The Andy Griffith Show

Categories: CBS network shows | North Carolina culture | Sitcoms | Television spin-offs | 1960s TV shows in the United States

The Andy Griffith Show was an American television series that aired from 1960 to 1968. The series was an immediate hit with its audience, and still enjoys success in syndication. Its whistled theme song (by Earle Hagen and Herbert Spencer) is quickly identified by fans of the show.

Overview

The show centered on rural Sheriff Andy Taylor who rarely carried a gun, and was also the Justice of the Peace dispensing summary judgments. In addition to the town of Mayberry, he apparently had jurisdiction in the surrounding county as well.

When the show premiered in 1960, viewers felt a connection with widowed "Sheriff Andy Taylor" (played by Griffith), his son "Opie" (Ronny Howard), his "Aunt Bee" (Frances Bavier), and his cousin and deputy sheriff, "Barney Fife" (Don Knotts).

Other characters included auto mechanic "Gomer Pyle" (Jim Nabors, whose role was spun-off into the series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.) and his cousin "Goober Pyle" aka "Goober Beasley" in early scripts (George Lindsey), town drunk "Otis Campbell" (Hal Smith), hell-raising mountain man "Ernest T. Bass" (Howard Morris), absentminded barber "Floyd Lawson" (Howard McNear), and the rest of the townsfolk of fictional Mayberry, North Carolina.

Griffith left the show in 1968. Ken Berry joined the cast that year, and the show was retitled Mayberry R.F.D. and continued until 1971. In the first episode of that series Andy married his longtime girlfriend, Helen Crump and they moved away from Mayberry.

The original pilot of The Andy Griffith Show was actually an episode of The Danny Thomas Show in February, 1960. In that show, the character Danny Williams (Danny Thomas) is arrested by the Sheriff for running a stop sign (at a spot where no crossroad has been built yet) while driving through Mayberry. Andy Griffith was already a well-known actor, and received a large hand from the studio audience upon entering the scene ("The name ain't 'Clem', it's 'Andy', Sheriff Andy Taylor!") While Danny is waiting for a resolution to the problem, various denizens of Mayberry wander through the courthouse, notably Frances Bavier, who is playing a different character from her eventual Aunt Bee: a widow victimized by a formal wear shop owner, who is making her pay eternal rent for the tuxedo her husband was buried in. The Andy Griffith Show, its format and cast somewhat retooled from the premise of this pilot, made its actual debut that fall.

The show operated on at least two levels. There were the corny, nitwit antics of the supporting players, who provided most of the humor. There was also the straightforward presentation of the occasional story involving a criminal to be caught or a love interest to be established, and there was often a storyline of a serious nature concerning Andy's being a single parent to Opie.

Ages

From The Searchable Mayberry FAQ

In "The Darling Baby" Barney says that he's 35. That episode aired midway through the fifth season, which means that Barney was 31 when the series premiered in October of 1960 (in real life, Don Knotts was 36 at that time.) Andy Taylor's age is never given (at least not that I can remember) but we learn in "Andy and Opie's Pal" that Andy and Barney were in the fourth grade together. Also, the episodes "Class Reunion" and "The Return of Barney Fife" imply that the two graduated from Mayberry Union High at the same time. Therefore, they must be the same age, or perhaps one year apart (In real life, Andy Griffith is two years younger than Don Knotts.) -Paul Mulik

Tourists

Years after the series ended, tourists driving through rural North Carolina still asked for directions to Mayberry, not realizing that the town depicted in the series is a composite of Surry County and the town of Mount Airy. The adjacent town to fictional Mayberry is named Mt. Pilot, and is an obvious reference to nearby Pilot Mountain, which is better known as a mountain rather than a town. The TV show itself was filmed entirely in Hollywood, on the RKO Pictures backlot called "Forty Acres", which is recognizable to fans of the 1950s program The Adventures of Superman and was used in many other TV shows and movies. Even the apparently rural fishing hole that led off each episode was actually in the Los Angeles area: Franklin Canyon Lake, just north of Beverly Hills.

List of all Andy Griffith Show Cast

List of Andy Griffith Show episodes

Copyright Status

The Mayberry FAQ says that the copyright on some episodes is expired. It also says that composers don't receive royalties but they do get performance money. The difference is that royalties are determined by a guild negotiating re-use payments with the producers. These payments diminish over time by the number of repeat plays of the program. Performance money is paid by the broadcasters who have to secure licenses to perform the music under the copyright laws of the world.

External links

• The Andy Griffith Show at the Internet Movie Database
• Mayberry.com home of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club w/ Interviews, Episode Guides, newsletters, and forums.
• Behind The Scenes of The Andy Griffith Show A behind the scenes look at The Andy Griffith Show and the real Mayberry, includes filming locations, the stars made on the show, and Mayberry trivia.