I walk down a street named Green Acres Drive. It reminds me of the old TV show “Green Acres” with Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor. I seem to remember some hilarious hijinks during the sitcom. It was always entertaining to watch. I mean who could not love a TV show with a talking pig named Arnold Ziffel? It featured rural life which is not necessarily my cup of tea, but I enjoy visiting it — just don’t want to stay there permanently. I lived in a small town growing up — around 30,000 people and that included the 18,000 college students. In the summer when all the students were gone, I used to pretend I was the last person on earth. It was not difficult to conjure up that image since there really were a lot of empty streets, stores, etc. When I got a job, it was in a much bigger town — 60,000 people. Lived there for 30 years but chose to move to a suburb of Dallas. The metro population of Dallas-Arlington-Fort Worth and suburbs is 7.5 million. I could not be happier. There is something exciting about living in a big city. However, visiting the country can be very relaxing. So, let’s explore Green Acres together.
According to Wikipedia, “Green Acres” is an American sitcom starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as a couple who move from New York City to a country farm. Produced by Filmways as a sister show to “Petticoat Junction,” the series was first broadcast on CBS, from September 15, 1965, to April 27, 1971. The first episodes were filmed in black and white, converting to color over its nearly six-year run.
Receiving solid ratings during its six-year run, “Green Acres” was cancelled in 1971. CBS at the time was under mounting pressure from sponsors to have more urban-themed programs on its schedule. To make room for the newer shows, nearly all of the rural-themed shows were cancelled, later known as the "rural purge," of which Pat Buttram (Mr. Haney) said, "CBS cancelled everything with a tree — including “Lassie.” The sitcom has been in syndication and is available on DVD and VHS releases. In 1997 the two-part episode "A Star Named Arnold Is Born" was ranked No. 59 on TV Guide’s 100 Greatest Episodes of All-Time.
Radio origins
The roots of “Green Acres” derive from “Granby’s Green Acres,” a comedy show aired on the CBS radio network from July 3 to August 21, 1950. The eight-episode summer series was created by Jay Sommers, who also wrote, produced and directed.
The principal characters — a married couple played by Bea Benaderet and Gale Gordon — originated, though under a different surname, on Lucille Ball's “My Favorite Husband.” “Granby’s” premise was that a big-city banker fulfills a lifelong dream by moving his family to a run-down farm, despite knowing nothing about farming. The nearby feed store is operated by the absent-minded Mr. Kimball, and the Granbys hire an older hand named Eb — voiced by Parley Baer, who would guest-star in several episodes of the television series — who often comments on incompetent management.
Adaptation to television
Following the success of “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Petticoat Junction,” CBS offered producer Paul Henning another half-hour slot on the schedule, without requiring a pilot episode. Faced with running three shows, Henning encouraged Sommers to create a series for the time slot. Sommers would go on to write and produce about one-third of the episodes. In pre-production, proposed titles were “Country Cousins” and “The Eddie Albert Show.”
Premise
“Green Acres” is about Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), a prominent and wealthy New York City attorney, fulfilling his dream to be a farmer, and Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor), his glamorous Hungarian wife, uprooted unwillingly from an upscale Manhattan penthouse apartment to a defunct farm in Hooterville that Oliver purchases to the disbelief of nearby farmers.
The debut episode is a mockumentary about their decision to move to a rural area, anchored by former ABC newscaster John Charles Daly. Daly was the host of the CBS game show “What’s My Line,” and a few weeks after the show's debut Albert and Gabor returned the favor by appearing on “What’s My Line” as that episode's mystery guests, and publicly thanked Daly for helping to launch their series.
Although many “Green Acres” episodes were still standard 1960s sitcom fare, the show developed a regular undercurrent of surrealism and satire. The writers soon developed a suite of running jokes and visual gags, and characters often broke the fourth wall to address the audience.
The show is set in the same television universe as Henning's “Petticoat Junction,” featuring such towns as Hooterville, Pixley, Crabwell Corners and Stankwell Falls, as well as sharing characters such as Joe Carson, Fred and Doris Ziffel, Sam Drucker, Newt Kiley and Floyd Smoot.
Oliver Wendell Douglas
Oliver Wendell Douglas was a New York City attorney who had long harbored a dream of moving to the Midwest and operating a farm rather than practicing "big city" law. His wife, Lisa, a glamorous Hungarian immigrant — played by Eva Gabor — had absolutely no desire to leave sophisticated New York City for a backward, rural area. His idea also met with stringent resistance from his own mother, Eunice (Eleanor Audley), who sided with Lisa against leaving New York City for the hinterlands.
However, once they actually arrived at their newly purchased farm — a run-down nightmare whose farmhouse was little more than a dilapidated shack — it was Lisa, not Oliver, who immediately fit into Hooterville and its weird collection of zany characters. Oliver had a high opinion of farmers in theory; he often made a speech in which he referred to "crops shooting up out of the ground" — which his wife, Lisa, in her Hungarian accent, repeated as "crops shoosting out of the ground" — and other platitudes about rural life, which on the program was invariably accompanied by a background of patriotic music (Yankee Doodle to be exact); other characters frequently searched for the source of the music. Oliver was usually presented in the light of being the only sane character in an insane world; however, he, too, had his quirks, such as driving his tractor wearing the same three-piece suits that he had formerly worn to practice law and addressing nearly every other person in Hooterville as Mr. or Mrs., though the Hootervillians referred to each other by first names (although they apparently reciprocated by continuing to refer to him as "Mr. Douglas").
Oliver also was either too blinded by pride or too stubborn to admit that he was a totally incompetent failure as a farmer. He did not fit into a place where everyone took for granted that a "talking" pig, Arnold Ziffel, was his owners' "son," or where one of the two contractor "brothers" constantly remodeling his house was a woman, and somehow always lost out to local confidence man Mr. Haney, from whom he had bought the farm in the first place. He also hired the young Eb Dawson, who referred to Mr. and Mrs. Douglas as his parents and who often irritated Oliver. He is such a fanatic farmer wannabe in the pilot episode, that during a flashback while on a bombing mission in a P-38, he annoys his squadron commander with comments about how tomatoes are turned into catsup. A later episode shows Oliver was a captain in USAF Reserves when the Hooterville townsfolk try to have him fly a broken-down Curtiss JN-4 from World War I.
Oliver's denial led him to labor on in vain, year after year, when it was obvious to everyone else that he would be far more successful back in his New York law practice. His wife Lisa, a very reluctant rural dweller initially, fits right into her new surroundings and is almost immediately accepted and befriended by nearly everyone. One running gag shows how Oliver usually "loses" one way or another to the Hooterville yokels. In one episode, Mr. Haney, Lisa and Hank Kimball think they've discovered a "milk-making" machine. Oliver has to tell them — tongue-in-cheek — that not only are the chemicals so expensive that milk prices would soar, but that this new milk also causes baldness! One episode shows Oliver as a "successful" lawyer when he manages to convince the U.S. Army not to draft Arnold Ziffel the Pig. Despite being a horrible farmer and once only making 16 dollars of profit for the entire year, the Douglases never had to worry about money — for instance, they never have trouble replacing the numerous dishes that Lisa breaks. This once caused the other residents to believe that Oliver was making and selling alcohol, and that he was involved with the mob.
A running gag in later seasons of the show involved Oliver often never being able to finish something he starts to say due to being rudely interrupted by other characters in the scene at a particular moment.
Lisa Douglas
Lisa (portrayed by actress Eva Gabor), a glamorous Hungarian immigrant, plays the role of the wife of Oliver Wendell Douglas, a successful New York City attorney who had long harbored the dream of moving to the Midwest and operating a farm. The leitmotif of the character through the years remains her comedic Hungarian accent, which leads to numerous jocular interactions with the Hooterville locals, who mishear Lisa's statements and are likewise misheard by Lisa. Both Lisa and Oliver are regularly portrayed as wearing city clothes, which seem misfit in the Hooterville expanse. Lisa's penchant for wearing resplendent jewelry, costly dresses and heeled footwear adds to this characterization through the seasons.
In the initial episodes, Lisa plays a Manhattan socialite who has no desire to leave the luxuries of her lifestyle in New York. After shifting to Hooterville, she becomes close to many farm animals —especially to the neighboring family's pet piglet Arnold — and takes up various cooking activities. As the episodes progress, it is Lisa who becomes comfortably enmeshed with the Hooterville life, undertaking various entrepreneurial and philanthropic activities, while Oliver faces numerous challenges, both in his entrepreneurial work and philanthropic orientation. The final episodes impress the significance of Lisa's rise to prominence in the Hooterville community and the apparent lack of importance that Hooterville residents accord to her husband. The concluding episode of the series, titled Lisa the Psychologist, reemphasizes this portrayal, showcasing Lisa as a psychoanalyst whose services are much sought after by one and all.
The character of Lisa Douglas engendered broad critical acclaim. CNN rated the character as being among “The most stylish TV housewives of all time.” Larry Karaszewski writes in the USC Spectator: "While Mr. Douglas thinks he is a 'real farmer', Mrs. Douglas has no such pretensions. She simply is what she is and the citizens of Hooterville accept her for being herself [...] Much of Green Acres is about a communications gap and Lisa is central to the gap."
In the book “Politics and the American Television Comedy,” pop culture author Doyle Greene writes: "Oliver and Lisa were [...] transformed into cultural and political caricatures, even dialectical oppositions: husband versus wife; rural life versus urbanity; Protestant work ethic versus flights of fancy; and, above all, America versus Europe. As the embodiment of Europe in all of its aristocratic glory, Lisa represents the very culture that America explicitly saw itself as being reborn from in the frontiers of the New World."
Mr. Haney
Mr. Haney, the downright low-down salesman portrayed by veteran character actor and longtime Western film sidekick Pat Buttram with the distinctive, warbling voice, sold his family's ancient, dilapidated farm to Oliver when he and Lisa Douglas left New York City for rural Hooterville and their new life as farmers. In the process of the sale, Haney stripped the farm of everything of value down to the plumbing.
Haney had cheated the Douglases by charging them several times what the property was worth and saddling them with a dysfunctional farm. He continued to cheat them by initially selling the movable property associated with the farm to them, one piece at a time. Douglas bought Haney's cow, tractor and plow, all of which were as useless as the farm. He sometimes put the word "genuine" in front of an object he was trying to sell.
He continued to come back with his farm truck converted into a peddler's truck — a 1924-25 Dodge Brothers truck, part of a running joke that everything in Hootersville was at least 30 to 50 years out-of-date. The truck would be stocked with worthless versions of items that Oliver needed. He almost invariably succeeded in unloading the items on Oliver at inflated prices despite his past shady dealings with them. He often took a piece of junk and called it by some outlandish name, suggesting that it has some use that it clearly does not and that it's in some way valuable.
Haney would often turn up in his truck at the Douglas farm, minutes after they've realized they needed something, selling exactly that — even if it were very odd — complete with a pull-down sign on his truck advertising it. If turned down by Douglas, Haney would offer a variety of equally useless alternatives. Mr. Haney, ever the glib and creative speaker, was once asked by Mr. Douglas, "How come you always show up with exactly what I need?", to which he replied, "Well let me put it to you another way — how come you always need what I show up with?".
In one episode, Haney's "Grabwell" washer — basically a barrel with an outboard motor in it — wrecks the Ziffels' house. Oliver successfully sues Haney. But Haney, of course, profits because the sale he holds to raise money to pay the settlement brings him in more than if he had peddled the stuff in his normal fashion. Further, Lisa buys some of it. In another episode, Haney examines what he believes is a dead cow — actually a plastic promotional item that fell off a meat truck — hoping to parlay the find into a profit, and refers to it as the “corpus delicious.”
In another episode Haney had what seemed to be an entire company in the back of his truck. One person comes out to speak to him. He then yells into the door for everyone to take lunch, and it sounds as if several dozen employees are contained in the small area.
Eb Dawson
Eb Dawson (Tom Lester) is the naive, wide-eyed, yet smart-mouthed young farmhand to the Douglases. He habitually addresses the Douglases as "Dad" and "Mom," much to Oliver's consternation.
In the early 1960s, Lester appeared in a play with CBS producer Paul Henning's daughter Linda Kaye Henning (Betty Jo Bradley of “Petticoat Junction”), and Lester soon found himself auditioning for the role of Eb Dawson, farmhand to Oliver Wendell Douglas on “Green Acres.” Lester beat around 400 other actors to play the character after a screen test.
Lester later said he won the role because he was the only actor who auditioned who knew how to milk a cow since he grew up on a farm in Mississippi. His recurring role soon became a regular character due to the character's and the show's popularity, which made Lester a household name.
As several “Green Acres” characters also appeared in episodes of two other CBS series — “Petticoat Junction” and “The Beverly Hillibillies” – Lester, as Eb Dawson, also occasionally appeared on those shows. Even during the height of “Green Acres’” popularity, Lester lived modestly in a small apartment over a garage in the San Fernando Valley. Each year during the show's summer hiatus he would travel the country and speak at churches, youth rallies and revival meetings and at one time worked for the Reverend Billy Graham's organization.
Lester appeared in nearly every "Green Acres" episode between 1965–71, with the exception of the first half in the 1967–68 season when he was ill with mononucleosis. The show's explanation for Eb's absence was that he had eloped and was on his honeymoon.
Fred Ziffel
In 1963 Hank Patterson first appeared in what would become a recurring role as farmer Fred Ziffel on the popular CBS rural comedy “Petticoat Junction.” It was on the popular, irreverent “Green Acres” that he earned his greatest fame. In 1965 and 1966 — two of the years in which the two series ran concurrently — he frequently appeared in both shows in the same week in primetime.
The association of Patterson's character with the popular character Arnold, the pet pig whom Fred and his wife Doris treated as a son, ensured him a place in TV history.
According to westernclippings.com "Characters and Heavies" by Boyd Magers, "Ironically, by the time Patterson was doing 'Green Acres' he was in his late 70s and almost completely deaf, but the producers loved his portrayal so much they worked around his hearing impairment by having the dialogue coach lying on the floor out-of-shot tapping Hank's leg with a yardstick as a cue to speak his line."
Arnold Ziffel
The humor that surrounds the character of Arnold comes from his human-like abilities and lifestyle, and from the way the people of Hooterville insist on thinking of him as a fellow human. They invite him to town meetings; they play checkers with him (and lose), and they speak English to him and can understand him when he speaks with pig squeals and grunts.
Arnold can do pretty much anything a human can. He can write his name and change channels on the television. He watches the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” to keep up with the issues. He signs checks and can adjust the TV antenna, and he is the smartest student at the local grade school. He carries his lunchbox in his mouth, and often plays practical jokes on the other students. Arnold is also artistically talented: he is working on a novel, he plays the piano, and he is an accomplished abstract painter, dubbed "Porky Picasso," whose piece titled "Nude at a Filling Station" wins first prize out of two thousand entries in a student art contest. He even works as a "paper pig" delivering newspapers, although he has a bad habit of throwing copies so hard and so badly aimed that he sometimes breaks windows.
Arnold is very lucky. He wins a trip to Hawaii in one episode and a trip to Hollywood in another. After a Hollywood screen test, he is cast in a role originally intended for a horse, but after the horse — implied to be Mr. Ed — explains to Arnold that he needs the job to send his son to Stanford, Arnold's deliberate bad behavior leads to him being fired and the horse getting his job back. He also wins a prize at the Pixley Bijou movie theater for having the most original costume ... the theater manager says that Arnold has the best-looking pig costume he has ever seen.
At one point, Arnold falls in love with Mr. Haney's prized Basset hound "Cynthia," but in a scene full of pig grunts and dog barks, subtitles explain that they realize their love can never be. Mr. Haney threatens to sue Arnold's "father" Fred Ziffel, claiming that Arnold has ruined Cynthia for dog shows since she has begun to grunt like a pig, too.
One storyline has Arnold inheriting millions of dollars as the sole descendant of the favorite pig of a pork-packing magnate, distinguished by his ability to predict the weather with his tail. Some doubt exists as to Arnold's weather prediction skills when — during the claims process for the money — his tail predicts snow in the middle of warm weather. This prediction is disbelieved, and Oliver finds himself in a difficult situation checking out of an expensive hotel, because he has to deal with Arnold's expensive bill being deemed Arnold's "Pig Lawyer" by the town of Hooterville. However, during this difficulty, Arnold's seemingly impossible prediction proves accurate when a freak snowstorm buries the city. So, the hotel welcomes Arnold back with open arms.
The Monroe brothers
Alf (Sid Melton) and his "brother" Ralph (Mary Grace Canfield) are two quarrelsome carpenters. In the episode that introduces them, Alf confesses that Ralph is actually his sister, and explains they would not get jobs if people knew that she is a woman. The Monroes rarely finish projects, and those that they do complete are disasters, such as the Douglases' bedroom closet's sliding door that is always falling down, their unsuccessful attempts to secure the doorknob to the front door, etc. In one episode, after accidentally sawing Sam Drucker's telephone line at the general store, they splice it back together — although backwards — causing Drucker to listen at the mouthpiece and talk into the receiver. Melton left in 1970 (season four) to do “Make Room for Granddaddy,” so the writers developed an occasional subplot that involved sister Ralph's attempts to win the affections of "Hanky" Kimball or some other hapless Hooterville bachelor. Alf later returns for Ralph's failed wedding to Kimball.
Canfield was best known for her recurring role on the hit comedy series “Green Acres” as Ralph Monroe, the all-thumbs carpenter who greeted her fellow Hootervillians with her signature "Howdy Doody!" She appeared in more than 40 episodes of the show during its six-season run from 1965 to 1971. Recalling the Ralph character in a 2006 interview, she said "To be remembered for Ralph kind of upsets me — only in the sense that it was so easy and undemanding." She added "It's being known for something easy to do instead of something you worked hard to achieve.”
Sam Drucker
Sam Drucker, portrayed by actor Frank Cady, is the operator of Drucker's General Store in the fictional community of Hooterville, which is seen in the television shows “Petticoat Junction,” “Green Acres” and occasionally “The Beverly Hillibillies.” Drucker is the only resident of Hooterville to be a regular character in both “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres.” The New York Times describes Sam Drucker as "a bit of a straight man to the colorfully zany folk" of Hooterville. However, like other Hootervillians, he sees nothing unusual in the fact that Fred and Doris Ziffel's "son" Arnold is a pig that understands spoken English language and whose grunts and squeals are understood by others.
Drucker is provincial, but fairly intelligent. He earns a modest living, and he sleeps in the back room of the general store. In the “Green Acres” episode "Milk Machine," Mr. Haney and Fred Ziffel ask Drucker for $500 to invest in a milk-making machine. When he tells them he doesn't have the money, Mr. Haney suggests getting a mortgage on the general store. Drucker tells him that he already has six mortgages on his store and is "working on a seventh." Much ado is made of Sam Drucker's baldness. In one episode, he dons a toupee for a photograph and notes that it is the first time he has worn it since high school. In another episode, he states, "We Druckers skin out early." And in the “Green Acres” episode "The Agricultural Student," Sam throws on his toupee and says he is "Young Sam Drucker" when a young blonde co-ed named Terry Harper needs a date for the barn dance.
Besides being the town grocer, Sam Drucker is also Hooterville's postmaster, constable, Justice of the Peace and superintendent of schools. And he is the editor, publisher and apparently sole employee of the Hooterville World-Guardian, the town's weekly newspaper. He operates a "bank," which is merely a cash box kept under the counter in his store. In addition, Drucker is a fireman with the Hooterville Volunteer Fire Department and plays the bass drum in the Hooterville Volunteer Fire Department Band.
Hank Kimball
Henry Wadsworth "Hank" Kimball is the county agent in the 1965–71 American television comedy “Green Acres.” Hank Kimball played by Alvy Moore is an unusual, perhaps unique, comic creation. He is friendly and eager-to-please, but he is highly scatterbrained and appears to have been educated beyond his intelligence. He has an unusual self-correcting manner where he makes a statement, then qualifies it, then corrects it, then corrects it further, and finally loses track of what he was saying entirely. The Encyclopedia of Television states that Kimball "personifies a kind of infinite regress, where every empirical statement branches into multiple statements that in turn preclude it, spiraling each new observation back and away from itself like an inductive Escherism.
Hank Kimball was a more straightforward character when “Green Acres” first began. Over the course of the first season, however, he gradually changes into a scatterbrained flake who cannot seem to remember anything, unless, as Oliver Douglas figures out, you specifically tell him not to remember it. He frequently forgets Oliver's name while he is talking to him and has to ask him his name.
Although Kimball is supposedly a farming expert, his advice is usually worthless. For example, in one episode, Oliver has children visiting his farm from New York City. He lets each one plant a small garden. Kimball comes and tells them he is the county agent and can tell them anything they would like to know about farming. A child asks how seeds know what to grow into. Kimball replies that the seeds just look at the pictures on the seed packs.
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