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The Andy Griffith Show . . . starring Andy Griffith!
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Bud Brewster
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Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 17018
Location: North Carolina

PostPosted: Sat Oct 10, 2015 6:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

_________________________________

With almost 3,000 posts to my credit (four times more than the next most active member), I figured I'd give the rest of you nice folks a chance to start some new threads while I spent a few hundred hours working on a clever way to attract a few new members.

Lord knows we need 'em.

But the "clever way" should be ready to unveil by Monday, and then we'll see if I succeeded . . . or just wasted my time.

Besides, one ASF member commented that I actually over-did it from time to time!
Embarassed
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


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Rocky Jones
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Joined: 17 Dec 2014
Posts: 225
Location: North Texas

PostPosted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 12:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

After I first started fooling around with the free version of the Sketchup program I found an excellent Mayberry model at the Sketchup 3D Warehouse. I just checked and the model's still there. It's a model of much of the famous former RKO/Desilu "40 Acres" backlot studio in Culver City where they shot the Griffith show, as well as Superman and lots of other things. It's fun to bring it up in Sketchup and just wander around. It doesn't have the interiors, unforch, although I suspect there are 3D models out there of some of those, too.

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=e8991f6a153f6098ea3e4d6c8003e506
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bulldogtrekker
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Joined: 14 Dec 2013
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Location: Columbia,SC

PostPosted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 6:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

impressive!

Bud and I were using a wiki photo for the layout of the town.
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Rocky Jones
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Joined: 17 Dec 2014
Posts: 225
Location: North Texas

PostPosted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 9:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BTW, I hope Bud's "clever way to attract a few new members" wasn't crashing the site's hard drive. That might have helped a bit, though. I haven't checked in for awhile.

As a someone in the web marketing arena, I'd have to suggest the dreaded social media as your best bet for such efforts. Make sure you've got regularly updated pages at Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest, for sure. Do Twitter. I know a lady with a thriving web business who literally puts herself on every new soc-med site that pops up. Generating traffic using social sites takes time and effort, but it's the way things work these days.
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Bud Brewster
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Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 17018
Location: North Carolina

PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

While watching episodes of Andy Griffith recently I noticed a fascinating fact.

In every single shot that shows the streets of Mayberry in the background of the elaborate Culver City set, there are always people and cars moving around to convince us that this is a real community filled with busy citizens going about their daily business on the streets of a small southern town.






While watching the episodes, I'm always impressed by all this activity in the background — even WAY in the background where they’re barely visible in the shots! For example, if the camera is pointed down the street during a scene in front of Andy’s house, we can see pedestrians and cars a quarter mile away at the cross street near the center of town!

I’ve often wondered what kind of instructions those extras in the background were given. They're usually pretty far from the actual shooting area, so it seems reasonable that they just kept doing their “background” routines constantly during all the takes that were needed for the shots in a given location. I don’t even think an assistance director shouted “action” and “cut” to those folks every time the stars of the show were actually filming a scene.






It seems more likely that those folks in the background just spent most of the day acting like Mayberry citizens — whether principal photography was going on or not!

Having said that, here’s the amusing idea I came up with.

After a few months of being in the group of extras in the background — all dressed up and sort of "role playing" as the citizens of Mayberry — these people might have started giving each other “character names” and imaginary “back stories”. Then, whenever they encountered each other in the street while moving around like Mayberry citizens going about their daily routines, they would stop and actually chat "in character"!

In other words, the actors would be doing improvisational theater.






Picture this typical situation: Two guys stop to chat, and one says he's on his way to Floyd's barber shop. The other one says he’s headed for Walker’s Drug Store to pick up a prescription for his wife. They’d chat about the weather, chuckle over something Otis Campbell did recently, and make predictions about when Andy would finally get married.

And then off these two fellas would go — actually wandering over to the places in the Culver City set they’d mentioned to each other!

After doing this every day for many months (and even years for some of them), these loyal and experienced “Mayberry citizens” would actually create the town Mayberry on there own, acting in character and having fun pretending to be the folks who live in this fictional little town!

After watching the show themselves for several years (like the rest of us did in the 1960s), they'd enjoy actually living in this parallel universe where Mayberry was real and they were it's citizens!

Think of it this way. In a sense, the residence of Mayberry are off in the background — improvising their actions, calling each other by character names they've made up, and pretending to be real townsfolk — while the actors are performing in front of the camera!






Here’s another way of looking at it: this would be a Mayberry version of a “Renaissance Festival” — a group of dedicated actors dressed in costumes, walking around the completely realistic set of a fictional southern town, interacting with each other as if they were the characters they’ve created!

It would be a fantasy version of Mayberry that no one — not even the producers and the stars — were aware of.

I wonder if there were any couples who got to know each other and formed friendships, then paired up on a regular basis and developed a romance . . . and eventually got married! Years later, when people asked them how they met, they could say, "We're both from the same small town, and we fell in love there."

And it would make a great Twilight Zone episode in which the viewer starts out thinking they’re seeing a real town, and a newcomer to this community doesn’t understand why the people in the town are being unfriendly to him.






The recently-added extra doesn’t realize that as a "new guy" among these veteran actors, they’re reluctant to treat him as a full-fledged member of their secret society! He’s confused by the way the people act oddly towards him because he isn't part of their established "Mayberry Cult".

Story wise, the puzzled viewer of this TZ episode sees the situation as real for most of the episode, not realizing that the "new guy" is a recently-hired extra who doesn't know what the other actors have started doing over the years, and he’s just being ostracized because he's not one of the veteran "Mayberrians"!

Eventually the viewer learns that this is a movie set, and the strange behavior of the veteran extras makes it appear they’ve all lost touch with reality and started believing they were citizens of this small North Carolina town.

The TZ episode would end with the new extra finding out the happy truth of the situation and joining in with the others, introducing himself on the streets with a made-up character name to the friendly “citizens” of Mayberry, telling them he just moved into town. The story ends with him stroll off down the street as he goes about his daily routines in the same manner as the rest of his fellow “Mayberrians”.
________________________________

Well, I'd like to chat more about this idea with you nice folks, but I've got an appoint to get a haircut at Floyd's, and then I'm goin' over to the dinner and flirt with Juanita. See ya'll later! Wink

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


Last edited by Bud Brewster on Thu May 21, 2020 9:14 am; edited 2 times in total
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Gord Green
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Joined: 06 Oct 2014
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Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 3:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Think that's a crazy idea?
Check this Youtube video out!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfqDGwzFbos

And then step over into the Andy G-Dimension here!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUQ9h_Gy70E

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Bud Brewster
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Joined: 14 Dec 2013
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Location: North Carolina

PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 4:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Great post, Gord! That first video is brilliantly edited. Loved it! Very Happy

And when I saw the clips from The Untouchables (1959 - 1963) I started wondering if some of the "Mayberrians" (the extras who populated Mayberry) might have occasionally found themselves thirty years in the past, wandering around Mayberry while 1930s gangsters from Chicago roared up and down the normally quite streets of their peaceful North Carolina town!

Now, by God, we've got ourselves a time travel story for the Mayberrians, who must find a way to get back to the early 1960s before Al Capone and his gun-tottin' gansters leave them bleeding to death on the sidewalk in front of Floyd's barber shop! Shocked

Barney will definitely need more than one bullet . . .

_________________
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


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Pow
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Joined: 27 Sep 2014
Posts: 3400
Location: New York

PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 8:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The MeTV network runs a hilarious ad that does a mash up of TAGS & Star Trek:TOS.

It shows a scene from the ST episode "The City On The Edge Of Forever''where Kirk & Spock travel back in time to 1930s NYC. The episode was shot on the Desilu 40-Acres Backlot town that was also used as Mayberry.

It has Kirk & Spock landing on the street & then the film goes from color to black & white.

The next scene shows Aunt Bee & a friend standing on the sidewalk & waving to Kirk & Spock.

We then see Barney Fife in the middle of the street as he excitedly pulls out his gun & starts to run.

Now we're back to Kirk & Spock running down the street.

It's all edited together beautifully with funny narration.
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Pow
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 8:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just watched one of my fav episodes last night ''The Haunted House'' from October 07,1963.

Opie & a friend are playing ball & the ball ends up going into the ole' Rimshaw House which has long since been abandoned.

Andy sends Barney to go get the baseball, but Barney buys in to the stories that the house is haunted. Barney gets Gomer to go with him, but the 2 of them are scarred out of the house by strange sounds & mysterious goings on.

Andy goes back with barney & Gomer to see what is really going on.

Three years later Don Knotts would do the hilarious film ''The Ghost & Mr.Chicken'' which deals with another haunted house.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 09, 2019 1:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

I sure miss old Bulldogtrekker. He and I chatted on Facebook while watching countless movies and TV series for six enjoyable years, and this included all the Andy Griffith Show episodes up through season 5.

We tried watching the ones after Don Knots left the show, but we just couldn't get into them.

During our long and pleasant visit to the quaint town of Mayberry, we became experts on various aspects of the show, such the Culver City set used for the exteriors —



___________

— and the courthouse / jail set where so many scenes were filmed, seen here in one of the few shots that included so much of the set.



Take special note of the upper left corner to the room, next to the two cells. Notice that the wall to the left of the cells appears to be plain sheet rock (as opposed to the brick walls in which the bars are set, although I'm not sure those wall are brick in the shot above).

And notice the odd-looking door in that plain wall between the left corner and the first cell. It looks like a flat sheet of plywood instead of a normal door.

Also note that there's no window in the wall on the far left, between the corner of the room and the main door that leads in from main street.

Having said all that, Bulldogtrekker and I noticed interesting changes which took place in that corner of the courthouse as the series progressed.

During season one, when Eleanor Donahue was on the show, the door to the left of the cells looked normal, not like a sheet of plywood as in the picture above. The wall around the door suddenly became brick, like the rest of the walls around the two cells.

But the front wall between the corner and door still had no window.



However, later in the series that corner of the courthouse lost the door completely, and a large window appeared (with blinds) which looked out onto the street. (The view of the street was, of course, a large backdrop painting.)

In addition to these changes, a large gas heater occupied that corner.



However, later still the heater vanished (as shown below) —



— and in several episodes during that season a large plush chair was in it's place. If was visible, for example, in the episode with sexy Susan Oliver playing a prisoner who used her feminine wiles on both Andy and Barney. (Sorry, I don't have a picture from that episode.)

And finally there this. IMDB has a trivia item about the windows inside the cells.
________________________________

The window in Otis' cell is moved around in three places. In the Weaver Christmas episode, it is in the center of the back wall without glass; same spot for Cousin Virgil episode, also without glass. When Andy and Barney try to wake Otis, it is on the far right wall with glass. In most episodes, there is no window.

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2020 3:09 am    Post subject: Sorry To Say . . . Reply with quote

Sorry to say that Aunt Bee was one character in the show that was treated with unmerciful cruelty by the screenwriters.

Almost like the screenwriters were sadistic DemiGods who enjoyed making the character of Aunt Bee into nothing but the butt of cruel jokes.

I can't remember a single episode where any of the men who were interested in Aunt Bee had "strictly honorable" intentions, (to quote James Bond on meeting Honey Ryder in Dr. No).

The men who were interested in Aunt Bee always turned out of have strictly dis-honorable intentions, generally out to defraud her and hoping to get ill gotten gains from this hapless, wretched character.

I hope that I can be proven wrong in my memories of the character of Aunt Bee, and if anyone can give some examples to do so, please do so.

I well remember aunt bee dropping a piece of jewelry into a kitchen sink garbage disposal, and her crisis with her insurance company over that incident.

And, how about the time she cooked all those pickles, which Andy and Barney thought tasted horrible, and Both Sherrif Taylor and Deputly Fife spent the show trying to get rid of aunt Bee's pickles by giving them to unwary strangers, who undboutedly found them just as horrbile tasting as Andy and Barney did.
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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2020 3:12 am    Post subject: Very Often . . . Reply with quote

Very often, people get the wrong idea when I express myself.

And, I hope no one gets the wrong idea in what I said in my last post.

I love the Andy Griffith Show just as much as everyone else who has posted to this thread.

I just don't see why the screen writers couldn't have shown her a bit of mercy, and allowed something good and positive to happen to her in the show.

And, to repeat myself, I hope some of you can produce some examples of such good and positive things that happened to Aunt Bee, that somehow I happened to miss.


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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2020 3:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
While watching episodes of Andy Griffin recently I noticed a fascinating fact.

Bud, in that first sentence, you committed the same (almost) but glad to say not quite Unforgivable Sin, of mis-spelling Andy Griffith's surname.

And, I might have committed a similar almost Unforgivable Sin by possibly mis-spelling Anut Bea's name as aunt Bee.

Or, is aunt Bee the correct spelling?

I remember as a youngster I once called Andy G of the Andy Griffith show, Andy Griffin, and I was very sternly reprimanded by one of my elders as to how to correctly spell and pronounce Andy Griffith's name.

And, Larry (Best Little Whore House in Texas) King, also committed the same sin in his otherwise marvelous Harper's magazine Article "Whatever Happened To Brother Dave?" by comparing Brother Dave Gardner to Andy "Griffin" playing some cruel joke on his Aunt (I won't committ the sin of possibly mis-spelling Aunt B--'s name).

But, remember that Hell is for Good People, and Heaven is for Sinners.

I sure am glad for that, because with all the sins that I commit, I am assured of a place in Heaven.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2020 9:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Thanks, FD. I fixed the spelling error.

You can check the spellings of both character names and actor's name at the Internet Movie Database. For example, type in "The Andy Griffith Show" and you'll find his.

Frances Bavier ... Aunt Bee Taylor

I often check IMDB when I'm not sure how to spell a character's or actor's name, along with things like release dates, directors, writers, etc.

I'm sure you'll find IMDB very helpful! Very Happy

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)
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filmdetective
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PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2020 10:42 am    Post subject: IMDB Reply with quote

Bud, I suppose IMDB is a Two Edged Sword.

I find it useful, but have annoyed the members of other message boards by quoting the reviews I find there.

And, while I often read denunciations of IMDB as making all kinds of factual errors, like yourself, I often do check it out to find proper spellings of film characters and release dates.
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