Awesome / Hogan's Heroes

• Perhaps the biggest and most predominant CMOA is that Team Hogan are not only running a resistance operation behind enemy lines—they're running it out of the middle of a fortified prisoner of war camp. The only reason they haven't escaped back to friendly lines is that they're more effective against the Germans where they are than anywhere else. It also says a lot that they're doing more work for the war effort as saboteurs than as the pilots of bombers and fighters as they were originally.
• Team Hogan steals a tank^note Well, actually, a self-propelled howitzer, and one that was actually on the American To&E in real life, but since a genuine Tiger I was completely out of the reach of the production staff, it counts as an acceptable break from reality... from the Third Panzer Division, drives it into Stalag 13 with one of them in SS uniform, disassembles it, blueprints it, reassembles it, and returns it. Everything about that episode is made of pure win, especially poor Schultz's protestations that he knows nothing about the tank the team hid in their barracks.
• The entire team in "Hogan Gives A Birthday Party." They kidnap a Nazi general, steal a German bomber, bomb a refinery and parachute out back to camp. Bonus points for the general being the one who actually shot down Hogan in the first place, and for making Schultz, of all people, parachute out as well.
• Carter's accidental infiltration of the German army. He gets his hands on the recaptured dynamite but not the detonator box, so he instead blows up the bridge with a stolen German tank^note The same self-propelled howitzer Team Hogan stole in an earlier episode. When Carter drops the Idiot Ball, he can get pretty awesome.
  Carter: Well I had to carry the dynamite in something!
  • Strangely enough, Carter changes between "total ditz" and "tactical destructive genius" depending on whether he's wearing a German uniform. And whether it's funny.
• Kinchloe's boxing match against Battlin' Bruno. Bruno has metal hidden in his boxing gloves and Kinchloe (by far the better boxer) has to stall but not defeat him until LeBeau has finished raiding Klink's office while the Germans are distracted. Once LeBeau returns he wipes the floor with Bruno—only for Hogan to declare the unconscious Bruno the winner the second after. This both technically lets Bruno win and keeps anyone from getting shot, and clearly shows the Americans won at the same time. Only gets better when you realize that each shot Kinch took from Bruno put him on the deck, so Kinch kept on the move and didn't let Bruno land a hit for several rounds.
• "Praise the Fuhrer and Pass the Ammunition" has a sadistic general toss what appears to be a live grenade at Hogan and his men. As everyone else, including Schultz and Klink, dives for cover, Hogan remains standing — he identified it as a dud. Deutsch asks how he knew.
  Hogan: If it were a live grenade, you would have been the first to run. You see, you and I both know that you're not a member of a super race.
  Deutsch: After our war games, I shall teach you respect for the SS.
  Hogan: I doubt it.
• Bob Crane was a highly skilled drummer. In the episode "Look at the Pretty Snowflakes," Colonel Hogan plays an impressive drum solo for the song "Cherokee" in an attempt to cause an avalanche, joined by the other Heroes. Even cooler was the fact that their legs had been chained together before they could reach the instruments, but this didn't stop them.
• "Klink vs. the Gonculator" had the word "gonculator" enter actual usage, adopted by computer geek-types as jargon to denote their least favorite piece of hardware, and its spelling changed to "gonkulator". The episode itself has the hero do a masterful job of Death Faked for You for a defector.
• Klink got one in "Will the Real Adolf Please Stand Up?" when, albeit for the wrong reasons, he correctly deduced Hogan's scheme as a pack of lies and tightened security to the degree that they had to use something as big as a Hitler impersonation to win the day.
  • He also correctly deduced that a Field Marshall's kidnapping in "The General Swap" was too implausible to be real, and if he hadn't made the mistake of voicing his suspicions to Hogan at the very end of the episode, there would have been a lot of trouble. The awesomeness comes from the fact that this one of the rare times Klink played the Only Sane Man for the Germans. Burkhalter was fooled.
• Carter's Hitler impersonation in "Will the Real Adolf Please Stand Up".
• All of the heroes' schemes should fall under this but some mention should be given to "The Meister Spy". Hogan pretends to be an intelligence officer, fake kidnaps a spy to Berlin, and fools him into thinking that Klink's office is Hitler's summer weekend office, all so that he could get the guy to reveal his contact. The best part comes from him convincing Klink and Schultz that the spy is crazy (and not a spy).
  Hogan (to Schultz): I found him rearranging the office because he thinks Hitler is in the next room.
• Sergeant Baker sprays Hochstetter with a fire hose in "It's Dynamite!"
• "Diamonds in the Rough": A ruthless Gestapo officer, who even kills his lover after she is no longer useful to him, who has an incredibly dangerously complete grasp of Hogan's operations, nevertheless underestimates Hogan as he falls straight for the Batman Gambit Hogan has set up, which neatly eliminates the problem and paints Klink as the efficient Kommandant Berlin believes he is.
• In "Art for Hogan's Sake", Schultz actually manages to pretend to be a General in the Wehrmacht seeing his girlfriend. He scares the pants off a couple of Gestapo agents and sending them fleeing out the door. Being completely drunk probably helped his acting skills.
  Schultz: Lucky for you, I was loaded.
  • This isn’t the only time Schultz has assisted the Heroes, either. Reluctant as he is to do so, it says a lot about the man that he’d still commit outright treason to help them complete their mission.
• Hogan and his crew pull off one of their finest cons - conning the German General Staff into thinking that Klink is going to be made the new Chief of Staff. And in doing so, keep virtually the entire German military from responding on D-Day so the Allies can make a proper landing.
• The Heroes heist an entire truck full of gold bars stolen - er, confiscated - from the Bank of France. First, Hogan uses a falsified document to convince Klink that the shipment will be attacked and stolen in Dusseldorf so that he'll have the shipment sent to Stalag 13, then drugs the guards and steals the gold while it's in camp. Obviously they can't leave the truck empty, so they replace the gold...with ordinary mason bricks painted gold. They got the bricks by sabotaging the stairs to Klink's office and convincing him to replace them with brick steps.
• The Gestapo has captured a Free French pilot who has some information they want. Rather than their usual methods of questioning, they convince the man that his fiancée has started keeping German soldiers company, so to speak. The method the Heroes use to keep the man from giving up the information the Germans want? Sending LeBeau on a motorcycle to Paris so he can pick up the guy's fiancée, bring her back to camp, and stage a show with a marriage scene so that Klink — who has some amount of regional authority due to the area being under martial law — can marry them.
• Hogan bluffing not only a mole, but his own men in "How to Catch a Papa Bear." Newkirk gets captured by the Gestapo, and Hogan appears to callously write him off until arranging an attack on a nearby ammo dump (with the mole's assistance, drawing the Gestapo away from the jail). Then he draws on her, reveals that Newkirk mentioned the emergency broadcast frequency to her but not the Trust Password they had agreed on before he left, and not only frees Newkirk, but hits the ammo dump as well once the soldiers waiting in ambush there leave to respond to the jailbreak. From his reaction when he's freed, Newkirk at least suspected she was a mole as well.
• Hogan hiding thirty prisoners in the tunnel to make a man trying to replace Klink look bad in "How to Escape from a Prison Camp without Really Trying."
• Newkirk planting tampering with the recordings being used as evidence against an Allied spy to make it look like the Gestapo agent who sold him out was the real spy, and then having them played in court.
• The gang regularly using Klink's car to smuggle people out of camp is no small feat itself, but in "The Dropouts" they manage to smuggle out a defector in the trunk of Hochstetter's car, three times in a row.
• In "The Gestapo Takeover" they trick the Gestapo officer trying to take over the camp into implicating himself and his boss in a (made up) plot to kill Hitler with the promise of a nonexistent bribe.
• In "Hogan Goes to Hollywood" they trick Burkhalter, Klink and Schultz into blowing up a vital German bridge on film with a Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon during the making of a propaganda movie, forcing Burkhalter to cover the whole thing up to save his own neck.
• In "The Hostage", the heroes sabotage a vital rocket project and then trick the Germans into thinking it was a design flaw and suggesting that they have the scientist "pretend" to defect back to the Russians to build more flawed rockets (or rather more rockets that the Germans think will be flawed).
  • From that same episode the original plan of the scientist behind the rocket is impressive in a chilling way. He just wanted to finish his rocket in order to prove his theory was right, then program it to come crashing back down and blow up himself, his work and the Germans, striking a blow against the Germans, and preventing his rocket from being used against Russia while allowing himself to die content that his invention worked perfectly.
• In "A Klink, a Bomb and a Short Fuse", Carter is in the tunnels right under an unexploded bomb but even after the cave-in trapping him is cleared, he insists on staying until he can finish broadcasting a code book to London, regardless of the risk.
  • From the same episode, Hogan managing to disarm the bomb, despite having gone in expecting it to be a dummy.
• The gang smuggling out twenty men in the climax of "Reservations are Required" with a bit of trickery into getting Klink and his guards to always be at the wrong end of the tunnel at just the wrong time while those men escape.
• Faking the end of the war in "War Takes a Holiday" to trick major Hochsetter into releasing several underground leaders.
• In "The Big Record" they tape a German staff meeting and then trick Klink into mailing it to London for them due to Klink thinking that the record contains his violin recital and might get him a record contract.

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