Green Acres

File:Greenacres.jpg

Aerial photo featured in the opening sequence of Green Acres

This article is about the fictional US television series. There is also the real US town of Green Acres, Washington.

Green Acres was an American television series that was produced by Filmways, Inc. and originally broadcast on CBS from 1965 to 1971. Today Sony Pictures Television owns the rights to the series (unlike its progenitor, Petticoat Junction, which is syndicated by Paramount).

After the tremendous success of The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, CBS offered producer Paul Henning another half-hour on the schedule with no pilot required. Lacking the time to commit to another project himself, he encouraged colleague Jay Sommers to create the series. Sommers used his 1950 radio series, Granby's Green Acres, as the basis for the new television series. The 13-episode radio series had starred Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet as a big-city family who move to the country, where their hired hand (a man in his late 40s) is named Eb, and the general store is run by a Mr. Kimball.[1]

Green Acres featured Eddie Albert as Oliver Wendell Douglas, a rich and successful New York attorney who was acting on his lifelong dream to be a farmer, and Eva Gabor as Lisa Douglas, his glamorously bejeweled Hungarian wife, dragged unwillingly from the privileged city life she adored to a bucolic life on a ramshackle farm.

Ostensibly a reverse Beverly Hillbillies, after the first few episodes the series shifted from a run-of-the-mill rural comedy and developed an absurdist world of its own. Though there were still many episodes that were standard 1960s sitcom fare, the show became notable for its surreal aspects that frequently included satire. They also had an appeal to children due to the slapstick, silliness and schtick, though adults are able to appreciate it on a different level. Its premise is sometimes compared to that of Newhart, though Newhart had no slapstick and was more cerebral.

It was set in the same fictional universe as Henning's other rural television comedies Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies, featuring such picturesque towns as Hooterville, Pixley, Crabwell Corners and Stankwell Falls. The shows even shared characters on occasion.

Much of the humor of the series derived from easily-frustrated, obsessive and short-fused Oliver's attempts to make sense of the largely insane world around him.

Some of the more noteworthy surreal aspects included:

• Oliver and Lisa's neighbours, the Ziffels, have 'adopted' a pig named Arnold, whom they treat and refer to as their "son" and who lives in the house with them. Arnold makes frquent appearances in the show, often visiting the Douglas farm, where he sits watching their TV (he is addicted to westerns); in one episode he even wins a competition and goes to Hollywood in an unsuccessful attempt to break into movies, although how he has entered the competition is never explained

• The episode titled "A Square is Not a Round" featured both a chicken that lays square eggs, which Oliver is desperate to locate, and a toaster that only works when you say "five" to it. In the end it is revealed that it has all been a dream of Oliver's, which he rushes back to bed to see how it finishes. At the very end, Lisa is muttering to herself, "Hmph, square eggs, talking to toasters..." and approaches the refrigerator and says clearly, "Mabel!" and the fridge opens by itself.

• Oliver always farmed wearing an expensive suit, just as he had done when practicing law.

• Whenever Oliver made a rousing speech about the American farmer, a fife could be heard playing Yankee Doodle in the background. (Wife Lisa called this the "shoosting speech" as Oliver always included a reference to the "crops shooting up out of the ground".) The other characters would frequently look around to try to find the source of the music. The other farmers also hated his speeches lionizing farmers.

• There seemed to be two versions of reality. One was that of the Hootervillians, which eventually included Lisa. The other was Oliver's. But there were times when it appeared that Oliver wasn't entirely sane either, as noted with his suit fixation above.

• Arnold Ziffel, a pig. Arnold was an avid TV watcher – his preferred televisual diet consisting of Westerns – and, despite being a pig, was the "son" of a human couple, Fred and Doris Ziffel. Only Oliver appeared to be aware, or to care, that Arnold was not a human.

• A pair of recurring characters were two carpenters known as the Monroe Brothers, Alf and Ralph. Despite her name and her status as one of the brothers, Ralph was in fact a woman, played by Mary Grace Canfield, she was also incredibly bossy and frequently threatened to beat Alf. Alf was played by Sid Melton. In general, only Oliver seems to notice or care about this bizarre contradiction. Nothing the Monroe brothers ever did was either finished -such as the Douglas's bedroom-or ever turned out right-Ralph once sawed through Sam Drucker's phone line and then spliced it together backwards so that Drucker had to talk into the ear receiver and listen at the mouthpiece!

• One running joke was that Oliver had a pronounced tendency to mangle words, especially when his wife, Lisa, mangled them first, as she frequently did, since English was not her native language. Oddly, the other residents of Hooterville would often inexplicably share Lisa's mangled vocabulary. Another aspect of this running gag was that Lisa would often seem to mangle words or phrases, but Oliver would then discover that Lisa's supposedly mangled version was correct - e.g. the title of a fictional TV series Lisa watches in one episode, entitled "Run For Your Wife"

• The series hilariously parodied the age-old truism that country folk all know each other's business -- in several episodes, conversations or argument between Oliver and Lisa would mysteriously and almost instantly become common knowledge all over the valley

• Another was the opening credits. In some episodes, the opening credits would appear and be visible to Lisa, but not Oliver. Sometimes, they would appear on Lisa's rubbery hotcakes—another ongoing joke in the series. In another instance, they were on the eggs laid by the Douglas' hens. One episode opened with the characters arguing, then realizing the credits were running, and sitting down and waiting for the credits to get done on grounds no one was paying attention to what they were saying. Another episode opened with Lisa herself first waking up, then waking up Oliver to ask if he wanted to read "the names" with her. This practice of inserting opening credits was also used in The Beverly Hillbillies as well.

• Oliver was the only person who did not realize that he was a terrible farmer, his farmland almost worthless, his tractor an antique relic, and his farmhouse a shack.

• Oliver had always dreamed of becoming a farmer, but the reality for him was a nightmare, although he lived in complete denial of that fact. Lisa, who always longed to go back to New York and would go back in a heartbeat, actually adjusted quite well and was relatively happy in Hooterville. The local people liked Lisa, but thought Oliver was weird.
• Lisa claimed in one episode to be from New Jersey but went to boarding school in Hungary, thereby explaining both her accent and her lack of ability to speak Hungarian. However, in some episodes, she is seen to converse with other Hungarians in fluent Hungarian. She also has a wide variety of stories involving how her father became the King of Hungary.

Other recurring characters included incredibly lazy and gullible farmhand Eb Dawson, acquired by Oliver along with the farm; dishonest and oily salesman Mr. Haney, who originally sold Oliver the farm and who still always got the best of him; scatterbrained county agent Hank Kimball, who always got lost in his explanations; and grocer Sam Drucker, the only person who seemed mostly normal, but who also saw nothing unusual in some of the more bizarre people around him, including Arnold.

Although still reasonably popular, the show was canceled in 1971 when CBS decided to shift its schedule to more urban, contemporary-themed shows, which drew the younger audiences desired by advertisers. (Nearly the entire Green Acres cast was middle-aged or older.) The Beverly Hillbillies and other shows with rural settings, including Hee Haw and Mayberry R.F.D., were also dropped at the same time.

Popular western film actor Smiley Burnette (also a regular on Petticoat Junction) guested several times in the role of railway engineer Charley Pratt during the 1965 and 1966 seasons but Burnette's ill health ended the role.

An urban legend says that the pig who played Arnold was cooked and eaten by the cast after the show ended. In reality, several different pigs were used during the show's run, none of which was ever eaten by the cast. Often the pig actors looked rather dissimilar to one another—for example, one Arnold had tufts of grey hair behind his ears, giving him an aged look. Another was female and had rather prominent teats—quite a sight to see on a pig who was intended to be male. Yet another Arnold has spots that others lack. This may have been an intentional goof by producers for comedic effect.

Arnold, it is revealed in the 1991 reunion TV movie Return to Green Acres, survived his "parents", and was then raised by his "sister", the Ziffel's comely daughter. The film was made and set at least twenty years after the series (as Haney's latest product is a Russian miracle fertilizer called "Gorby Grow")...but in reality a pig life span is on average 12-15 years, similar to a dog, so Arnold almost certainly would have predeceased the Ziffels. In the reunion movie, the Douglases move back to New York but are miserable there and are implored by the Hootervillians to return and save the town from a scheme to destroy it which has been cooked up between Haney and a wealthy, dishonest developer (Henry Gibson).

In the US and Canada, the first, second and third seasons of the show are available on DVD. A book containing detailed information on the creation and history of the show has been written, titled The Hooterville Handbook : A Viewer's Guide To Green Acres (ISBN 0312088116).

At the 2005 Emmy Awards, the theme song to Green Acres was performed by Donald Trump of the reality show The Apprentice, and Megan Mullally of Will & Grace, who dressed up for the rendition in appropriate costumes.

Cast

File:Green acres 1.jpg

Green Acres starred Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor

• Oliver Wendell Douglas: Eddie Albert
• Lisa Douglas: Eva Gabor
• Mr. [Eustace] Haney: Pat Buttram
• Eb Dawson: Tom Lester
• Fred Ziffel: Hank Patterson
• Doris Ziffel: Barbara Pepper (1965–69, left the series due to ill health)
• Doris Ziffel: Fran Ryan (1969–71)
• Hank Kimball: Alvy Moore
• Sam Drucker: Frank Cady (also a cast member on Petticoat Junction)
• Ralph Monroe: Mary Grace Canfield
• Alf Monroe: Sid Melton
• Newt Kiley: Kay E. Kuter
• Eunice Douglas: Eleanor Audley (Oliver's mother)

In addition, there were crossovers from Petticoat Junction cast members, most frequently:

• Kate Bradley: Bea Benaderet
• Joe Carson: Edgar Buchanan

References

• Cox, Stephen (1993). The Hooterville Handbook : A Viewer's Guide To Green Acres. St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0312088116.

External links

• Green Acres at IMDb
• A Green Acres Website