Sometimes, a song can change the trajectory of your entire life. At least, that was the case for M*A*S*H producer Larry Gelbart, who found his perspective changed when he first watched the film adaptation.

“What first struck me about the film was not what M*A*S*H had to say about war or human folly,” wrote Gelbart in his memoir, Laughing Matters. “My initial impression had nothing to do with any of the movie’s loftier themes. It was a particular song, written especially for the picture. The haunting 'Suicide Is Painless' seems a simple composition, part sweet, part sad - and all the sweeter for it - and with swing built in. It got to me.”

The emotion fueled Gelbart as he began developing the series.

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“As I wrote the TV series’s pilot script with Dr. Richard Hooker’s novel, which served as the basis for the screenplay, at one elbow and the perfectly executed screen adaptation of it at the other, it was composer Johnny Mandel’s work that kept going round and round in whatever part of the psyche creative juices mix and marinate. After all this time, I still don’t know the precise lyrics of the song, although they are obviously some sort of commercial for self-destruction. But it is that refrain, heard at the start of each seemingly perpetual rerun, that prepares me even now for what I am about to see, just as it prepared me then for what I was about to write.”

Gelbart credited the tune with having set the tone for the entire series. “The flavor of the music had a great deal to do with the final work being unlike anything I had ever done before - comedy in a minor key,” wrote Gelbart. “However contradictory that seems, that is what finally evolved. I have always found it difficult to write to any sort of recipe, but I have always been aware that, for me, it was Mandel’s melody that set the tone.”