jeffclinthill

In many ways, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was a teenage version of the Bob Cummings Show. After playing Bob's nephew, Chuck as a college student for a few years, Dwayne Hickman appeared as Dobie as a high school student with many of the mannerisms of Bob Cummings as Bob Collins. Just one of those mannerisms was the "takes" that he would do whenever sidekick Maynard G. Krebs would murder the English language. The Bob Cummings Show had French Colette DuBois played by Lisa Gaye who when pondering the idea of dating Chuck, said, "Wouldn't that be like you Americans say, 'stealing the baby bed'?" To which Bob did his double take and then reacting, "You mean 'robbing the cradle'?" Like in the Cummings show, Dobie was surrounded by attractive girls, usually with some comic fiasco of an ending with the given girl of each episode. Whereas Bob Collins had his loyal secretary Schultzy always pining for him, Dobie had Zelda. Whereas Bob Collins was forever thwarted by Lola Albright as Kay Michaels, Dobie was forever thwarted by Tuesday Weld as Thalia Menninger.

Speaking as a Vietnam war veteran who arrived in Vietnam the same summer as the movie takes place (1969) and who went on R&R in 1970, I found "Love and Honor" to be terribly annoying and insulting in its blaring inaccuracies that indicate that the producers did not employ (or else didn't listen to) any form of technical advisor.

1: When going on R&R (or leave) from Vietnam, we traveled in civilian clothes, not in our jungle fatigues.

2: When in any form of uniform, we wore an insignia showing rank. Those in the Army (soldiers) in Vietnam wore small, black, metal rank insignias that the enemy could not see from a distance. The guys in "Love and Honor" are not wearing any rank insignias at all.

3: The movie touts "military travels free." That is only when traveling on a military plane or a military chartered plane when the individual has specific orders to fly. When flying commercial, we showed our (leave or PCS) orders and then got 50% off by flying "Space Available," meaning we may or may not be getting on the next flight or the flight after that or the flight after that. There is absolutely no way any military member could have been on R&R in Hong Kong and from there flown out - let alone fly all the way to and all the way back from some location in the continental United States. And if the two soldiers had had any plans to try that stupid move, they would have elected to take R&R in Honolulu, not Hong Kong.

4: In one scene the soldier tries go say hello to a "round eye" in the states and he gets the finger and a buzz off, baby killer. He mumbles "whatever happened to 'thank you for your service.'" "Thank you for your service" was not invented until the recent, Middle East wars. The first time I heard, "Thank you for your service" was in 2014, when somebody noticed that my car, parked on Fort Bragg, has a (North Carolina) Vietnam Veteran license plate. When we got back from Vietnam (between 1965 and 1973), at best, nobody mentioned our service in that war at all.