My fellow alt.tv.mash poster Larry Gelbart, perhaps best known for the Developed for Television by credit in that series' titles, has passed away from cancer diagnosed in June. I previously LJed about him here. We'll miss him.
Last night I was out with some friends and I saw a M*A*S*H episode that I'd never seen before.
Now, even those of you who've only known me through this journal (if any), think about that. A M*A*S*H episode. That I'd never seen before.
M*A*S*H was what got me through adolescence, the way most boys latch onto cars or sports, or most geeks latch onto Star Trek (Star Trek was one of mine too, second after M*A*S*H). (And there are sure worse things to be fanatical about in adolesence, if you want to go on to create humor on a schedule, than something Larry Gelbart spent four years on.)
I say I saw it but there was a lot going on and I didn't get to pay it much attention. It was a later episode, but not too late because Radar was in it (Radar's departure is for me when the show completed the last few degrees of the arc over the marine predator). It was something about a football game, or a football season, like the subplot about the World Series in the episode that spans 1951. And the very end is one character pleading with a group of others that surely despite all the recent acrimony things can go back to the way they were before, and Radar - the paragon of invulnerable innocence - says, "No. No, it can't."
I thought this was great. First of all, dude, a M*A*S*H episode I'd never seen before. Second, even though I'd caught the end I hadn't seen most of it; and it's not the destination, it's the journey. After all these years, I had another M*A*S*H episode out there somewhere waiting for me. Fantastic.
And then I woke up.
One of the regular - or, more accurately in tv writer talk, recurring - posters on alt.tv.mash for the past ten years (besides me) is Larry Gelbart. You know, the guy in the show's credits under developed for television by and, if it's an episode from the first four years, story editor (or something like that).
I once responded to a query what he looks like by stating he looks like a cross between Woody Allen and Larry King. Before I posted this, however, I began to wonder if it was quite a polite thing to say, particularly in front of him. So I emailed him first for his reaction to the statement. He wrote back a polite but vehement denial of having any desire or right to censor what anyone else writes. Now I wonder whether I offended him with my attempt not to offend him.
People have asked him a few times what he'd've done for a series finale if he'd been with the show all eleven years. Larry's never responded definitively enough for me to recall now what he's written about it, but I always like to suggest, "Well, look at the last episode he did do." ... which was The Interview.
Yesterday, in response to a request from another poster, Larry posted what he might have written for Henry Blake had McLean Stevenson still been with the show to appear in The Interview. It's at the top of this page. It was weird and a little spooky to see new material, from the creator, featuring the character from all fiction who at 14 I thought was most like me, from a tv series that's been off the air for thirteen twenty-three years come the 28th.
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timeasmymeasure
