| M*A*S*H (20th Century Fox) |
  Cue the acoustic guitar and that old somber song about a certain illicit activity being painless - it's M*A*S*H you horse hockey'n ferret face! M*A*S*H, for you kids who don't know, was a 1973 Comedy show about a Medical Unit in the US Armed forces and the crazy, sometimes low-brow comedy hijinks that would take place with everything from military life to rescuing heroes on the mountains. It followed the lives of Hawkeye Pierce, Ferret Face who tries to feign being a sexual deviant to get out of the miliatary, hot lips Hoolihan, and their leader, Colonel Potter, who uses the term "Horse Hockey" as a placeholder for terms like "bulls***" and "baloney".
Doin' Da' Wartime Boogie - My Experiences I discovered M*A*S*H first time when I was hanging with some old metal bandmates around 2001 and we decided to download PC Atari Emulator and a pile of ROMs from Atari Age one night. Our singer and rhythm guitarist, being a fan of the show and having military ties himself, wanted to try it out, and I was curious as I'd just marathoned a bunch of episodes off VHS as of that time. M*A*S*H turns out it really does a good job of catching the vibe of the show, as you start out flying a helicopter rescuing stranded soldiers from the forest in some kind of screwed up air ambulance relay race. Once your helicopter is "full" the idle speed drops to let you know what's up, and you are to immediatley drop off your patients to the facility on the left. Once a round has finished, it moves to some kind of kooky Atari-based version of the board game "Operation" where you extract bullets from your victim with a BBQ fork without touching the sides of the body or the game makes a loud growling noise and calls you "FERRET FACE!!". I found this copy years later in an Everett WA thrift shop for less than the cost of a gallon of gas right now and have kept it because every time I toy with selling it off I end up playing it and going "nah, this one really is a keeper". |
