then tells the next agent put on that "Friedlaw" is Gestapo, and has the underground switch targets to an ammo dump, which the prisoners hear going up during an after-lights-out card game (paralleling a similar moment at the beginning of the episode).
In the coda, Hogan helps Klink out of the noose he's put himself in by spilling the fake beans to Gertrude that Klink's been having an affair with Hilda.
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MeTV has repeatedly skipped "How to Win Friends and Influence Nazis" (October 21, 1967), so I don't have it.
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Hogan's Heroes
"Nights in Shining Armor"
Originally aired October 28, 1967
IMDb said:
The Heroes need to get both a member of the French resistance and some bullet-proof vests out of Stalag 13.
The prisoners intercept an air drop of a crate of bulletproof vests and bury them on the spot because this week they have issues transporting heavy objects. The next day, a Lt. Maurice Dubois (Felice Orlandi) approaches the gate to surrender, and in exchanging some conversation en francais, tells LeBeau that he's there for the vests. Dubois's story to Klink is that he was a member of the French air force who's been on the run since his country surrendered...which would have happened somewhere in the neighborhood of four years prior, though when Hogan verifies his identity, he's said to have been in the French Resistance for two. (There's also another reference to the prisoners having been at the stalag for two years...which, if the show takes place from early to mid-1944, is pretty much historically impossible.) Helping Hilda with office work, Carter intercepts Klink's report to the Gestapo; and Hogan gets into the cooler to talk with Dubois. Back in the barracks, Hogan gets the idea to take advantage of the camp's plumber having been sent to the Russian front to have Kinch sabotage Klink's bathroom sink so they can pass Dubois off as one.
After Dubois has been pretending to work on the pipes under Klink's quarters for a while with Kinch's assistance, the prisoners let Klink discover the retrieved vests through Schultz, which Dubois claims to have been secretly developing while not in the cooler. (Um, yeah...) Dubois pretends to want to sell out his special treatment to Klink, who calls Burkhalter, who arranges for an aide, Captain Franz (Chris Anders), to transport Dubois and the vests to Berlin. Carter posing as a checkpoint guard helps the prisoners to hijack the staff car, they take Franz prisoner, and Dubois takes Franz's uniform and the car.
In the coda, Hogan convinces Klink that Dubois was conspiring with Burkhalter to cut him out of the deal, and Klink's faucet is still spraying him in the face.
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Hogan's Heroes
"Hot Money"
Originally aired November 4, 1967
IMDb said:
The Germans have set up a money-counterfeiting operation in the camp, and Hogan is planning on destroying it.
A truck arrives at the stalag with civilians and a heavily guarded mystery cargo. Schultz subsequently shows up for some gambling in the barracks, using American and British currency that's identified by Kinch as counterfeit. Hogan questions the sergeant to learn that a counterfeit printing press has been set up in a camp building, and the prisoners deduce that the Germans are planning to use the funny money to destabilize Allied economies. They use a pilfered signature of Klink's to post a phony notice and pass it off as Newkirk's handiwork. Upon questioning, he propositions Klink and SS Major Bock (Sandy Kenyon) to help them with the counterfeiting, but trick questions from Bock expose him as a phony. Afterward, Bock persuades Klink not to report the incident because the major would be held responsible for any breach of security and executed.
Having been listening and recording via the sewing kit deck, Hogan decides to make the German printing expert, Stoffel (Jon Cedar), think that Bock's planning to execute him once he's done his job. They pass a warning note to Stoffel to get him to come to the barracks, where Hogan plays a doctored recording of Bock ordering Stoffel's execution. Stoffel cooperates in faking a fire in the press building so that the prisoners can slip in pretending to aid in fighting the fire to smash up the equipment and plates.
We've been seeing some background prisoners lately whom I suspect might be the actors' doubles, as they resemble the regulars. The resemblance of one of them to Larry Hovis is particularly striking.
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Historians still debate the wisdom of broadcasting the speech without a laugh track.
Cynical.
Come on, Dean, there's a couple more than that.
I thought that number sounded low, but it seems the shorter list was a thing, and later a longer list was disclosed.
Nixon's Enemies List - Wikipedia
I don't recognize this one. It's kind of meh.
Yeah, and I already had it.
Oldies radio classic.
Classic.
I have this as well, though I wasn't particularly familiar with it.
My favorite Bond film, and the first one I saw in a theater. These facts are possibly connected.
First one I saw in the theater was
Octopussy. But LALD on TV played a key role in piquing my interest in Bond. I popped on an airing in the middle of the film and was blown away by the boat chase sequence.
Yeah, but he's somebody they're counting on for the success of the mission. Presumably the other members of the meeting were of high importance as well.
It was just the general and Hogan.
Well, yeah, but not very military. I wouldn't recommend him as James Bond, either.
It also makes tea, which is a selling point for me.
At first I was wondering what caused the explosion at the end...then I remembered Roger Daltrey telling us in an episode about the history of the NYC Fire Department how in the steam engine era, firefighters were more likely to die from their equipment blowing than the fires.
And Happy 81st, Sir Paul!
