RIP Donna Douglas

[duaneiac]

I was surprised no one had mentioned this yet. Donna Douglas, best known as Elly May on The Beverly Hillbillies, passed away last week.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-donna-douglas-dies-beverly-hillbillies-20150102-story.html

I remain an unabashed fan of The Beverly Hillbillies. I know some view it as being one of the stupidest shows TV has ever produced, but I loved it as a kid and love it still today. I have a couple of seasons of the series on DVD. In the early seasons, the writing was quite fresh, the humor organic and the characterizations unforgettable. The humor was gentle, never mean-spirited whether it was poking fun at the Beverly Hills elite or the backwoods common folks.

It was a typical "fish out of water" comedy premise, but looking at it in retrospect, it was perhaps also an early example on TV of the 1% vs. the 99%. What happens when the dirt poor Clampett family suddenly discovers oil and are thrust into the ranks of the megarich with their access to these new kinds of dollars ("Yeah -- millions they call 'em.")? To what lengths would the elite society of Southern California go to accommodate the "eccentricities" of the Clampett clan?

Yes, the show was often silly and it went on far too many seasons, ultimately running its premise into the ground. But it was a very funny show from before the days when all comedy had to be ironic or "edgy", and for that, I like it.

Edited January 5, 2015 by duaneiac

[catesta]

RIP

I too loved the show and still do.

[jazzbo]

She was so lovely then! RIP Ms Douglas.

[Scott Dolan]

Brilliant show, with one of the best ensemble casts of all time! I'd put them right up at the top with shows like The Andy Griffith Show, M*A*S*H*, All In The family, and Seinfeld.

Ms. Douglas pulled her character off to perfection. Too bad that became her achilles heel when it came to getting more work after the show.

Anyone else notice that both The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show kind of went to shit when they switched over to color? (of course, Don Knotts not renewing had a lot to do with AG going downhill)

[duaneiac]

I don't know that I would agree that those two shows "went to shit when they switched over to color". I don't know exactly what years that happened for each show. Both programs were long-running and I think that is a problem for many series -- trying to squeeze yet more juice out of a premise that has pretty much been used up. For me The Beverly Hillbillies really "jumped the shark" that season they went to England, whenever that was.

For the Andy Griffith Show, in addition to losing multiple Emmy Award winning Don Knotts, the show also lost Gomer Pyle to his spin-off series, Floyd the barber when Howard McNear suffered his stroke, saw Opie grow from a loveable tyke into an awkward adolescent, and saw the real world around them change dramatically. By 1967-68, it must have been harder for an audience to suspend disbelief to accept this folksy little town of Mayberry that knew nothing about hippies or Viet Nam or civil rights protests or assassinations.

I recently checked out from the library Season One of Mayberyy, R.F.D., the sequel series that came about when Andy Griffith decided he wanted to move on from the grind of a weekly TV series. All the locals continued in this series -- Goober, Howard Sprague, Emmet the fix-it shop owner -- and Aunt Bee moved in with widower Ken Berry and his son Buddy Foster (who was to Jodie Foster what Clint Howard was to Ron Howard). Andy Griffith made a few brief appearances in some of the episodes I watched, including getting married to Helen in the series debut. Don Knotts made an appearance as the best man in that episode and was far and away the funniest thing in the show; that man could do funny like nobody's business. I recall watching this program as a kid, but there really just wasn't much of interest to it. Part of that may stem from the fact that Ken Berry is nowhere near the actor Andy Griffith was.

(What other programs tried to continue a series after their stars left? I can think of After M*A*S*H and wasn't there a Sanford Arms series after Redd Foxx left Sanford and Son? There was Archie Bunker's Place, but that's sort of a case of a star wanting to continue a show after every one else had left.)

[l p]

this is an interesting wiki entry regarding the folksy late 60's-early 70's shows mentioned in this thread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge

The "rural purge" of American television networks (in particular CBS) was a series of cancellations between 1969 and 1972 of still popular rural-themed shows with demographically skewed audiences, the majority of which occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season....

[danasgoodstuff]

The sublime Flatt & Scruggs did cameos here and on Petticoat Junction, IIRC

[mjzee]

Yup, they were still popular but didn't carry the demographics CBS (and advertisers) wanted.

Something similar happened recently with Longmire and A&E.

[duaneiac]

Green Acres (another favorite of mine) was a really absurdist program. If CBS had asked Luis Bunuel to come up with a sitcom for them, I doubt if he could have created anything stranger.

[ejp626]

Green Acres (another favorite of mine) was a really absurdist program. If CBS had asked Luis Bunuel to come up with a sitcom for them, I doubt if he could have created anything stranger.

Speaking of surreal, there is this British show (not sure how influential it was, but it seems a precursor to Monty Python, etc.).

I have to admit, I have the Region 2 DVD but haven't watched all the way through, but I will one of these days!

[7/4]

Green Acres (another favorite of mine) was a really absurdist program. If CBS had asked Luis Bunuel to come up with a sitcom for them, I doubt if he could have created anything stranger.

I loved that show.

[Chuck Nessa]

She was so lovely then! RIP Ms Douglas.

Only then?

Green Acres (another favorite of mine) was a really absurdist program. If CBS had asked Luis Bunuel to come up with a sitcom for them, I doubt if he could have created anything stranger.

I agree. Hot water soup has been a favorite for years.

[GA Russell]

The story that I read was that William Paley's wife, Babe Paley, was a New York socialite known for saying "You can never be too rich or too thin."

Once she went to lunch with her jet-set friends, and when she arrived, one of them said, "Here's Babe Paley, from the Hillbilly Network."

She felt so insulted that when she went home, she insisted to her husband that he cancel the rural shows, and he did.

[Jazzmoose]

Green Acres (another favorite of mine) was a really absurdist program. If CBS had asked Luis Bunuel to come up with a sitcom for them, I doubt if he could have created anything stranger.

I grew up on Green Acres and Rocky and Bullwinkle. And people still wonder how I got this way...

[gmonahan]

Sorry to be a dissenting voice, but those shows were unbelievably DUMB. The only positive I know of to come out of them was the Irene Ryan scholarships that actress generously established with the money she made from the show. Otherwise, good riddance!

Humbug! Bah!

gregmo

[jazzbo]

She was so lovely then! RIP Ms Douglas.

Only then?

Not only then. PARTICULARLY during this BH years.

[Scott Dolan]

Sorry to be a dissenting voice, but those shows were unbelievably DUMB.

Wow!

Whether you liked them or not, those shows were anything but dumb. They were some of the most creative comedy shows ever written, and perfectly acted by their stars. If they weren't your cup of tea, fine. But dumb they were not.

[JSngry]

Absurdist Pop Culture Near-Genius, I say.

At the very least, supreme stoner fare for 70s dorm life.

[gmonahan]

You must have lived in a different kind of dorm than I did! My stoner friends all watched Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. And compared to the Norman Lear comedies, shows like Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction were pretty juvenile. Apologies to all the fans!

gregmo

[duaneiac]

I haven't seen Petticoat Junction in decades, don't recall much about it outside of the wonderful showcase it provided for Bea Benaderet and Edgar Buchanan, and can't say much in its defense.

Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres were both far from "juvenile" however. The comedy on each could at times be simple and could be appreciated at that level by juveniles, but each show also had an underlayer of humor that the viewer had to have a little sophistication to appreciate.

Green Acres often made fun of its very nature. I vaguely recall one episode that began with Lisa Douglas making breakfast and as the toast popped up it would have the writers' credits on it and as the eggs fried they would have the director's credit on them. She then made some remark about all these strange words showing up in her cooking. I wish I remembered it better so I could adequately describe it, but it was a very funny bit. One of my favorite running gags from the show would be whenever Oliver Wendell Douglas went into one of his stirring speeches about the glory and importance of the American farmer or some such and softly in the background we would hear a fife playing a stirring patriotic melody ("Battle Hymn of The Republic" or some such). That in itself was a satire of the many movies which featured such stirring music coming out of nowhere to augment dramatic scenes. The extra joke GA added is that the characters around Mr. Douglas could also hear this fife music and were just as confused and puzzled by this odd phenomenon as we viewers should have been had we not been inured to it because of countless viewings of scenes using such musical enhancement.

I can fully understand people not liking these shows and I would not try to convince any one to like them, but I don't think "juvenile" ia an appropriate word to describe them

[JSngry]

You must have lived in a different kind of dorm than I did! My stoner friends all watched Monty Python and Saturday Night Live.

Dude, that shit was always on at night (and on weekends). I'm talking daytime 70s stoner dorm fare, like 3 PM, when class were over, but before dinner came.

[gmonahan]

You must have lived in a different kind of dorm than I did! My stoner friends all watched Monty Python and Saturday Night Live.

Dude, that shit was always on at night (and on weekends). I'm talking daytime 70s stoner dorm fare, like 3 PM, when class were over, but before dinner came.

gregmo

[duaneiac]

Hogan's Heroes -- now that to me was a juvenile show. Yeah, I'm sure life in a German POW camp must have been a nonstop wacky chucklefest for all concerned. I'm surprised the WWII veterans who actually survived such experiences did not organize to protest the show. But that was then, back before every one felt entitled to express their "outrage" over every public issue imaginable

Edited January 10, 2015 by duaneiac

[Dave Garrett]

Hogan's Heroes -- now that to me was a juvenile show. Yeah, I'm sure life in a German POW camp must have been a nonstop wacky chucklefest for all concerned. I'm surprised the WWII veterans who actually survived such experiences did not organize to protest the show. But that was then, back before every one felt entitled to express their "outrage" over every public issue imaginable

I've known Jews of a certain age who despised the show for depicting the Nazis as bumbling idiots and refused to watch it. The actors in the key German roles were all Jewish, and some of the actors were not only WWII vets but had been in concentration camps prior to the war themselves. From Wikipedia:

The actors who played the four major German roles—Werner Klemperer (Klink), John Banner (Schultz), Leon Askin (Burkhalter), and Howard Caine (Hochstetter)—were Jewish. Furthermore, Klemperer, Banner, Askin, and Robert Clary (LeBeau) were Jews who had fled the Nazis during World War II. Clary says in the recorded commentary on the DVD version of episode "Art for Hogan's Sake" that he spent three years in a concentration camp, that his parents and other family members were killed there, and that he has an identity tattoo from the camp on his arm ("A-5714"). Likewise John Banner had been held in a (pre-war) concentration camp and his family was killed during the war. Leon Askin was also in a pre-war French internment camp and his parents were killed at Treblinka. Howard Caine (Hochstetter), who was also Jewish (his birth name was Cohen), was American, and Jewish actors Harold Gould and Harold J. Stone played German generals; Jon Cedar played a camp guard.

As a teenager, Werner Klemperer (Klink) (son of the conductor Otto Klemperer) fled Hitler's Germany with his family in 1933. During the show's production, he insisted that Hogan always win over his Nazi captors or else he would not take the part of Klink. He defended his playing a Luftwaffe Officer by claiming, "I am an actor. If I can play Richard III, I can play a Nazi." Banner attempted to sum up the paradox of his role by saying, "Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?" Ironically, although Klemperer, Banner, Caine, Gould, and Askin play stereotypical World War II Germans, all had actually served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II — Banner and Askin in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Caine in the U.S. Navy, Gould with the U.S. Army, and Klemperer in a U.S. Army Entertainment Unit.

[gmonahan]

Hogan's Heroes -- now that to me was a juvenile show. Yeah, I'm sure life in a German POW camp must have been a nonstop wacky chucklefest for all concerned. I'm surprised the WWII veterans who actually survived such experiences did not organize to protest the show. But that was then, back before every one felt entitled to express their "outrage" over every public issue imaginable

Yes, only in America could we concoct a sitcom making life in a German POW camp seem like a comic romp. It did give the great German actor Werner Klemperer some money, albeit, playing a really shallow, dumb character.

gregmo