You could almost hear the distinctive thump-thump-thump of medevac choppers swooping in over the old "MASH" television series set in Calabasas.Except the only real noise here Thursday was the heavy breathing of Brian Rooney and Mark Rackow as they lugged a 10-foot signpost down a muddy canyon fire road on the western side of Malibu Creek State Park.
Its familiar-looking, hand-lettered arrows pointed the way to Boston, Seoul, Coney Island, San Francisco, Tokyo, Burbank, Death Valley, Toledo and Decatur -- just like the ones that for 251 episodes stood in the center of the fictional 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital compound.
The iconic signpost was being returned for the first time in a quarter-century to the "MASH" filming location.
Soon it will be the centerpiece of a partially restored set that state officials plan to use to pay tribute to Malibu Creek State Park's cinematic past.
The park's 6,000-plus acres have been the backdrop for thousands of movie and TV scenes since 1927, when it became the Scottish Highlands for a silent movie called "Annie Laurie" that starred Lillian Gish.
It doubled for Wales in 1941's best-picture Oscar winner, "How Green Was My Valley" and was Shangri-La in 1937's "Lost Horizon."
It was the backdrop for a primate-run world in "Planet of the Apes" in 1968 and where "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" were chased over a cliff by a pursuing posse in 1969.
But it is "MASH" that matters most to park visitors, who come from all over the world to see for themselves the Korean wartime world inhabited by Hawkeye, Hot Lips, BJ, Trapper John and the others who filled out the landmark black comedy's on-camera Army surgical team
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