YMMV / Hogan's Heroes

• Alternative Character Interpretation
  • Is Schultz really the dim-witted Bavarian hick he appears to be, or is he Obfuscating Stupidity to cover his secret opposition against the Nazi system, while at the same time consciously helping Hogan's plans? It's more believable when you learn Schultz in peacetime was CEO of one of the largest toymakers in Germany. Obviously he couldn't successfully run a large business for years if he was really as dumb as he acts. Now throw in the fact that his toy factory was repurposed by the Nazis as a munitions plant, and that Schultz himself was drafted as an enlisted man (the German military had a very rigid class system in which commissioned officers were basically nobility, enlisted men were common rabble, and NCOs like Schultz were only slightly better, though the Luftwaffe tended to be more lax), despite his obvious management skills, it starts to look a lot more than just likely. Also, Schultz outright says that before the war he was a member of the Social Democrats, a left wing party that opposed (and was later banned by) the Nazis.
  • The same can be wondered about Klink. Schultz once admitted to Klink that he was a member of the German Social Democratic Party before the war, at the same time Klink admitted that he hated the whole Nazi system - particularly the SS. These probably helped them to turn a blind eye to some of Hogan's most blatant lies and plots. On the other hand, if they actually did catch Hogan in any of his plots, they'd be most likely transferred to the Russian front, meaning both have a vested interest in not catching Hogan.
  • It's very possible that Klink is actually Nimrod or at least a secret ally. He blatantly lets slip classified information in front of Hogan and the others often, which could be because he's an arrogant fool, but there are also times that he goes out of his way to help which suggests otherwise (warning about radio-detecting equipment probably being the biggest example).
• Awesome Music: The opening and closing themes.
• Crosses the Line Twice: A weird retroactive example. While it wasn't considered particularly extreme at the time, a lot of modern audiences are shocked at a zany comedy set in a Nazi concentration camp. It's important to note that Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp, but rather a POW camp, the main distinction being that POWs had more human rights than those in concentration camps (that is, they had ANY rights at all), and that there was no active effort to exterminate those interned beyond the usual mistreatment commonplace in the poorly-run Nazi war machine.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: This series has its own page.
• Fair for Its Day/Values Resonance: In the casting, as described in the introduction to the main article. Critics who slam the program for trivializing Nazi concentration camps (always seeming to ignore how the show actually depicts a POW camp for Western Allied prisoners, not a concentration camp proper) never get around to just how much of a groundbreaker it was, in the American TV environment of the early 1960's, to cast an African-American not as second- or third-banana comic relief, but as Hogan's right-hand man and the man responsible for creating all the gadgetry the team needed to do its work (preceding Mission: Impossible).
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • In-show, in an early episode Newkirk adamantly refuses to dress up as a woman (before a Gilligan Cut showing him in a wig and a dress, of course). Of the five Heroes he turns up to be the one who later dresses up as a middle-aged/old woman most often over the course of the series.
  • In "Two Nazis for the Price of One", Hogan is blackmailed for information about the Manhattan Project. The Gestapo officer blackmailing him? Played by Alan Oppenheimer. As in that Oppenheimer. J. Robert Oppenheimer is a distant cousin.
• Magnificent Bitch: Marya is a Soviet spy who operates under the cover of being a White Russian émigré. Extremely capable behind her overacting and eccentric behavior, she proves one of the most cunning and charismatic schemers in the series. In her first appearance, she helps the Heroes to spring captured French Resistance member Tiger in order to obtain information about secret German airbases for her country. Subsequently, Marya alternates between working with the Heroes towards a common goal and working at cross purposes towards her own objectives, often using their own scheming to her advantage. Her achievements include destroying or discrediting plenty of high-ranking German officers and scientists, helping to steal a large portion of Hermann Göring's art collection, sabotaging the reputation of an experimental wunderwaffe, retrieving a Soviet scientist, and saving her spy ring from an SS plan to expose it. The only recurring character to consistently get the better of Colonel Robert Hogan, Marya stands head and shoulders above the show's other schemers.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Klink and Schultz provide the two memes below respectively.
    • "Dis-missed!"
    • "I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing!" (Or later, just "I know nothing!")
  • Major Hochstetter has two catchphrases that are also meme-able.
    • "What is this man doing here?... What is this man doing here??... WHAT IS THIS MAN DOING HERE!?!?!?"
    • "WHO IS THIS MAN?!"
• Parody Displacement: Hogan's Heroes is a parody of WWII POW films like Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. The show is now better recognized than the serious movies it was making fun of, which is why there are modern viewers who wonder why anyone thought the subject matter was funny in the first place.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Younger viewers might be a bit surprised to not see Richard Dawson either hosting a game show or being part of a panel on a game show.
  • William Christopher was a minor supporting actor in a number of episodes, sometimes playing a POW, sometimes playing a German, and sometimes playing a POW playing a German. He would later become famous in a series produced by Gene Reynolds (who directed many of the episodes Christopher was in), M*A*S*H.
• Spiritual Successor: To Billy Wilder's Stalag 17. So much so, that the producers of Stalag 17 sued Bing Crosby Productions for plagiarism. They lost, mainly on the grounds that, as a farce, Hogan's Heroes wasn't replicating the tone of Stalag 17 and was more in the realm of parody or homage, which are legally protected. The pilot, in particular, has quite substantial similarities in basic plot to the film (both being based around The Mole). However, it's also a very obvious type of plot for a bunch of spies and saboteurs operating from inside an enemy POW camp. There's also Schultz who, unsurprisingly, is an Expy for Stalag 17's Schulz, except his friendliness with the POWs is genuine.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Major Hochstetter was a reprisal of Gestapo Colonel Feldkamp, played by Howard Caine in season 2. Feldkamp was killed by a car bomb but his behavior was otherwise identical and even asks "WHO IS THIS MAN?!" when first meeting Hogan.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The season 4 episode "Watch the Trains Go By" has the crew returning from an aborted sabotage mission to find a largely increased guard presence around the camp. An entire episode could be made of the phrase "How do we escape into a POW camp?" but the crew gets back in by sending two of their men to get caught cutting the wire and allow the others to sneak back in.
• Values Dissonance
  • Some of Hogan's more... aggressive actions towards women come off as creepy to modern eyes.
  • While Kinchloe gets his chance at two women, both of them are black. He almost never vocally shares the other inmates' interest in beautiful white women. This might also be an aversion of Politically Correct History, as it wouldn't be particularly smart for a black man to do so even among friends in that time period.
  • When Carter reveals that he is part Native American, LeBeau and Newkirk spend the rest of the episode mocking him over it, to his evident displeasure. Especially jarring given the show's generally respectful treatment of its black characters.
  • Similar to the Native American example, women who aren't young and thin get hit pretty hard. Frau Linkmeyer gets the worst of it (due to appearing the most), but Burkhalter's niece in "Gowns by Yvette" is mocked for being a pudgy woman that no man would ever genuinely want.
  • More recently (relatively), the show made the #5 spot on TV Guide's Top 50 Worst TV Shows of All Time in 2002, with the author of the article arguing that the show is really outdated and tasteless in its subject matter.
• The Woobie: Sergeant Schultz's Butt-Monkey nature is mostly Played for Laughs, but his constant state of anxiety despite being a Punch-Clock Villain at worst, the cruel disrespect and discipline he gets from Hochsetter, Burkhalter, and even Klink on occasion, and the episodes where he comes close to being sent to the Russian front can make him a genuinely tragic figure every now and then.
• Woolseyism
  • While the original is unclear on where in Germany the Germans came from, the aforementioned dub has Klink from Dresden and Schultz from Munich. Why? Because the Saxon and Bavarian accents are the ones other Germans find the funniest...
  • There is an old rivalry between Bavarians and the rest of Germany, or, as the Bavarians say it, "Prussia". This is also referenced in the German dub. Schultz even calls Klink "Saupreiß" on some occasions.