...the person on the loudspeaker sounds a lot like Radar but at the same time it seems to NOT be him.
Is it or not?
We do see Radar making announcements on the camp PA system.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't some other guy who occasionally gets on the horn.
https://mash.fandom.com/wiki/Todd_Susman
shareThat answers it! Thanks.
I remember him as the police officer on Newhart. One of my favorite characters on that show.
The person on the PA was broadcasting to all the MASH units about incoming wounded. They must have had wires strung up that connected to the loudspeakers at the 4077, 8063, etc.
shareNo, but I can understand why you'd think that. I wondered it myself.
I figured it out through listening to both Radar's voice and the announcer, and there was a scene on the show that confirmed they weren't the same person (as well as the cast list). In one episode, you see Radar out in the main compound, talking to one or more of the other characters, and they all stop and listen to the announcement.
Now Radar could not be the announcer we hear if he was out in the compound, because you'd have to be in the company clerk's office talking into a microphone tuned into the camp's PA system in order to give announcements. In fact, we never get to see the owner of that voice on the entire show! :o He has a slightly lighter, smoother voice than Gary Burghoff as well.
I never liked the show very much so I seldom watched it. Not enough catch the scenes you describe.
I think the "I'm superior" attitudes of Alan Alda and his buddy (either number 1 or 2) turned me off even when I was a kid.
At the time I was watching it in my early 20s, I was still learning how to identify liberals from conservatives, so some of the politics were a little lost on me. The show does make me laugh at times, even today.
But it's pretty clear upon closer inspection that some aspects were more 1970s culture than 1950s, complete with the "live and let live" attitude many people on the base had, or making Frank the resident strawman Republican liberals love to show on tv.
Honestly, having such an anti-authority, anti-gun guy like Hawkeye [or even BJ for that matter] would have been a liability in a MASH unit in the 1950s, because he would have been seen as a security risk, as well as a trouble-maker. In fact, he did some stuff on the show that would have landed him in Leavenworth in real life, like breaking into the negotiations between the UN and the North Koreans and yelling at both sides for not agreeing on anything. Or dragging a latrine with a general in it behind a jeep on an unscheduled trip to North Korea. Or harboring a North Korean fugitive in the camp and forging documents so he'd pass as a "South" Korean doctor.
It's interesting that some of the craziest stories were partially inspired by real stuff written about the Korean War, but some of it was also Hollywood (and left-wing) fantasy writing as well.
You've nailed it perfectly. When the show was first broadcast in the '70s I still considered myself a liberal, yet the sanctimonious injection of Alda's and Farrell's leftist ideology into the scripts just seemed self-important on the part of the actors, anachronistic, and jarringly out of place in the setting of an early 1950s Army unit. Now that I've grown up, politically, I find the show so self-righteously leftist I can't stand to watch it anymore. As the seasons wore on, each episode became more and more of a virtue-signaling teachable moment with injections of slapstick relief by an ugly guy in a dress.
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