Combat! (television)

Combat!
1966-67 season color title card (With Rick Jason)
Starring	Rick Jason Vic Morrow
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	5
No. of episodes	152 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Selig J. Seligman
Running time	50 minutes per episode
Production company(s)	Selmur Productions
Distributor	CBS Television Distribution
Release
Original network	ABC
Original release	October 2, 1962 (1962-10-02) – March 14, 1967 (1967-03-14)

Combat! is an American television program that originally aired on ABC from 1962 until 1967. (The exclamation point in Combat! was depicted on-screen as a stylized bayonet.) The show covered the grim lives of a squad of American soldiers fighting the Germans in France during World War II. (The episode "A Day In June" shows D-Day as a flashback, hence the action occurs during and after June 1944.) The program starred Rick Jason as platoon leader Second Lieutenant Gil Hanley and Vic Morrow as Sergeant "Chip" Saunders. The series was unusual in that Jason and Morrow would play the lead in alternating episodes.

Combat! premiered on ABC on October 2, 1962, and was broadcast for five seasons. TV's longest-running World War II drama (as of February 2016), Combat! aired 152 hour-long episodes. The first four seasons, spanning 127 episodes, were produced in black and white. The fifth and final season produced 25 color episodes. The show was developed by Robert Pirosh, who wrote the pilot episode.

According to Rick Jason, "Our budgets for the first year, including pre-production, production, and post-production, (that is, the entire cost of each negative) was $127,500. In the fifth year (in color) we delivered them for $183,000. Our time schedules were six shooting days. Therefore, on a five-day week, we took a week and one day to shoot a show. Here and there, a segment went to seven shooting days and everybody in the front offices got a little nervous."

Jason said of the working conditions, "In the first year of the show, Vic and I were given dressing room suites in a building that hadn't been renovated in twenty-five years. We also had no dressing rooms on the outdoor sets (we were thankful just to have chairs). Vic went on strike the beginning of the second year and things got much better."

Wesley Britton wrote, "The producers and directors of the series (including Robert Altman, whose work on the show included 10 defining episodes) went the extra mile for establishing credibility and realism. Then and now, viewers see motion picture quality photography as in the long shots very unlike most network television of the period. They had military advisors on hand to look over scripts and maps. The cast couldn't shave during the five day shoots to help the 'beard continuity.' Except for occasional dialogue, for the most part when the 'Krauts' or 'Gerrys' spoke, they did so in German. Actor Robert Winston Mercy, who wrote one script and played a number of German officers, told me the uniforms were so precisely recreated with correct pipings and insignias that he would cause a stir among Jewish cafeteria workers when he strode in wearing his costume during lunch breaks."