Television Photo Archives - LIFE

LIFE Said This Invention Would “Annihilate Time and Space”

Bill Syken — Mon, 20 May 2024 14:23:57 +0000

In September 1944, World War II still had a year to go, but that didn’t stop LIFE from looking ahead to peacetime in its Sept. 4, 1944 issue. The magazine ran big story on the new technology that it predicted would reshape life after the war. The story was headlined, “Television: The Next Great Development in Radio is Ready Now For Its Enormous Postwar Market.”

However odd it seems today to speak of television as a “great development in radio,” LIFE was dead-on in assessing how big a deal the combination of sound and moving pictures would be:

Within the first postwar decade television will be firmly planted as a billion-dollar U.S. industry. Its impact on U.S. civilization is beyond present prediction. Television is more than the addition to sight to the sound of radio. It has a power to annihilate time and space that will unite everyone everywhere in the immediate experience of events in contemporary life and history.

After getting readers excited about the new technology, the story then went on to detail its mechanics. The photos by Andreas Feininger are beautiful and fascinating in the way they contrast the machinery of the tubes and plates with the resulting image they produce of a female model whose presence is a kind of siren song. All that glass and metal, dear reader, will magically bring this woman into your living room.

At the time this LIFE story ran, very few Americans owned television sets. In 1946, the first year the government has data for television ownership, the total number of sets in American households was 8,000. By 1951, though, the number had ballooned to more than 10 million.

The LIFE story correctly predicted that TV would give Americans the new power to witness history live, and that was transformative. Part of the immense power of the signature moments of the original run of LIFE magazine—whether it be triumphs such as the moon landing or tragedies like the assassination of John F. Kennedy—was that Americans experienced those moments together, huddled around their televisions, seeing the same things at the same time.

The lens, at right, focused its image onto a plate in an RCA television camera tube, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This “dissector camera tube” was part of a 1944 story in LIFE on the brand new technology of television. Here’s how the magazine described the tube’s function: “Image is focussed on light-sensitive plate (left). Electrical field transforms visible image into extended electronic image…Electromagnetic field pulls this extended image back and forth in front of scanning finger mounted vertically at front of tube.”

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Schmidt projector threw this image of a model onto a screen. A 1944 article in LIFE on the new TV technology stated that “projection screens will be part of postwar home receivers.”

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A 1944 LIFE story on how television worked showed an image of girl being focused through a lens, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A color television camera, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An image from LIFE’s look at the technical side of the emerging technology known as television, 1944.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a 1944 story about emerging television technology, this demonstration photo illustrated how lines came together to make a picture.

Andreas Feininger/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Why “Voluptua” Was Too Hot For TV

Bill Syken — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 14:40:52 +0000

Back in the 1950s, a woman wearing only a pajama top as she spoke seductively to her TV viewers was too much for people to handle.

In 1954 Gloria Pall, a former Las Vegas showgirl, originated a character called Voluptua. The so-called “Living Goddess of Love” hosted a late night show devoted to romance movies on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. The show was a counterpart to a similar late-night program built that station had built around horror movies and hosted by a character named Vampira.

LIFE’s story on Voluptua was headlined, “Love on a Late Night: Hostess Sheds Her Clothes to Hold Audience.” Here’s how the magazine described her act in its issue of Jan. 31, 1955:

Volupta starts by urging each man in her audience to get out of his shoes, loosen his tie and be her very good friend. Between segments of moist celluloid love Voluptua…does some disrobing of her own. By mid-program she is down to a negligee. Then after reading her sonnets and paying tribute to famed lovers, she slips into a nightgown, climbs into bed, throws a kiss at her men and calls it a night.

The images from LIFE staff photographer George Silk captured the come-hither quality of the program. including showing Voluptua changing her costume on camera, behind a screen. One photo shows the words on Voluptua’s teleprompter, seemingly from the beginning of the broadcast: “…dashed home because I knew you’d be here at nine-thirty. But now I feel all good and warm. You and I are together at last. And we will be always…”

This was racy stuff in a time when married couples on TV were shown as sleeping in separate beds. Certain outraged viewers called the character Corruptua and pushed for Voluptua to be banished from the airwaves. And they got their way. “Just seven weeks after it first aired, amid mounting pressure from religious and PTA groups and lackluster commercial sponsorship, the station abruptly canceled the show,” the Los Angeles Times recounted in an obituary of Pall after her death in 2013.

After Voluptua died, Pall carried on. The actress, born Gloria Pallatz, had grown up in Brooklyn and headed west after winning a Miss Flatbush contest. Her screen career consisted mostly of small, often uncredited roles in movies and television, though she did appear in nine episodes of the TV series Commando Cody: Sky Marshall of the Universe. Her brief and uncredited appearance as “Striptease Woman” in the movie Jailhouse Rock resulted in a memorable still in which her legs framed the face of the movie’s star, Elvis Presley.

In the early 1960s Pall moved on from acting and worked as a real estate agent. When she died she was remembered as a pioneer. “She was quite openly in touch with her sexuality, and that was an incredibly dangerous thing to do,” author R.H. Greene, who had recorded a radio piece on Pall, told the Los Angeles Times. “We don’t have too many stories for that time that illustrate that, and Gloria’s does.”

Gloria Pall, playing the character of Voluptua, welcomed viewers to her show, where she hosted romance movies on a Los Angeles TV station in 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall, playing the character of Voluptua, hosted romance movies on a Los Angeles TV station in 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall played Voluptua, a TV character who hosted late-night romance movies and would change costumes in mid-show, 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall played Voluptua, a TV character who hosted late-night romance movies and would change costumes in mid-show, 1954.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gloria Pall, playing the character of Voluptua, hosted romance movies on a Los Angeles TV station in 1955.

George Silk/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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When Nuns Got Into The Television Habit

Bill Syken — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:06:51 +0000

The 1950s is known as The Golden Age of Television because in those early days of the medium, the programming veered more toward high culture, with stage dramas and orchestra performances coming through the airwaves along with vaudeville-type shows and the earliest sitcoms and dramas.

It was in this era that a group of Boston nuns decided that television might be just the medium for them. In its Aug. 19, 1955 issue LIFE wrote about how these nuns were learning the new technology, hoping it would be a tool for education:

Twenty lively nuns overran a studio full of cameras, lights, microphones and monitors last week and became wise in the worldly ways of television. Parochial school teachers, they were learning the technical tricks of the TV trade from working professionals and expecting that they will regularly receive and produce educational telecasts for their schools. On WIHS-TV, set up by the Boston archdiocese as a closed circuit, they worked in front of and behind the cameras, staged commercials they wrote, tossed cues, directed skits, and combined all their talents in a convent-cast version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

LIFE photographer Grey Villet was there to capture the spectacle, and it makes for some delightful pictures. Not too long ago a professor at UC-Davis wrote a serious academic paper on the topic of why nuns are so funny. But Villet’s pictures, especially the ones of the nuns are acting out a Snow White skit, capture perfectly the memorable juxtapositions than can result when these holy women immerse themselves in the modern world.

The nuns’ ambitious for their productions were obviously narrow, with their focus on teaching. But the scenes of the nuns in front of the camera call to mind that the most most famous nun ever on television was The Flying Nun, a sitcom starring Sally Field that ran from 1967 to 1970, when the Golden Age of Television had given way to a world of popular entertainment..

A group of nuns learning how to make television programming at a Boston TV station, 1955.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nuns learned about making educational programming at a Boston TV station, 1955.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Three nuns in praying position while in front of the TV cameras on a TV set where they were making educational television, 1955.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A nun acted out a makeshift TV commercial, featuring a joke about the pocket size of nuns’ habits, during a workshop at a Boston TV studio, 1955.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A group of nuns learning how to make television programming at a Boston TV station, 1955.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nuns learned about making educational programming at a Boston television station, 1955.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A TV workshop for nuns including filming a skit based on Snow White, 1955.

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

View of five nuns, each with a paper makes that depicts one of the Seven Dwarfs, as they perform under a boom microphone, August 13, 1955

Grey Villet/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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The Earliest Days of Television, Texas Style

Bill Syken — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 14:14:01 +0000

One of the great changes that took place during the original run of LIFE magazine was the rise of television culture. When the magazine was founded in 1936, television still largely a creature of the laboratory. By the time the magazine ended its original run in 1972, about 95 percent of American homes had a television.

LIFE magazine documented that growth in its many steps along the way, including stories on what early TV election coverage looked like, nuns learning to make educational shows, and portraits of these TV viewers in their early habitats, among many others.

The April 11, 1949 issue of LIFE captured the distinctive color of local television as it first came to the Lone Star state, in a story titled Television, Texas Style. Here’s a few lines from the report that capture the flavor of what was going on at Fort Worth station WPAB, a pioneering broadcaster in Texas.

When television hit Texas last fall, set owners within reach of the Southwest’s biggest station, WBAP-TV at Fort Worth, expected something that would really spell out the Texas spirit. They got it. Outside the studio the station’s well-heeled owners, Carter Publications Inc., picked up every rodeo, stock show and cutting-horse contest within range. Inside the studio they ran chuck wagons, cow ponies, autos and an occasional elephant from a visiting circus past the cameras and regularly put on big barn dances with as many as 120 people prancing about on the huge 82-foot-long floor…..The station director frequently runs a herd of cattle right through the studio. This sometimes allows pleased Texans to watch an alert stock handler bulldog an errant calf just before it demolishes a camera or gets badly tangled up in the studio’s steel scaffolding. (It never lets them see the arrival of many “cow hands” in well-polished Cadillacs.)

The photographs by Thomas McAvoy capture the scene in loving detail, from the cattle and horses in the studio to the cowboy boots of the cameraman and the memorable mugging of comedian Bruce Pierce. Also of note is the studio audience: the men and women are dressed formally. If you had to guess just from looking at them, you might think they were attending a wedding rather than a staged hoedown.

Another Texas-sized aspect of the production was its broadcast reach: “Although most eastern stations are happy with extreme ranges of 80 to 100 miles, WBAP-TV engineers claim that because of flat terrain they can supply Texas television fare to set owners in Hattiesburg, Miss., 490 air miles away.”

Of course broadcast range is now an obsolete concept, in an age where shows are transmitted digitally for viewing around the globe to anyone with an internet connection. But if the old stations had limited reach, they were also stepping into a new medium full of possibilities, and this Fort Worth station was certainly having fun with them.

A taping of local programming at a Fort Worth television station, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cattle were regularly herded through a studio during tapings at a Fort Worth television station, 1949.

homas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The horse and buggy added to the Texas atmosphere during television tapings at a Fort Worth station, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A taping at a Fort Worth television station, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cowboy comedian Bruce Pierce performing on a Fort Worth TV program, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Comedian Bruce Pierce at the taping of a Fort Worth television show, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The filming of the Fort Worth television show “Barn Dance,” which recruited performers from local square dance clubs, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A taping of the local television show “Barn Dance” at a Fort Worth television studio, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The taping of the local show Barn Dance at a Fort Worth television studio, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A taping of the television show Barn Dance at a studio in Fort Worth, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The studio audience during a taping at a Fort Worth television station, 1949.

Thomas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A cameraman wore cowboy boots while filming for a Fort Worth TV station, 1949.

homas D. McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Election Night Coverage When TV Was Young

Bill Syken — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 17:50:56 +0000

In 1952 television was just beginning to make serious inroads in the American living room. Household penetration that year was at 34.2 percent, a sign of the coming boom that would take that number close to ninety percent by the end of the decade. The 1952 election marked a sea change in politics, in that it was the first year that candidates used television to communicate to voters.

That year also brought another new phenomenon: election night as a television event.

LIFE photographer Al Fenn spent election night in 1952 visiting network newsrooms to document their coverage, which was headlined by the presidential race between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.

While the network news productions from 1952 inevitably look dated in comparison to what we see in modern digital age, plenty is not that different from what we know today.

For starters, the graphic concepts are more or less the same, even if the vote totals had to be changed manually. You see photos of Eisenhower and Stevenson hanging on the wall with their current electoral vote totals beneath them, providing a template for today’s digital equivalents that are flashed to full screen with the press of a button. CBS also had a dedicated wall for Senate races, with the familiar head shots of the opposing candidates side by side. Another graphic display charted the changing composition of the Congress.

But the most notable aspect of the 1952 election coverage was the urgency to let viewers know who was going to win—and it was especially true at CBS. The network deployed a room-filling UNIVAC computer that promised to predict the presidential election based on early voter returns. It was a good idea, but CBS’s problem in 1952 was that while the network had the technology, it didn’t trust the computer’s predictions, leading to a historic lost opportunity.

Political prognosticators had expected a close race between Eisenhower and Stevenson. So when the CBS computer predicted at 8:30 p.m. that Eisenhower would win the electoral vote by a landslide margin of 438-93, the network news director decided not to share the projection because it was so out of line with conventional wisdom. But in fact the computer had it right, almost exactly. The final electoral college result was 442-89 in favor of Eisenhower. Only hours after the original prediction did CBS reporter Charles Collingwood tell viewers that the computer had been way ahead of everyone else. This was a watershed demonstration of the power of technology, and of early data. In the coming years the practice of exit polling would help networks call many races as soon as the polls closed.

The modern detail that was notably missing from the 1952 election coverage was a big one—color coding for political parties. While you can see a shaded electoral map in the background of one photo, back then colors weren’t as meaningful or codified because Americans were watching in black-and-white. The idea of blue states and red states was still a ways away.

A young Walter Cronkite (center) manned the news desk for CBS on election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture CollectionShutterstock

Television news coverage of the 1952 election between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture CollectionShutterstock

Television coverage of election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture CollectionShutterstock

A television newsroom during election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Walter Winchell during television coverage of election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture CollectionShutterstock

Walter Winchell (left) and John Daly during television coverage of election night in 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture CollectionShutterstock

CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood (center) with the UNIVAC computer that forecasted the result of the 1952 presidential election based on early returns.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture CollectionShutterstock

A look inside CBS’s vote-predicting computer on election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Television coverage of election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A network newsroom on election night in 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A television newsroom on election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The CBS newsroom on election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A television newsroom on election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Television coverage of election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A television newsroom during election night, 1952.

Al Fenn/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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MAS*H: Extraordinary and Timeless

Bill Syken — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 14:39:56 +0000

The following is from LIFE’s new special issue M*A*S*H: TV’s Most Extraordinary Comedy, available at newsstands and online:

Each episode of M*A*S*H begins with the sound of an acoustic guitar, a B-minor chord strummed even before the first image appears. The subsequent theme song—and the opening images—have been in our heads for nearly half a century now: the back of Radar O’Reilly’s cap as he gazes up at the helicopters soaring in across the foothills; the names of principal cast members yellow-stenciled over the red-crossed rooftops of a tent city strung with loudspeakers; and, finally, the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, whose acronym has been familiar for more than 50 years, since the 1970 release of the film M*A*S*H, (which featured Sally Kellerman, who died on February 24, 2022, in the role of Margaret “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan) which two years later spawned the TV adaptation of the same name. The series endured for 11 seasons and concluded with the most-viewed episodic television event in history.

The theme song’s indelible melody was composed by Johnny Mandel, who wrote “The Shadow of Your Smile,” a song recorded by Frank Sinatra. But this tune, “Suicide Is Painless,” is his best-known work. He originally wrote it for the movie, which was drawn from a 1968 novel set during the Korean War, though it soon came to represent the Vietnam conflict, too, and the madness of war more broadly.

Thanks to the ongoing syndication of the television series, M*A*S*H has come to be viewed through a universal scrim of mosquito netting, a khaki-colored landscape of every war, with the olive drab wardrobe inevitably giving way to the olive-infused martinis. “Everything is painted green,” observes Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, the hospital’s chief surgeon, played in the series by Alan Alda. “The clothes are green, the food is green—except the vegetables, of course. The only thing that’s not green is the blood.”

The helicopters, of course, were Army green, and the whap-whap of their rotors echoed the rhythmic rat-a-tat of the rapid-fire dialogue, which owed a debt to Groucho Marx, a hero of Larry Gelbart’s, the show’s cocreator and most renowned writer. Gelbart was the bard of Incheon. He made Hawkeye the king of the snappy comeback.

Is that an incoming mortar? “The mortar merrier,” Hawkeye says. Should they toast fellow surgeon Frank Burns? “He won’t fit in the toaster,” Hawkeye exclaims. In the television iteration of M*A*S*H, Hawkeye channels a peacenik Groucho when he says: “I’ll carry your books, I’ll carry a torch, I’ll carry a tune, I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash-and-carry, ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,’ I’ll even hari-kari if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun.”

There was other Marxist dialogue as well—Karl Marx, in this instance, not Groucho—for M*A*S*H was often tackling big ideas, though the lofty elements were almost always leavened by low comedy. As Corporal Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), in his never-ending bid to be discharged, tells his commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), “Sir, I have to confess: I’m a communist—an atheistic, Marxist, card-carrying, uh . . .”

“Bolshevik,” Blake barks.

“No—honest,” a defensive Klinger responds.

The umbrage Hawkeye took, combined with the comedy he used as a coping mechanism, conspired to make M*A*S*H a chronicle of war not unlike The Iliad, every bit as epic in scope and timeless in theme. M*A*S*H was set in the 1950s, conceived in the 1960s, debuted in cinemas and on TV in the 1970s, and concluded, before an audience of more than 100 million people, in the 1980s. In the decades since, it has run in syndication without pause, making M*A*S*H—including the best-selling book in 1968 and the Oscar-winning movie in 1970—an indelible fixture in American popular culture. “Now that it’s off, it’s on more than ever,” Gelbart quipped in his introduction to the The Complete Book of M*A*S*H, published a year after the show ended.

Before M*A*S*H, television comedies set in the military had been laugh-tracked diversions from war, not reflections on its true nature: McHale’s Navy; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.;and The Phil Silvers Show (popularly known as “Sgt. Bilko”) were comforting. Television’s longest-running reflection on World War II was Hogan’s Heroes, set in a grim German prisoner of war camp yet played for guffaws.

The 251 episodes of M*A*S*H spanned 11 seasons, which was eight years longer than the Korean War. When it concluded its initial run, an English professor at Clemson University calculated that the 94.9 hours of episodes—excluding credits and commercials—were nearly the same length of time required to watch the complete works of Shakespeare. One could quibble with the exact math, but one thing is certain: The appeal of M*A*S*H was its Shakespearean melding of drama and humor, high and low, heavy and light. The series embraced timeless themes of love, death, joy, tragedy, war, sex, and booze. Or as Hawkeye once put it: “Our motto is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy hour.”

The doctors of the 4077th were understandably thirsty, charged as they were with a soul-numbing task: sewing up wounded soldiers and sending them back to the front to fight again. “All their efforts were futile in a way, in that their project, their duty, [and] their obligation is to heal wounds, put people back together again, in the middle of an overall effort, which is to destroy life,” producer Gene Reynolds, who died at age 96 in 2020, told the Oral History archivists at the Television Academy Foundation. “The absurdity, the drollness, the futility of their putting bodies back together again, and the overall effort is to destroy them. It’s existential.”

That absurdity—restoring human life so that it might be destroyed—was a catch-22, and M*A*S*H owed a debt to the Joseph Heller novel that spawned the term, in which insanity was proof of sanity. It also paid homage to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its recurring slogan, “War Is Peace.” The conundrum faced every week by the show’s surgeons, and the injured soldiers who passed through their operating theater, resonated with much of the American public when the show made its debut on CBS in 1972, while the United States was hoping to broker a settlement in Vietnam by bombing the North Vietnamese.

By the time the sets of M*A*S*H were struck from the lots in 1983 and re-assembled in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Vietnam War was long over, but more conflicts were to come. Alan Alda noted that the series was unfortunately evergreen, because war was likewise timeless. “As M*A*S*H goes into reruns,” Alda noted, “the Vietnam War is going into reruns, too.” That same year, 1983, the U.S. invaded the island nation of Grenada. Meanwhile, 241 U.S. Marines and military personnel died when their barracks were bombed in Beirut.

M*A*S*H achieved something remarkable: It was of its time, yet it remains relevant for all time. “Wherever they come from,” Hawkeye once said of the casualties on his operating table, “they’ll never run out.” And so M*A*S*H has stayed ever vital. It will—to paraphrase Hawkeye—carry on, carry over, carry forward.

Here is a selection of photos from LIFE’s new special issue M*A*S*H: TV’s Most Extraordinary Comedy.

Cover image by MPTVImages.com

Sally Kellerman, who died on February 24, 2022, played Margaret ‘Hot Lips” O’Houlihan in the 1970 film version of M*A*S*H.

Moviestore/Shutterstock

Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), Margaret O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and Trapper John (Elliott Gould) in the film version of M*A*S*H, 1970.

20th Century Fox/Aspen/Kobal/Shutterstock

Director Robert Altman on the set of his 1970 film M*A*S*H.

20th Century Fox/Aspen/Kobal/Shutterstock

The poster for the 1970 movie M*A*S*H.

: Universal History Archive/Shutterstock

The television version of M*A*S*H starred Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce and featured Gary Burghoff, the lone carryover from the cast of the film, as Radar O’Reilly.

Steve Schapiro/Corbis/Getty

Radar (Gary Burgoff) laughed with Lt. Col. Henry Blake (left, played by McLean Stevenson, who left M*A*S*H after the third of its 11 seasons).

CBS Photo Archive/Getty

Behind the scenes at the filming of the final episode of M*A*S*H, which aired in 1983, the cast buried a time capsule. “Rather than leaving a time capsule in Korea, we should leave one on the lot,” said Jamie Farr (fifth from left), who played Cpl. Max Klinger. “We found a great place near the commissary.”

Paul Harris/Getty

The surviving cast and creators of M*A*S*H gathered in 2002 to celebrate the show’s 30th anniversary.

Randy Holmes/20th Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

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