Several weeks ago I was out shopping with a few people when I came across, of all things, a t-shirt for the show Hogan's Heroes. The shirt featured a large picture of Hogan chatting with the typically confused Sgt. Schultz. Needless to say, I instantly snatched it up. At the time my only regret was that I couldn't find a shirt that featured a picture of Colonol Klink. [I should be so lucky!] Only a few hours later did it register on me that I had just bought a shirt that had a big, colorful picture of a Nazi on it. Just how would the rest of the world react to that?
Pretty well, actually. I wore the shirt around town and managed to garner favorable responses from both friends and total strangers. It seems that people have nothing but fond memories for those jolly members of the Third Reich. Upon reflection, I realized that the Nazi characters on the show were actually more likable than the Allied prisoners. Not only were they not particularly interested in the war, but the fact that they were so easily and consistantly duped turned them into sympathetic characters. Kind of odd, once I stopped to think about it.
In all honesty I don't know what any of this means other than that people seem to dig a situation comedy show based around the most insane premise ever. ["A World War Two P.O.W. camp. It's funny!"] Remember, if you want to make a fashion statment, you could do worse than a Hogan's Heroes shirt. It's preferrable to those Big Johnson shirts at least; a line of shirts that are so tacky they make Nazis look like the height of fashion.
A Special Note
I just wanted to take this opportunity to give a tip of the fez to Werner Klemperer. You have to admire a man who managed to make an entire acting career out of looking like a Nazi.
I'm going over the fence at midnight. If you want to get ahold of me before then, drop me a line at gleep9@hotmail.com. Scurry on back through the underground tunnels to either the main or the pop culture page.
Get your own Free Home Page