Col. Blake's death -- a surprise?

[snopes]

Originally Posted by ElectricBarbarella

Jamie Farr was a known cut-up during filming (per DH's DVD collection).. not that I doubt the veracity of his side of the story, especially since, as snopes pointed out, his is less fanciful than the one most often repeated, but just what would be the divine source for the actual truth in these situations and not just repeated FOAF's stories?

In this specific case, I think it's significant that the legendary form of the M*A*S*H story is something repeated as fact with no reference to source, while the non-legendary form is the one told by people who were actually involved in the production of the episode.

[MisterGrey]

Ahhhh, thank you for the clarification. I didn't realize he wasn't speaking chronologically.

[RichardM]

A Jamie Farr story with absolutely no basis in fact:

Jamie Farr was actually in the Army before becoming an actor. He was stationed at Fort Hood in Texas. One of his jobs was to inspect WW2 vintage barracks on a regular basis and call in to report the the condition of each building as he made his rounds. However, not only were the buildings WW2 vintage but so was the telephone lines to each building. Once, he called and the conversation went like this: "This Farr reporting in from Barrack 1632." "What, I can't hear you." "THIS IS FARR IN BARRACKS 1632" "Say again." FARR IN BARRACK 1632!!!!" So the farr (that being Texan for fire) trucks were sent.

[KingDavid8]

Originally Posted by snopes

Gelbart also states in his book that "having Henry die was a show-business decision; we were not trying to punish an actor for leaving the series."

Which touches on another urban legend, I suppose. I always heard that the writers killed off Blake in order to spite McLean Stevenson (and that, henceforth, the act of killing off a character in order to punish the actor was known as "McLeaning" them). I heard that the writers didn't like working with him, and McLean said that if his new show ("Hello, Larry", IIRC) didn't go well, he might return to "M*A*S*H", and they wanted to make sure that didn't happen. The only source I can recall offhand for this is "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" (though I'm pretty sure I heard this somewhere else earlier), and, yes, I know that Uncle John's is hardly a reliable source.

David

[snopes]

Originally Posted by KingDavid8

I heard that the writers didn't like working with him, and McLean said that if his new show ("Hello, Larry", IIRC) didn't go well, he might return to "M*A*S*H", and they wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

If that was their motive, they didn't do a very good job. It would have been all too easy to announce in a subsequent episode that oops, it wasn't really Col. Blake's plane that got shot down after all. If Blake had been killed by, say, a sniper or a shell that landed on the helipad just as he was leaving the 4077th, that would have presented a much greater obstacle to bringing him back.

In any case, I doubt the producers would have resurrected the Col. Blake character even if McLean Stevenson had come back to them begging on his hands and knees. (He walked out on a five-year contract, remember.)

[snopes]

Here's the clip: