"Hogan's Heroes" (1965) More at IMDbPro »TV series 1965-1971

The problem with Hogan's heroes is that it has lost its context. People criticize it as a comedy set in a German prisoner of War camp, saying that trivializes the real human tragedies created by the Nazi regime. The thing is, Hogan's Heroes is not a spoof of prison camps. It's a spoof of World War II movies and TV shows. It came out in the wake of films like `The Longest Day', `The Great Escape', etc. which produced shows like `Combat', `The Gallant Men', 12 O'Clock High', all of which were hyper serious because of the subject matter. Such a trend requires a leavening spoof. And `Hogan's Heroes' and `McHale's Navy' provided that comic relief. Nobody ever criticized McHale's Navy for trivializing the Pacific War, any more than they criticized `F Troop' for not being a documentary about the Old West or `Get Smart' for not being written by John LaCarre. Why do we indict Hogan's heroes for being insensitive to the deprivations of the Nazis?

This show is itself based on a hit Broadway play and movie from a decade before called `Stalag 17' which won William Holden an Oscar. If you've seen Stalag 17, the humor there is much cruder and more oblivious of the real threat of the Nazis than Hogan's Heroes. Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck, (later to show up in another Military spoof to which HH also obviously owes a lot), decide at one point they would like to see some female Russian POWS take showers. They grab a bucket of paint and begin painting a stripe down the middle of the road toward the building where the showers are. This fools the guards until the paint a stripe right over to the window of this building, (the showers have windows?), and peer in. There is nothing this crude or insensitive in any episode of Hogan's Heroes. Yet this is a highly regarded film.

But now, 30 years later, when there are fewer films about that era made, the old show is viewed not a spoof of a show business trend but as a parody of the real event, which it was never really intended to be. This has allowed the critics to `pile on' and rip the show for being insensitive to the victims of Nazi oppression. All I remember is a funny show and that's all it was ever intended to be.