DVD Review: M*A*S*H: Martinis and Medicine Collection

 

MASH was a long-running series set during the Korean war. It was based on a book and adapted from a movie and starred Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce, and a very strong ensemble cast that changed over the years and included Mike Farrell, Larry Linville, David Ogden Stiers, Harry Morgan, Loretta Switt, Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, William Christopher, Jamie Farr, and Gary Burghoff (who was the only cast member that appeared in the movie). It started out as a pretty standard sitcom, and then over the course of time as it became even more of an anti-Vietnam war show than it started out as, became a dramedy. It was mainly a procedural story-of-the-week type show but did occasionally have multi-part episodes or refer back to prior episodes. As most know, it started off as a show that was on the brink of cancellation in its first couple of seasons (saved only because the wife of the President of the network liked it) to having its series finale be the highest-rated television show in history, rivaled only in ratings by the Superbowl.

The DVD set contains the entire series on DVD and then bonus discs that include the movie and a ton of behind the scenes and making-of features, as well as the TV specials that were made after the show had been off the air. So, if you like going through bonus material this has a lot of it.

The big drawback to this set, as others have noted, is the god-awful packaging. Each disc is inserted in a very tight slot/notch that is very hard to get discs out without tearing the slot and/or scratching the disc. So, unless you are extremely lucky, one or more of the discs is going to get scratched up, and it is just a matter of will the scratch be bad enough to make at least a portion of the disc unplayable. That is why I give it three stars. If the packaging was better it would easily be a five-star set.

Overall, the show was very good (even if it got a bit preachy in the later seasons). It was well-written and acted. It is getting harder and harder to find the show in syndication now that it has been off the air for getting close to forty years, and even when you can find it in syndication, it is impossible to watch it from the first episode to the last in broadcast order. So, for those of us who were too young to see most of the episodes when they originally ran on TV, and only watched it in syndication, getting the DVDs or streaming the show is really the only way to see all of the episodes in order. The DVDs are the only place (as far as I know) to find all of the bonus material (although some of it may be on YouTube). I would really only recommend this set for die-hard fans of the show, and make sure to test the discs right away in case you get some unplayable discs.