Trivia / The Andy Griffith Show

• Adored by the Network: TV Land adores this show, to the point of airing month-long marathons of it. As of 2022, it's the only pre-'70s sitcom still in the channel's line-up.
• Cast the Expert: The Darlings, an in-universe musical family, were played by bluegrass band The Dillards.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Andy Griffith's singing was showcased in several episodes, as was Jim Nabors'. Andy can also be seen regularly showing off his guitar skills on the show.
• The Danza:
  • Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor and Elinor Donahue as Ellie Walker.
  • In "A Date for Gomer", Mary Grace Canfield played Mary Grace Gossage.
• Defictionalization: Though Mayberry itself is a fictional town, the town it was based on, Mt. Airy, North Carolina, has adopted the name; several locations throughout the town are named after, and built to resemble, locations in the series. The tourism site for the town is even called "Visit Mayberry".
• Died During Production: Will Wright played Ben Weaver, the town scrooge, until Wright's death. The character was recast twice.
• Executive Meddling: The whole reason why Bob Denver replaced Hoke Howell as Charlene Darling's husband, Dud Walsh, for the character's third appearance. At the time, Denver was about to star in Gilligan's Island, and CBS, which aired both it and The Andy Griffith Show, insisted on Denver guest starring on the latter series as a means of introducing him and his new sitcom to the greater viewing public. (This, of course, was in spite of the fact that Denver already had at least four years of experience and recognition playing the title character's beatnik best friend Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.)
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • As opposed to his role as The Alcoholic Otis Campbell, Hal Smith was actually The Teetotaler in real life.
  • While Barney Fife's trigger discipline was lacking to the degree Sheriff Andy only let him carry a single bullet; among the medals Don Knotts received for his service in World War II were an Army Marksman Badge.
• Missing Episode: Some channels only air the black and white seasons (1-5), and skip the color seasons (6-8).
• Money, Dear Boy: Notoriously the only reason Frances Bavier agreed to do the show and stayed on for the spinoffs. She was otherwise rather vocal of her dislike of the series, as she considered the Aunt Bee role to be beneath her usual acting talents and, according to various cast interviews, she generally did not associate with or get along with the rest of the cast very much. However, despite the urban legend that she refused to see Andy Griffith when she was on her deathbed, Bavier actually did meet with him on good terms shortly before her death.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Ben Weaver, the department store owner, was played by three different actors over the course of the show.
  • Four different actors played Wally, the owner of the filling station.
  • Floyd was played by a much older actor in his first appearance.
  • Nurse Mary Simpson was played by both Julie Adams and Sue Anne Langdon during the second season.
  • Charlene Darling's husband Dud was played by both Hoke Howell and Bob Denver.
• The Pete Best: McNear took over the role of Floyd after Baldwin's one-time appearance as the character.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Andy Griffith is a native Tarheel. Mayberry is a pastiche of Mount Airy, where he grew up. Nearby to Mount Airy is Pilot Mountain, renamed to Mount Pilot for the show.
  • Being on the show so endeared the state to Frances Bavier that she moved there (specifically to Siler City) later in life.
  • Howard McNear (Floyd the barber) had a severe stroke during the run, and upon returning could not walk or stand on his own. He thereafter was always shown sitting or leaning against an object, and would "walk" across the room off camera. When worsening health required him to leave permanently, Floyd retired and the barbershop became Emmett's Fix-It Shop.
• Referenced by...: Half-Life, of all things. Security guard Barney Calhoun is named after Barney Fife, an artifact of the Alpha models that gave the guards bug-eyes, making them look remarkably similar to Don Knotts.
  • Kurt Cobain named one of his songs "Floyd the Barber", after the character from this show. It appears as on Nirvana's debut album Bleach.
  • The Title Theme Tune for Freakazoid! includes the line "Floyd the Barber cuts his hair", complete with a cartoon Howard McNear cutting Freakazoid's hair with a tiny lawnmower.
• Real-Life Relative: Rance Howard, Ron Howard's real life father, made four separate guest appearances and wrote an episode. And Ron's younger brother Clint made a few early appearances as a young boy named Leon who would often offer people his sandwich.
• Recycled Script:
  • At least two different episodes has Barney desperately wanting the big solo in choir – in one such episode, he loses to Gomer, whose singing voice is much more suitable for the solo; in the other, he's over confident that he's got the solo while the rest of the choir try to find a way to get rid of him without hurting his feelings.
  • Several early episodes followed the following format: state police and/or feds come to Mayberry to deal with a crime or seek out a dangerous criminal and are frustrated with Andy's country bumpkin nature, eventually ordering him off the case, only to be humbled when he ends up solving the case for them.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Andy Griffith was supposed to be the comedic lead with Don Knotts as his straight man (similar to their roles in No Time for Sergeants), but they quickly discovered it was funnier the other way around: "By the second episode, I knew that Don should be funny, and I should play straight."
  • During the development time, executive producer Sheldon Leonard and producer Aaron Ruben wanted the show to be some unspecified location in the South, while Andy wanted the setting to be North Carolina. After pitching some made-up names which Andy didn't like, the town was almost known as Mt. Pilot, until Andy pointed out that there was a place called Pilot Mountain near Andy's hometown of Mount Airy, which became the basis for the fictional Mayberry, N.C.
  • Andy Griffith wanted black actors and actresses to have prominent roles in the series, but he was barred from this because of the fact that, being before the Civil Rights laws era, many southern CBS affiliates would have refused to air the show. This resulted in only a very occasional black extra showing up as a background character in very few episodes, with more prominent characters appearing in the spinoff only, and Mayberry didn't get any solid black characters until the RFD sequel/retool series many years later.
  • Related, Griffith reportedly considered doing an episode about racial prejudice after the 1960 sit-ins in Goldsboro, NC brought the issue close to Mayberry. He ultimately decided that racism was "one thing Sheriff Andy could not have solved in a half-hour" and preferred not to address the problem rather than to handle it badly.
  • Ken Berry was asked to reprise his Mayberry R.F.D. role of Sam Jones for the 1986 Return to Mayberry reunion movie, but had to decline due to his work on Mama's Family, in which he played Vinton Harper.
  • The success of Return to Mayberry opened up the possibility for more Mayberry reunion programs (possibly even a series revival), but Andy Griffith had already committed himself to Matlock.
• Write What You Know: Mayberry is based very heavily on Griffith's home town of Mount Airy, NC (and Mount Airy is quite proud of it). ^note  Griffith himself denied this, however, saying that he only used names from the area because he hated using fake ones. Sheldon Leonard merely intended the show to be set in the South.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Several, but the award goes to Allan Melvin appearing as 8 different characters, many of them central to the episode they appeared in.
  • Despite already playing the role of Ernest T. Bass, Howard Morris was, for some reason, randomly brought into one episode, in a guest spot as a neurotic TV repairman. Perhaps justified in that Howard Morris directed that episode, as well as several others during that particular season.
    • In a case of You Sound Familiar, Morris was also the voice of Leonard Blush on the radio in the episode "Barney's Bloodhound". Again, it was an episode he directed.
  • In the Backdoor Pilot of the series that aired as an episode of The Danny Thomas Show, Frances Bavier played a woman named Henrietta Perkins rather than Aunt Bee Taylor. Also, Will Wright played a character named Mr. Johnson instead of Ben Weaver (although the two characters were very similar).
    • In addition, Jack Dodson appeared as an insurance man named Ed Jenkins in "Lost and Found" before playing Howard Sprague.
  • An interesting example is Gavin MacLeod. In "TV or Not TV", he plays a bank robber pretending to shoot a movie about Andy's life; in "Taylors in Hollywood", he plays an actor in the actual movie being made about Andy.
  • Alberta Nelson, who later played Goober's girlfriend Flora, previously appeared as a classmate of Barney's in "The Return of Barney Fife".
  • Some actors who played recurring characters on the spin-off Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. also played different characters on Andy Griffith (and vice versa). For example: Elizabeth MacRae, who played Gomer's girlfriend Lou Ann, appeared in the episode "Big Brother" as the older sister of the boy Howard is mentoring.

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