#timothy brown

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Dynamite Brothers - Movie poster art by Gray Morrow (1974)

[eclecticpjf]

Now watching:

Nashville (1975, dir. Robert Altman)

[sidneyfreedmans]

I love their instinct for violence

[ninetimesbluedemo]

The only MASH spinoff that should have been made was one in which Kellye goes back to the states and bumps into Oliver Jones there. She remembers him from the early days of the 4077, they hit it off, and they go on a cross-country road trip visiting everyone from the 4077th and slowly amassing a whole caravan of doctors, nurses, corpsmen, etc

[moradadabeleza]

Timothy Brown

[mash-notes]

Oliver Harmon Jones, etc.

Hi, MASHies <3

It sucks that, for a long time now, I’ve seemed to post here only when I have news of someone from MASH dying. I would like to change that, because I still love MASH so much and think of it often. The urgency of having to commemorate these deaths should not preclude happier, gentler, more leisurely fan talk.

But, ugh of course, people have indeed died and it would be mean not to mention it. GREAT people—including Brian Dennehy, one of our treasured character actors, who breezed in for a brief appearance in season 5. He’s one of those people who worked so much during that era, it seemed there was hardly anything he wasn’t in. I absolutely love actors like that.

Gene Reynolds, too, one of the very architects of the show who poured his life into it, passed earlier this year before all the pandemic crap went down. I wrote in more detail about Gene here…

Especially, though, I want to give a sendoff to Timothy Brown, season 1’s Spearchucker Jones and one of a very few actors to appear in both the TV series and the movie (though in different roles). He died last month at age 82, reportedly due to complications from dementia.

As I’ve said before, there’s an unfortunate stain on this character—his racist nickname caused him to be quietly cut loose after five episodes. Though I don’t fault MASH for this decision, I’ve always thought it a shame for this to happen to Brown, a charismatic, handsome actor who could have done much for the series. As a former football player and a singer, he was unusually versatile. A comedy like MASH might have benefited from his talents, especially as it got heavier later on; the absence of Black main characters throughout most of the series also fails to reflect the actual diversity of most Army corps. One thing the frequently-maligned early seasons did better than the later ones was to include this young doctor, along with Odessa Cleveland’s excellent Nurse Ginger.

What we do get of Doctor Jones, we relish: team spirit, surgical competence (he was the only brain surgeon!), and drowsy smiles. May he rest in peace.

[vhs-ninja]

Dynamite Brothers (1974).

[vintagerpg]

When Dark Sun was initially under development as War World, TSR was looking for a high stakes campaign setting catering to high-level PCs. The hardcover Dragon Kings was the book intended to guide those characters beyond level 20.

There’s some great material here. Perhaps most central to the campaign setting, it details the process by which a defiler wizard can transform into the devastatingly powerful and ecosystem-destroying Athasian version of a dragon (or, the angelic, vaguely New Age-y Avangion, for preservers). There are also rules for psionic enchantments, some sweet war vehicles (Brom’s illustrations of which are **chef’s kiss**) and new high level spells (at least one of which defies the unexplained fact that Athas is cut off from the outer planes, but we get a sweet Baxa glabrezu, so whatever).

This is the Dark Sun book I flipped through the most over the years. Also the one got the least use. The published Dark Sun metastory adventures tapped out around level 15 and, because of the strictures of the metastory, supplements that allowed for a more traditional custom-written campaign that could get to level 20 and beyond didn’t start to appear until after my group’s Dark Sun interest faded in favor of the billion other things TSR was publishing at the time. Once again – 90s-era TSR shooting itself in the foot.

I’d be keen to hear stories from y’all about Dark Sun campaigns that DID make it to the epic levels, though! Surely someone out there turned into a dragon, right? I bet @dnd_daily did at some point in his career.