RichVR
8033
Oh HELL yeah. What a shitshow that would have been.
I mean, the writers were in Hollywood. If they could write a Black part in I Spy I suppose they could have tried to swing something not utterly offensive in Andy Griffith. At least, a fella can hope.
There’s also Dr. M’Benga!
Dejin
8037
Who is returning for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!
ShivaX
8039
Star Trek was also unique and the first of it’s kind in lots of ways.
I’m just saying late '60s Hollywood wasn’t quite, y’know, DW Griffith making Birth of a Nation. There were strong progressive currents, Dr. King was in the air, you were seeing well-intentioned if ham-handed fare in the ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ mode on the big screen, Norman Lear’s groundbreaking Black comedies were only a few years away, etc. Whether any of that would have come to Mayberry, which was obviously trading on old-South nostalgia and trying not to stir up any shit (even Gomer Pyle USMC never mentioned Vietnam!) is of course another question. But the writers weren’t working out of a shack 50 miles west of Raleigh.
(Fun fact: guest actors on The Andy Griffith show included Harry Dean Stanton, Teri Garr, and Jack Nicholson.)
Yeah I think the reason you didn’t see more diversity in Mayberry was more due to the show runners (to use a modern term) knowing their audience, and more importantly, their advertisers.
rrmorton
8042
Yep. I’m reading an excellent book on film history called Pictures at a Revolution, learning a lot of little nuances about the racist af south during that era and how Hollywood navigated that issue. For a movie like In the Heat of the Night, they managed the financial risk by deciding ahead of time that the film just wouldn’t play in the south and then they budgeted accordingly. Black actors (meaning Sidney Poitier) shooting on location in those areas would get violently harassed.
Could it be that Mayberry was always a bullshit fantasy??
I also learned that Poitier and his wife hosted a fundraiser event at their home here in my hometown of Pleasantville, NY in honor of the first black student who integrated at a southern university and then got shot but survived. The Poitiers hosted him at their home and then found a burning cross in their front lawn.
Papageno
8043
Well, yeah. From that famous postwar development in New York State whose name escapes me to Terre Haute Indiana to Peoria Illinois (“But how will it play in Peoria?”) across the Great Plains to the West Coast, the US was vastly more white (and “white bread”) in the 1960s. It’s just something you notice more now, especially on a show set in a part of the country that did IRL necessarily for historical reasons have an appreciable black population. Not everyone made the Great Migration.
No question the show was an inaccurate depiction of most small southern towns, in its unrelenting whiteness. There was little incentive for the relatively amoral and bottom-line focused studios to be accurate, though.
DaveLong
8045
…and now all those people think it’s actual history.
Well, as a kid in Atlanta, we were shown Gone With the Wind and the prevailing attitude was that, while it wasn’t perhaps completely accurate, it was a largely true vision of the old South, etc.
nKoan
8047
Can’t we just go back to good old days when life was just like “Leave It To Beaver”
Skipper
8048
I miss threads sometimes over the weekend and I just want to thank you because, even if for a brief moment in time, you won the fucking internet with this post. A+++ would read again, even a longer version spun out into a Netflix miniseries.
Don’t be hard on yourself or the past. Not only do I fall into the same vein, but I actually lived in Mount Airy for three years as a young kid and remember all the hoopla about “Mayberry.” To be fair, it was one event a year where they had a parade and stuff, as any other kid, I loved it. Who knew Trumpers would come and shit on the thing like everything else they touch, Like King Shit Midas, they are slowly turning everything good into a landscape of brown.
But to the comments degrading that show for not being inclusive or whatever, I mean, it was the Andy Griffith show. It ran from 1960 to 1968. A LOT of stuff was happening then and a LOT of other shows were right there in the same boat. I don’t denigrate the show, one that was all about family values and doing the right thing, as something bad. That show taught lessons to a young me that were important. That’s rare these days.
Besides, who can’t get a laugh out of Barney or Otis coming in drunk and locking himself in the cell, etc. It was good hearted and good natured, despite missing out on what could have been continued good lessons. Andy strove to make the town better and to get the people to act better. I really wish there WOULD have been an episode of inclusiveness of race.
rrmorton
8049
Good points. In many respects, the problem is not the show itself but the absence of a similar show by, about, and for a black audience. We’re making slow but real headway.
Papageno
8050
Oh, I love the show for the things you mention. It was well written, thoughtful, and miles ahead of complete silliness like Green Acres.
Even one of my favorite series of all time, MASH, has gags (especially in the first few seasons) that are super cringey to offensive from a sexual politics perspective.
The movie that spawned it gets dinged for that a lot these days. Hawkeye and the gang of frat bros giving shit to Hot Lips, etc.
Skipper
8052
You know, I hadn’t even thought about M.A.S.H. and running what happened on that show through the filters we have today. Yikes. I guess you could give it a point though for pretty frequently allowing Max to be in drag as part of his ongoing, “section 8 discharge,” ploy. I guess you could then again throw back on the military that pretending to be a man dressed as a woman got you a section 8 discharge.
Someone challenged me a while back on the Confederate Flag when I mentioned the Dukes of Hazzard. And … well, I don’t really have a good memory of any great effort on the part of that show to dispel any notion of that symbolism or to be inclusive of race on the show. =(
