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2. Seriously, I'm not one to go to the mattresses to defend Hogan's Heroes, a middling 1960s sitcom on par with Get Smart or Gilligan's Island. But.
3. The one interesting thing about Hogan's Heroes is that it was a military service comedy, a once popular genre that seems to have died out. The genre runs from the high (The Good Soldier Švejk, Catch-22, MASH) to the low (Hogan's Heroes, Sgt. Bilko)
4. As a service comedy, the most interesting thing about Hogan's Heroes was Sgt. Schulz, a German soldier who really didn't want to do his job & was good at not doing it.
5. It's strange that the service comedy has disappeared despite (or maybe perhaps because of?) the interminable Forever Wars.
6. The critique that Hogan's Heroes whitewashed or made light of Nazis wasn't just made by woke millennials -- that was Mad Magazine's critique in the 1960s (they shifted story from a POW camp to a concentration camp).
7. Other interesting byproduct of Hogan's Heroes is the movie Auto Focus about the disturbing life & death of star Bob Crane. Not a great movie but a decent one. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Focus
7. In conclusion: Hogan's Heroes: not great art, a little problematic but also having some merit & complexity. Worth watching a few episodes for general cultural literacy reasons.
8. One last thing: Hogan's Heroes shows how seemingly contemporary "woke" controversies are usually reprisals of critiques that existed all along. That's true of much debates about culture. These controversies are of long standing.
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