M*A*S*H TV Season 1

A great series, but no extras?
I'm not going to go into too many details about the series. If you're reading this, you probably already know who the characters are, what the show is about, etc.

The first season (24 episodes) is packaged on three DVDs with eight episodes per disc. The episodes are presented in airdate order. The video quality is quite good for film material from the 70s -- far better than the All in the Family DVDs. The audio is good as well.

As others have pointed out, this DVD set comes with no extras. The only modification that I make when watching this series is to turn off the laugh track. M*A*S*H was such a thought-provoking series that sometimes the canned laughter was a distraction; yet funny enough that I didn't need to be told when to laugh.

For the material itself, I give it five stars (I'd even go higher). For the audio/video quality, four stars and for the lack of extras only one star. Overall, four stars. For this price, the lack of extras is acceptable.

Fox got it right!!
This first season DVD set is wonderful - The greatest 'bonus feature' the creators of this DVD series has given us is the option to play the dialogue straight without the laugh soundtrack. According to Alan Alda, the cast and crew never liked the canned laughter but CBS insisted on it. The people involved with the show felt the audience did'nt need to be told what was funny or when to laugh. Now you can watch these pristine quality episodes as they were intended - Without the laugh track (but for those who prefer it, the laugh soundtrack is also an option).
M * A * S * H Season 2 DVD is set to be released in May 2002. We're finally getting a DVD collection with the quality it deserves! THANKS!! (Let's hope more classic shows are on the way...)

In the beginning, when M*A*S*H was just a situation comedy
In 1972 America was still involved in the war in an unpopular war in Vietnam, which created an environment in which an antiwar comedy like "M*A*S*H" could thrive. The show was set during the Korean War, but the Vietnam sub-text was obvious from the very beginning. However, what we forget when looking back at the first season of "M*A*S*H" was that it was a traditional situation comedy in the beginning and that it was not, from the start, the great show that it became when it hit full stride. Larry Gelbart gets a lot of credit for creating the series and writing the pilot and the "Dear Dad" episode, but that first season Laurence Marks wrote almost as many episodes. This is of some importance because Marks had been one of the chief writers on "Hogan's Heroes," and there is a sense in which many of these early episodes are more reminiscent of that odd World War II sit-com set in a Nazi P.O.W. camp than "M*A*S*H" in its prime (the show...

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