I’ve never even heard of the Great Indoors. I’ve heard of Two Broke Girls, but never watched a single episode. I tried to avoid BBT, but my best friend loves that show, so I’ve been unable to avoid it. I don’t find Jim Parsons to be completely unwatchable, but the rest of that show is complete garbage. I actively avoid watching sitcoms and even comedy movies now, because 99% of them just aren’t funny.
Even more fun is singing O Little Town of Bethlehem to House of the Rising Sun!
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It was totally reviled by the critics when it came out. Didn’t stop anyone from watching it tho.
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No Amazing Grace to the tune of Gilligan’s Island.
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Don’t forget The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!
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The late Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies fame had a short-lived career as an actor when he was young, and had a small role in the pilot episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, at 21m58s into the video linked above, and 21 seconds into the one linked below.
https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+osborne+beverly+hillbillies
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Ole Scruggs, for what it’s worth, is singularly who changed how Banjo was played.
Before Scruggs, hillbillys strummed it or clawhammered it.
After scruggs, people think banjo sounds like the Beverly Hillbillys theme.
Source: Bought a banjo, love Bela.
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And then the night became a whole new kind of uncomfortable
Kinda like how poetry greeting cards are always to the tune of either Amazing Grace or Yankee Doodle.
They should mix it up a bit and do terza rima, or a villanelle.
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The 60’s were a great time for hot women in sitcoms:
Donna Douglas
Tina Louise
Dawn Wells
Elizabeth Montgomery
Barbara Eden
Reruns on syndicated TV, where are you now?
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Personally, I’m more of a fan of this version.
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No; it’s a really good typo.
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My favorite is singing Because I Could Not Stop for Death to the tune of I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.
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Hell, not everything can live up to the high standards of Green Acres!
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Those are amazing! Do you know who the people are in the photos, especially the last one? Grandparents and great-grands?
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Of all the old shows mentioned ITT that are generally regarded as crap, I have found, on recent re-visiting, that Green Acres is actually pretty good. The convoluted perspectives of the townsfolk and Lisa, contrasted with Oliver’s (a “normal person”‘s) viewpoint and the mountains of hubris he sets himself up for–a lot of the show is about questioning the nature of reality. The characters (and in most cases, their actors’ execution) establish that reality exists only for the individual, particularly Mr. Kimball and especially Mr. Haney, who is actively working to turn reality on its ear in order to baffle everyone into making a quick buck for himself. Mr. Drucker seems to patiently mediate between Oliver’s Cartesian reality and his native reality embodied by Mr Ziffle. (Admittedly, the casting and actors’ interpretation of Eb and the Monroe brothers misses the mark, though.)
Also to its credit, there are frequent gags that are purely visual, and tremendous amounts of care are put into all the visual aspects of the show. As a showcase for the new color TV broadcasts, the bright color palate serves toward creating the surreal backdrop for the “otherplace” reality known as Hooterville. I have come to believe that the show’s creators were cribbing heavily from Fellini and were trying to subvert the entire sitcom format, to the extent they were able given the rigid nature of broadcasting and the american mass-market at the time.
it’s still a pretty dumb show, because sitcoms are dumb. you don’t get to air without dumb. but I think they were trying to point out that sitcoms are dumb. viewed this way, it’s pretty fun.
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What wonderful photos! Thank you for preserving and posting them, they are gold.
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You may be right: in all honesty, I haven’t seen it since I was a kid, so I have no idea if it’s actually good or not (but I’d be willing to bet that P. Junction is bad, as most spin-offs are).
Not particularly apropos, though, somehow I recently ended up on Wikipedia page on the Rural Purge, which is actually pretty fascinating (that’s the overnight period when all TV shows went from being a variation on Andy Griffith to a variation on Woddy Allen). All the shows mentioned in this thread seem to have been purged at that time.
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I remember people talking about that in the Hee Haw thread a while back. HH was the only purge survivor, it seems.
Speaking of wiki, it turns out a lot of what I said about Green Acres is in the wiki, as well as some other unique features of the show I missed (it frequently broke the 4th wall, e.g.) and they also make mention of the Rural Purge there, too. And, AFAICT, Petticoat Junction does suck, but weirdly, it came first and GA was the spin-off show, with the same creator, even.
After the first episodes, the series developed an absurdist world.
Though many episodes were still standard 1960s sitcom fare, the show became notable for its surrealism and satire.[7] Characters frequently broke the fourth wall to address the audience, and on several occasions Lisa was seen apparently reading the superimposed episode credits (which she called ‘the written-bys’) although they were invisible to Oliver. …The show appealed to children through its slapstick, silliness and shtick, but adults were able to appreciate it on a different level.
Instead of washing dishes, Lisa sometimes tosses them out the kitchen window… In one episode Oliver finds Lisa mending holes in his socks with a stapler. As he begins to comment on it, a visiting Fred Ziffel says, “I see you’re mending socks! Darned if you don’t do it better than Doris does!”… Lisa admits that she has no cooking abilities and says her only talent is her Zsa Zsa Gabor imitation (the real-life sisters were often mistaken for one another).
Oliver and Lisa are both depicted as fish out of water; however, the concept provides an ironic twist. While Oliver instigated the move from Manhattan to Hooterville over Lisa’s objections, Lisa more naturally fits into the illogic of their neighbors while quickly assimilating to their quirky, offbeat surroundings. Oliver, while eager to fit in, is often at a loss to grasp the surreal Hootervillians.
Again, I freely admit that I totally did not see any of this at first. As a kid, like it says, I just noticed the slapstick, obvious stuff, but I never liked the show all that much. As an adult, I didn’t give it a chance based on that memory and wrote it off as “dumb 60s sitcom” in the vein of Gilligan’s Island (a show I adored as a kid but which is so incredibly bad as a grown-up.) They started re-running GA here and I would leave it on that channel for the eye-candy while I surfed the internet (I like the colors.) Gradually, I started picking up on the subversive bits. Hooterville is what Twin Peaks would have been if you removed the seedy criminal underbelly and supernatural forces: a bunch of surreal goofballs.
I really have to admire Eva Gabor, too. IRL, she represented fully legitimate Continental class, but took a role that fundamentally subverted that legacy. She was obviously a sport. There are moments in the show where I felt like her supposedly odd-ball, “bubbleheaded” take on, or solution to, a given situation was actually the correct one, contrasted with Oliver’s uptight mores. And she always had really pretty, high fashion dresses. It was a gag that they were out of place on the farm, but nonetheless they looked really cool.
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