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"Hip, Flip,
Cocky Bob Crane reveals his secret of playing a hero's role"
TV Guide August 3, 1968 - August 9, 1968 by Edith Efron Pages 25-27
"Think John Wayne!" Hip, flip, cocky Bob Crane reveals his secret of playing a hero's role by Edith Efron "I watch Hogan's Heroes regularly. This young man, Bob Crane, is a wonderful farceur and there are almost none of them around any more. He's habit-forming." Helen Hayes. "The ex-POW's in Albuquerque, N.M., have an association. They had a convention and invited me. A lot of POW's are hooked on Hogan's Heroes. They're our biggest rooters - along with New York Jewish delicatessen owners!" Bob Crane. Millions of Americans are comparably "hooked" on Hogan and his merry band of Allied solders who play hob with their Nazi captors every week on CBS. And Hogan, played by actor Bob Crane, has been one of the public's darlings for the past three seasons - to the stupefaction of a lot of people. The stupefaction mostly exists in the minds of those who haven't seen and don't want to see the heroes, because they've been understandably;y traumatized by what they've heard about it - that it's about a Nazi POW camp with "funny Nazis." But the "soft-on-Nazis" trauma turned out to be unnecessary; the show, inspired by "Stalag 17," proved, in production, to be astonishingly innocent. It is, in fact, a classical black-and-white comedy with a bunch of admireable guys throughout troucing a bunch of contempltible guys. The good guys are naiaclly unstoppbale indivudualists who have burrowed the POW camp into a giant Swiss cheese, through the holes of which they conduct jubilant and succssive "geat escapes" in the Allied cuase. And the bad guys are Chaplineseque embodiments of authoriztatian absurdtieis -
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Last Modified : Fri 16 May 2008 7:12 AM
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