M*A*S*H Saturday morning cartoons? And TOYS?

In the 1970s, almost anything that was popular enough got its own Saturday morning cartoon series and licensed toys. But some properties were better suited for this sort of exploitation than others. While there's nothing that shocking about a Happy Days cartoon and Fonzie dolls, M*A*S*H would seem to be far too adult to try to sell to kids like that. But that didn't stop Hollywood from trying.

The clip above is from MUSH, a truly wretched cartoon that re-imagined the doctors from the 4077th as a bunch of dogs working in an arctic fort. (MUSH stood for "Mangy Unwanted Shabby Heroes.") If for some reason you feel compelled to see more, you can do so here.

You can really sense the despair of the people working on this cartoon. It's like they knew this was a horrible idea, but they had to go through with it because their boss said so. So you get some really ugly and awkward character designs, and a Trapper John stand-in who is always channeling John Wayne for some reason, and a Radar O'Reilly dog who starts every other sentence by going "Glm! Glm!" The folks behind this cartoon were obviously desperate for anything to do with these stupid, hideous characters, and as soon as anybody had any idea at all, it immediately went into the cartoon. ("The guy who works in the mailroom suggested that we make the Radar dog says 'Glm! Glm!' all the time..." "That's totally stupid and makes no sense. Let's do it.")

The M*A*S*H action figures seem even less likely, but they actually happened. Kids could play with their own Charles Emerson Winchester the third and Col. Sherman T. Potter, and there was even an entire M*A*S*H military base. It featured "high impact plastic buildings" - presumably so you could recreate those very kid-friendly episodes where Hawkeye and company desperately tried to operate on wounded soldiers while shells were raining down outside.

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