Review Detail

This one brought back lots of great memories for me. This was my first "grown up" tv show I remember watching. Yes, it was a comedy, and many of the subtleties were lost of me at the age of five, but even at that young age I sensed the underlying message about the futility of war. You knew you were watching something different, something dramatic and important. And now, all these decades later, I look back at MASH as one of the true great series in the history of television.

This firstling fan edit wonderfully captures the spirit and power of those early (and in my opinion, best) seasons of the show. The characters are rich and immediately engaging. The loose narrative works really well, it has an Altman feel and structure much like the original movie that inspired it. And even though I knew how it must end, I still felt surprised and choked up when the story came to close. Very well done.

The video upscale from 4X3 to 16x9, looks very look overall, none of scenes felt too zoomed in or chopped off. There is some quality differences between different episodes. Also, there is a very significant video quality difference during the new opening credits with the cuts to the incoming helicopters that I found a bit distracting as I believe these are from the feature film and I am surprised at how degraded they looked. But most tv shows through the 70s and 80s used poor quality stock footage for shots, so I guess it fits with the edit.

I did find it distracting that the editor choose to put "Do Not Distribute" warning right in the middle of the opening credits, instead of before the main feature.

Majority of the cuts worked for me, I did not notice any flash frames or significant transition issues. Though I did notice a continuity issue right away.... In the beginning Hawkeye is wearing his blue Hawaiian shirt, he is still wearing it when the copters arrive and when he is evaluating the incoming wounded at the top of the landing hill, but when he gets to bottom of the hill he is in army greens. Not a big deal, but it is one of the challenges of doing a multi-episode edit that editors need to keep an eye on. The end credits, also come to a very abrupt end, no gentle fade out of music or video.... it just stops.

Audio is for the most part good. I loved the use of the original them song. Though the instrumental version that is used for a scene transition at 1hr6min, while dramatically powerful, was too loud for my tastes. Also, there were a couple of scenes in the MP4 version I watched where the audio went out sync for a minute or two, for example at 31minutes where Radar gives Trap the bad news.

All in all, a good firstling edit. The world of Hawkeye, Trapper and Colonel Blake is as entertaining today as it was 40 years ago and this edit really does shine a light on some of the series best moments while telling a fresh narrative.

Thumbs Up.