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Mehdi Hoffman There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

oystermanproductions A lot of great artists have tried to use humor against the Nazis: Chaplin, Lubitsch, Wilder. If you want to see mockery, though, real mockery and scorn, you really can't beat this TV show. Even more than Wilder's original film, Stalag 17, this show ridicules Nazis without mercy. It's a subversive and light sitcom about a bunch of POWs who operate as spies behind enemy lines. The show manages to capture the dark side of Nazis, specifically the SS. Periodically they come in and threaten to send Col. Klink to the eastern front. Meanwhile, Sgt. Schultz knows the prisoners are up to something, but to acknowledge it would open up a huge can of worms. "I see nothing!" Klink and Schultz are caught between a rock and a hard place, between the evil SS and those damn sneaky POWs. Klink begs Hogan to cooperate and be nice. Meanwhile, instead of escaping to safety--which they could do anytime they wanted to--the POWs sacrifice their own liberty to stay in the prison camp and spy on the Germans. Hogan's Heroes is broad to be sure. Many of us underrate it. It's not particularly funny or dramatic, but it is enjoyable in the way many TV shows are, and you can easily lose yourself in an episode. What makes it worthy of our time, I think, is that it captures perfectly the mindset we should have about Nazis. Nazis are stupid, stupid, stupid. Over and over the show relishes an attack on the intelligence of Nazis. Oh, you stupid morons, look what we are doing right under your noses. No way are you going to win this war. You see a lot of Nazis in art. They are our default bad guy, even today, 65 years after the war. But you would be hard-pressed to find any more withering scorn for Nazis than in any random episode of Hogan's Heroes. It is perhaps one of the finest examples of pure mockery in art.I think much of our pleasure from this show is on that simple basis. "Let's outsmart the Nazis." And yet if you think about it, Col. Klink is a fascinating creation. He's a weak man, a coward, and stupid. But he is not actually evil in the way of the SS. Klink and Schultz are not Nazis so much as nihilists, people who just want to get along in life. "I see nothing!" It's a metaphor for a type of person who wants to avoid conflict at all costs. The repression in that line fascinates. It is, perhaps, an oblique reminder of the German refusal to see what was happening to the Jews. Klink and Schultz avoid seeing what the POWs are so obviously up to, for the same reason they avoid seeing what the Nazis are up to: to see such things would cause problems for them personally. So Klink chooses, on some level, to be a buffoon, and Schultz loves his strudel. They are likable and yet in a certain way reprehensible. It is the humanity of Klink and Schultz-- their weakness, their fear, their basic decency--that makes this show so interesting. We watch as they bounce back and forth between the evil of Nazi Germany and the heroism of the POWs. While the show undoubtedly works on the cheap level of adolescent thrills--watch as we upstage authority and mock the Nazis--the show also works on a more complicated level of subversion and repression and masks. The POWs often corrupt Schultz with strudel, and then he refuses to see what he has in fact seen. The POWs go further, on occasion saving Klink from the Nazis so as to keep him as commandant. The conceit is that no Nazi can possibly be as dumb, or as complicit, as Klink. Klink in turn defends his own perfect record, how no one has ever escaped from his prison camp. Which is true enough, but only because it is headquarters of a massive spy ring. The show works on both simple and complex levels. Nazis are mocked without mercy. And yet too the show is all about masks and self-deceit and repression and subterfuge and denial. Much of this swirls around the character of Col. Klink, the buffoon with a monocle and a riding crop. He is unable to be good and unable to be evil. He is too weak to please the Nazis and too weak to stand up to them. He is not a Nazi so much as a facade of a Nazi. His whole camp is a facade. And yet he wants to be liked by the Nazis and liked by Hogan. He wants everyone to like him and he wants all problems to disappear. It is Klink's desire to avoid all conflicts and problems and disharmony--his desire to keep his beautiful facade up at all costs--that makes Hogan's Heroes unusual and fascinating. While it is a simple, even a simple-minded sitcom, it is also one of the more layered comedies you will ever see. In fact that's exactly what it is, since half the show takes place in an underground tunnel. I remember when I was a kid and I first heard of "the French underground." I figured they were actually under the ground, like the guys in Hogan's Heroes. Good guys in secret tunnels under bad guys is a wonderful and comic visual, a manifestation of id against ego, of rebels against tyranny and oppression. It's silly, yes, but kinda brilliant too.

GoUSN I watched Hogan's Heroes at three different points in my life: childhood (my mother loved war stories, and this was, after all, a war story); college, when this show in reruns was all the rage; and today again, revisited after a long gap. I am this time around impressed by the superb comic timing of both writers and actors. Can there be anything funnier than watching the oblivious self-promoter Klink boast yet again about Stalag 13's perfect no-escape record, then watch the reactions of his various antagonists? Perhaps the greatest endorsement for this show came unwitting from a German emigrant who lived in our neighborhood. She came to the US from Germany as a war bride - she met her American husband in Munich where she was born and spent the war. She presented in this country - and to us kids - as a dedicated anti-Nazi. Which I believed until one day later in her life she was lamenting entry of so many Turks into Germany. A real tragedy, she said. And then said, and I quote, "Hitler would be spinning in his grave." Those are not the words of an anti-Nazi. Those are the words of a Nazi sympathizer. And she hated Hogan's Heroes. Not because it made light of tragedy, but because it made the Germans look bad. Her hatred of Hogan's Heroes is an excellent endorsement. Back to the show. I can't think of a show that was better cast, from top to bottom. The comic writing is superb. And, for the record, the POW camps were run by the German armed forces, not by the Gestapo. Whereas the Gestapo were crude killers, history tells us something that Hogan's Heroes alludes to: there was considerable tension between the German armed forces and the Gestapo, conflict often evident in the administration of POW camps.

classicalsteve This show has little to do with World War II, German POW camps, or war history except it uses these elements as a kind of superficial backdrop. It is pure fantasy created strictly for laughs and amusement. But maybe a tragedy like World War II needs to have its lighter side and in that sense Hogan's Heroes fits the bill. My guess is that this show was inspired partially by two films, both of which idealized certain aspects of German POW camps in their own way: "Stalag 17" and "The Great Escape". However, the sense was that in both films the Americans and British were somehow really in charge of the whole operation. The English-speaking peoples were ultimately the superior over their German-touting captors. Hogan's Heroes takes this idea, turns the German colonel in charge of the camp and his guards into wining idiots, gives the Americans and British superior intelligence, and adds a laugh-track. The result is Hogan's Heroes, and oddly enough it works on its own terms.This show is essentially a comic strip with live actors. All the characters are rather cartoonish. The lovable but scatter-brained Colonel Klink, played with bumbling foolishness by the great Werner Klemperer, is no match for the sly and shrewd Colonel Hogan, played by the immortal Bob Crane who will best be remembered for this show. In many episodes, the Americans, British, and French POW's played by Larry Hovis, Richard Dawson and Robert Clary outwit, outdo and humiliate their Nazi adversaries. The POW's don SS uniforms, constantly bribe and flatter the top guard, Sargeant Hans Schultz, and intercept numerous messages. And the most fun is when Klink will be visited by the high command and he turns to Hogan for help. It seems Klink's line, "Hogan you've got to help me!" recurred throughout the show. Of course the biggest mystery of the show is why Klink doesn't just shoot them? In fact Werner Klemperer played a German/Nazi judge defendant in the award-winning "Judgement at Nuremberg" which has to be a 180-degree shift from Hogan's Heroes. In Nuremberg, Klemperer's character sent many innocent people to their deaths.The show which lasted for a remarkable 7 seasons is nearly a theater of the absurd. The little situations are good, clean and inoffensive fun, unless of course you are of German descent. That I can't help. But I guess that's the price Hitler's Germany paid for trying to conquer Europe: they get mercilessly and shamelessly spoofed for the rest of eternity. But after the laughter's over, we should not forget that the Nazi ideology caused the deaths of millions of people and the suffering of millions more. The only consolation is that if Klink had been in charge, maybe this could have been avoided. Oddly, Klink's character appears to be a victim as well. In one memorable line, Klink says to Hogan, "Col Hogan, if you ever escape, be a good fellow and take me with you!" Not even Klink liked the Nazi high command.

telcontar328 "Why would anybody make a comedy about a WWII prison camp?"Because the best way to fight evil, especially a snobby evil like Nazism, is to make fun of it.Suppose some high-ranking Nazi--let's say Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo--could be magically brought forward in time and shown one film about World War II... If he saw a serious documentary or drama about the war, one that played up how fierce and cruel and efficiently nasty the Gestapo were, he'd be very proud of his organization. But if he saw an episode of "Hogan's Heroes"--especially one that features Major Hochstetter being fierce/cruel/Gestapo-nasty, with the studio audience laughing their heads off--he'd probably burst a blood vessel!"Hogan's Heroes" is a situation comedy about a group of POWs whose insanely complicated undercover ops always involve fooling their stuffed-shirt kommandant. It doesn't make fun of real POWs or what they went through; if anything, it glamorizes them quite a bit. What it does do is make fun of people who think they're superior. Sure, it overplays how ridiculously silly the Germans were and how much damage the POWs could do (without getting shot), but exaggeration is the essence of comedy. Would "I Love Lucy" or "Gilligan's Island" be funny if only realistic things happened?Granted, the basic plots can get pretty predictable--the heroes have to smuggle something or someone out of camp/out of Germany, or their operation is in danger of being discovered, or they have to sabotage something or save Klink/Schultz from the Russian front. Many episodes do have clever plot twists, but on the whole I give the plot quality a 7 out of 10.The scripting, on the other hand, gets 10 out of 10. It's consistently stellar over the 168 episodes, with unforgettable lines like "I see nothink!", "Why is it, Kleenk, that you are always happier to see me than I am to see you?", "Love your barbed wire", and Major Hochstetter's two favorite remarks: "What is this man doing here?!?" and "BAAAH!"The acting was fairly good, 9/10 overall; the regulars and recurring characters tended to be better than a lot of the one-shots. A few of the actors deserve special mention: John Banner (Sergeant Schultz) gets 10 out of 10. He was one of the world's great comic actors, and "Hogan's Heroes" couldn't have existed without him. Larry Hovis (Carter) also gets 10 of 10. Not only is Carter one of the world's cutest dumb guys, in my opinion, but his Hitler impersonation is the best in TV history! Howard Caine (Major Hochstetter) provided something sorely needed on this slightly overoptimistic show--a dangerous Nazi. If it weren't for the intercom in the coffeepot, Hochstetter would have uncovered the heroes' operation several times over. And let's not forget Ivan Dixon (Kinchloe)! One year before Lt. Uhura, he became TV's first black communications officer.Hogan's Heroes is a very funny, family-friendly situation comedy about outwitting "superior" bureaucrats, keeping your sense of humor in tough situations, and never giving up--especially when a job is impossible.