 Aerial photo featured in the opening sequence of Green Acres - There is also the US town of Green Acres, Washington
Green Acres is an American television series that was produced by Filmways, Inc. and originally broadcast on CBS from 1965 to 1971.
It was set in the same fictional universe as the rural television comedies Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies, featuring such picturesque towns as Hooterville, Pixley and Crabwell Corners. The shows even shared characters.
The series featured Eddie Albert as Oliver Wendell Douglas, a New York attorney, and Eva Gabor as his Hungarian wife, Lisa Douglas, dragged unwillingly from the privileged city life she adored to a bucolic life on a severely ramshackle farm.
Although there were plenty of typical sitcom fish-out-of-water jokes because Oliver was a terrible farmer and the farmland and equipment even worse (he'd even wear a suit while plowing), the series was noteworthy due to its surreal aspects. Among them, it featured a pig named Arnold Ziffel, who was an avid TV watcher, and who, despite being a pig, was the son of a human couple, Fred & Doris Ziffel. And only Oliver appeared to be aware Arnold wasn't a human. Another aspect worth mentioning is that, 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.
Another running joke was that whenever Oliver made a rousing speech, Yankee Doodle would play in the background. The other characters would frequently look around to try to find the source of the music. Oliver also had a pronounced tendency to mangle words, especially when his wife, Lisa, mangled them first.
Other characters included handyman 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 extension agent Hank Kimball, who always got lost in his explanations; the Monroe Brothers, incompetent contractors Alf and his sister Ralph; 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.
Much of the humor of the series derived from easily-frustrated and short-fused Oliver's attempts to make sense of the largely insane world around him.
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 were eaten.
In the US and Canada, season 1 is available on DVD, and season 2 is scheduled for release in March 2005.
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