MASH camp hike revisited
Back in April last year, I posted about the Malibu Creek State Park trails where you can visit the old locations of M*A*S*H — Sightseeing is painless: The M*A*S*H Hike.
In this LA Times story today, “‘MASH’ camp comes alive”, the news comes that state officials want to re-create the sets as an attraction, since so many visitors come to see them for that reason and come away disappointed.
Of course, it wasn’t just M*A*S*H that was filmed at the park,
The park’s 6,000-plus acres have been the backdrop for thousands of movie and TV scenes since 1927, when it became the Scottish Highlands for a silent movie called “Annie Laurie” that starred Lillian Gish.
It doubled for Wales in 1941’s best-picture Oscar winner, “How Green Was My Valley” and was Shangri-La in 1937’s “Lost Horizon.”
It was the backdrop for a primate-run world in “Planet of the Apes” in 1968 and where “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” were chased over a cliff by a pursuing posse in 1969.
But it is “MASH” that matters most to park visitors, who come from all over the world to see for themselves the Korean wartime world inhabited by Hawkeye, Hot Lips, BJ, Trapper John and the others who filled out the landmark black comedy’s on-camera Army surgical team.
They’re even considering special overnight camping arrangements with possible screenings of the show — projected onto a bed sheet, naturally.
Whatever one thinks of the idea, it certainly seems a unique enough reason to go for a stroll in the great outdoors.