Housekeeping

Due to acquiring new material and discovering overlooked material, I have to do some housekeeping and this is as good a time as any, with the end of the 1980-81 season.  I will be watching the following before continuing on with June of 1981:

• The 1970 MASH movie, which is part of the complete DVD collection of the TV series.  I've of course seen the movie before, at different points in my life, but I want to revisit it before continuing on with the last two seasons of the TV show.  I probably won't review it since it's not TV and my movie blog is retired, but I will probably refer to it in upcoming reviews of the series.
• Two episodes of Happy Days that are included on the DVDs for the fourth season of Mork & Mindy, a season I bought a couple weeks ago.
• KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, a 1978 TV-movie that I had listed as a movie and so overlooked earlier for this project.
• The Perfect Woman, a Fred Willard TV-movie copyrighted 1979 but airing in 1981 (IMDB is vague on the date).

It will probably be a bit of culture shock to go back to '70, or even '79, at this point, but better now than later.  I guess you can pretend I was watching these all in '81, which I certainly could've been (although MASH would've been heavily edited for TV).

Update: Well, if I were reviewing MASH, I would give it a D.  I've always had issues with it, and it has not aged gracefully.  I will note that I gave the TV series pilot a D-.  A few things I want to mention that have bearing on the series:

• There are indeed too many, mostly undeveloped characters in the movie, as there would be in the first season.
• Gary Burghoff's Radar is indeed the character who most shines through the muck, and while I'm glad he got to do more on TV than in the movie, it is a shame that his pluckiness faded away.  From first moment to last, he made me smile.  (Yes, he's in on the broadcasting-Frank-and-Margaret scene in the movie, but otherwise he's a much more sympathetic character than just about anyone.)
• While I think Sally Kellerman is an absolute delight in The Big Bus (http://reviewingeverymovieiown.blogspot.com/search?q=big+bus ), I spent most of the time here feeling sorry for her and her character.  It's not just the repeated humiliation of Hot Lips, but that Hot Lips does a complete 180 with no explanation.  There's no line or scene to even explain why she goes from hating football to becoming a cheerleader, let alone why she sleeps with Duke.  The evolution of Hot Lips on TV was not just more gradual (of course) but it was plausible.
• Henry Blake is as clueless here as in McLean Stevenson's portrayal, but he's been in the Army since before Pearl Harbor, as he mentions more than once.
• Sutherland's Hawkeye and Gould's Trapper bear little resemblance physically or otherwise to Alda and Rogers, and Duvall's Frank Burns is in a different universe from Linville's snivelly weasel.
• The scenery, despite Altman's attempts to grunge things up, is actually much better-looking and lusher than on TV.
• Although the film is supposed to be anti-war, it doesn't really connect the behavior of its anti-heroes to the horrors of war in the way that the TV show did, admittedly sometimes heavy-handedly.