Trivia / Hogan's Heroes

• Acting for Two: Notably, all of these episodes feature impersonations of one character by the other.
  • In Kinchloe's A Day in the Limelight episode "The Prince from the Phone Company," Ivan Dixon also plays the title character.
  • "Heil Klink" features a financial expert called Wolfgang Brauner who's wanted by the Gestapo; John Banner plays Schultz and Brauner.
  • The two-parter "Lady Chitterly's Lover" has Bernard Fox act as both the bumbling Col. Crittendon and the traitorous Lord Chitterly.
  • In "Funny Thing Happened on the Way to London" guest star Lloyd Bochner plays RAF Group Captain James Roberts and his German double Lt. Baumann as part of a plot to assassinate Winston Churchill. Also see Fake Nationality below.
• California Doubling: Made the "perpetual winter" continuity of the series unrealistic, with full green foliage in the surroundings, and the actors sweating in their caps and coats and acting like it's freezing outside when in actuality it was well over 90 degrees outside. In fact the main set was on the Desilu lot near the sets of The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C..
• Cast the Expert: In the first episode, it's mentioned that Newkirk has some training as a magician - hence his skill with pickpocketing and sleight of hand. Richard Dawson performed at the Palladium.
• Completely Different Title: The series is known as Papa Schultz in France, putting the emphasis more on Sergeant Hans Schultz (who became the series' most popular and well remembered character there).
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Racial variation — while Carter does the best in-person Hitler, Kinchloe does him for phone calls and radio messages.
• The Danza
  • Bob Crane as Col. Robert Hogan, though this is actually coincidental; the character was named after actor Robert Hogan, who was a friend of co-creator Bernard Fein, and director Gene Reynolds (and indeed appeared on the series himself).
  • On occasion, Ivan Dixon as Ivan Kinchloe (even though Kinch's original first name was James).
• Fake Nationality: Almost completely averted. John Banner was Austrian, the rest of the regular cast matched the nationality of their characters. Major Hochstetter — a character not in the main cast — was played by an American actor, as was French resistance leader Tiger.
  • Howrver, many recurring and one-shot characters are played by actors or other nationalities, such as in "Funny Thing Happened on the Way to London", Canadian Lloyd Bochner playing dual roles as an Englishman and a German... who's pretending to be English, making it also an In-Universe Fake Nationality.
• Fake Russian: Marya, played by American Nita Talbot.
• He Also Did:
  • Both Werner Klemperer and John Banner had appeared in the fact-based drama Operation Eichmann playing more serious, evil Nazis. Klemperer was Adolf Eichmann himself, while Banner played notorious Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss.
  • In 1956, Werner Klemperer and John Banner appeared together on the "Safe Conduct" episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Klemperer played Prof. Klopka and Capt. Kriza, and Banner played a train conductor. This was the first time they had starred together on TV or film.
  • Klemperer also appeared with Howard Caine in the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg.
• I Am Not Spock:
  • Averted with Bob Crane and Werner Klemperer; Crane loved playing Hogan and wanted to be remembered as such, while Klemperer mentioned on The Pat Sajak Show that he's perfectly okay with people coming up to him and saying, "Hi, Colonel [Klink]!"
  • Inverted with Richard Dawson, who spent a number of years trying to form his own identity, separate from Newkirk; in fact, when appearing on The Dinah Shore Show with Caroll Spinney and Oscar the Grouch, Spinney had Oscar ask, "So, Dawson, how's everything over at Hogan's Heroes? Heh-heh-heh!" and Dawson was not amused. If his long-remembered tenures on Match Game and Family Feud are any indication, it worked swimmingly.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Colonel Klink was depicted as an incompetent musician. Werner Klemperer was a highly gifted violinist and came from a long line of musicians.
  • Carter, the least romantically successful of the main Heroes, was played by Larry Hovis, who was the only one of their actors to be married throughout the show's run. The reason his hands are never seen without gloves was because he refused to take off his wedding ring while filming.
• Jews Playing Nazis:
  • Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz were played by Werner Klemperer and John Banner, both Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Most notably, Klemperer only took the part on the condition that Klink would be perpetually inept and always get outsmarted by the protagonists.
  • Two recurring villains are General Burkhalter and Major Hochstetter, who were played by Jewish actors Leon Askin and Howard Caine, respectively. Askin was born in Austria and fled to America in 1940 after persecution by the Nazis.
  • Other actors of Jewish descent who appeared in minor roles as Nazis and camp officials include Oscar Beregi Jr. as General Stauffen and Walter Janovitz as Oscar Schnitzer, the camp's guard dog trainer (who's secretly sympathetic to the resistance).
• Money, Dear Boy: Co-creator Albert S. Ruddy wanted nothing to do with the series. When he was offered a position on the show's writing staff, he turned it down to concentrate on writing screenplays for movies; the main reason he co-wrote the pilot episode was at the suggestion of a colleague who said he would be paid rather nicely as the creator of a weekly series, as common practice back in those days was whoever wrote the pilot episode of a series was credited as the creator(s).
• Prop Recycling: The jacket Hogan wears is the exact same one worn by Frank Sinatra in Von Ryan's Express.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Hogan's womanizing took on a new light when the seedy details of Bob Crane's private life came out. Crane also married Sigrid Valdis who played Hilda, the secretary with whom Hogan had an implied relationship.
  • Carter almost never takes off his gloves. If you look at one of the very rare scenes where he's bare-handed you can see that he's wearing a wedding ring. Larry Hovis, his actor, refused to remove it even while he was acting.
  • LeBeau is never seen in short sleeves for a very sobering reason: Robert Clary is a Holocaust survivor. The long sleeves hide the number tattooed on his forearm.
  • Related to the above, although the series is often criticized for lampooning Nazis and prisoner of war camps, in fact many of the actors involved in the series were direct survivors of Nazi oppression. Aside from Clary, John Banner was an Austrian-born Jew who lost family in the concentration camps, while other actors in the series, including Klemperer and Leon Askin, left Germany and Austria as Hitler rose to power. Askin's scar, in fact, was genuine, a result of a beating that he had received from SA thugs shortly after the Anschluss, and shortly before he was able to flee to America.
• Real-Life Relative: Axis Annie was played by Werner Klemperer's then-wife, Louise Troy.
• Recycled Set: It's subtle, but if astute viewers pay really close attention, anytime the heroes are doing business in a different barrack, it's clearly the exact same set as Hogan's barrack, with the bunks and lockers and such rearranged. Even the interior of the new Rec Hall in Season Six, the front wall is the same, a bookcase is inserted in the doorway.
• Referenced by...:
  • In the The Simpsons episode "The Last Temptation of Homer", Werner Klemperer's ghost is Homer's Guardian Angel. Homer, of course, thinks it's Colonel Klink. Klemperer plays along with it in his final cameo.
  • In one episode of Green Acres, Oliver mentions he had a stint in Stalag 13.
  • The series has a shared reality with Green Acres. During a flashback from Oliver's World War II years, both Colonel Hogan and Stalag 13 are mentioned. Colonel Klink also showed up in — of all places! — the Batman TV show and The Simpsons.
• Unfinished Episode:
  • Both Werner Klemperer and Richard Dawson have hinted that a seventh season of the series, which would have included a proper finale in which the war ends and the prisoners of Stalag 13 were liberated, was in the works at the time The Rural Purge happened, thus axing the series for good after its sixth season.
  • In The '70s, Larry Hovis began work on an After Show that would have focused on the original Heroes' children fighting in Vietnam; plans for the series were abruptly halted when Bob Crane was murdered.
• What Could Have Been
  • In separate interviews, both Werner Klemperer and Richard Dawson have hinted that there was a possible seventh season in production, but was more than likely stopped, due to the series falling victim to The Rural Purge. There has also been some hinting that the supposed seventh season was to be the real last season, including a final episode in which the war ends, the POWs are liberated.
  • Richard Dawson wanted to give Newkirk a Liverpudlian accent in order to avoid the stereotype that all British characters speak in a cockney accent. However, people were having a difficult time understanding his dialogue, and he was asked to give Newkirk a cockney accent after all, to which request he relented. Ironically, shortly after the pilot was filmed, A Hard Day's Night was released and went over really well with audiences, leaving Dawson to ponder that if audiences could understand what The Beatles said, surely they could've understood Newkirk.
  • Co-creator Albert S. Ruddy said that the show was originally set in a modern-day American jail (though the premise of the prisoners carrying on operations under the guard's noses was still intact), but when he got wind of another series being developed for NBC set in an Italian prison camp in WW2, he reworked the series' setting into a German prison camp. In fact, when the other pilot (Campo 44) finally made it to air in 1967, it was heavily criticized as being a rip-off of Hogan's Heroes.
  • Ruddy was also offered to be a staff writer on the series, but turned down the offer, as he didn't even want to be involved with the show's production anyway; he wanted to write movies instead, and only co-wrote the pilot episode to have a series creator credit to his name.
  • Early production had intended for Schultz and Langenscheidt to be a "Laurel and Hardy" type comedy pair. This was scrapped in favor of having Schultz play off Klink instead.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Howard Caine played three different German officers, Major Keitel in "Happy Birthday, Adolf" (S1/E17); Col. Feldcamp in "The Battle of Stalag 13" (S2/E5); and Maj. Hochstetter in 37 episodes.
  • William Christopher appeared as an extra in four episodes, playing a German officer, and a Stalag 13 prisoner.
  • In addition to his recurring role as camp guard Corporal Langenscheidt, Jon Cedar appeared in three episodes as other characters (a Guilt-Ridden Accomplice to a government-sanctioned counterfeiting ring, a Beleaguered Assistant to a Gestapo officer and Oskar Danzig, a Master of Disguise in La Résistance). Given that last one there are occasional Epileptic Trees that the other two identities (and possibly Langenschneidt himself) were some of Danzig's disguises, or that Langengschneidt and Danzig are brothers or cousins.

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