1.10.: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You

"You got a lime spreader."
"No. And, I'm not gonna buy the one you have on your truck."
"I haven't got one on my truck."
"Oh..."
"Wanna buy a truck?"

We are cooking now. Mr. Kimball has the first of his all-out forgetful and funny scenes (and the Chief comes up). The telephone pole with the phone on top arrives. We get the first town-wide comedy scenes when Oliver's old law partner, Judson Carter Felton, keeps trying to call Hooterville. We get the first sequence where an outsider enters Lisa and Oliver's new life and sees only insanity. The show has arrived and damn it's good.

Lisa is still having trouble with the Generator "Plug-In" system. Oliver is getting ready to spread lime on the soil. And, JC Felton is trying to get Oliver to come back to NYC for three weeks to finish a case. During all of this, the hassle of contacting NYC gets Oliver his phone on a pole outside the bedroom. Why on a pole? They ran out of wire.

I always loved the phone up the pole. (Contrary to GA poplar belief, the phone does go inside during Season Three and, I think, it's there for a while. We'll see when we get there.) It makes for a lot of great physical comedy and a lot of casual athletics from Eddie Albert as he goes out the window and up it. I like the "We ran out of wire" thing too. Oliver & Lisa wake up at 5:30 AM and the pole is out there. It is dawn. So, they put it up when it was still dark. They brought the wire all the way out, put up the pole and just placed a phone on the top when they discovered that they had no more wire...all in the dark, without making a sound. Awesome. Pure classic comedy. How'd they do it? Who cares! You wake up every day to discover new obstacles and here, very literally, is a new one for our favorite farm couple.

The phone actually arrives because of the scene with Mr. Kimball. This is the first of the absolutely wonderful Hank scenes. He is forgetful ("No. I left my lunch there.") and confused ("What have you got here?" to the dozen bags that say "LIME" on them) and throwing out anecdotes about his boss, the Chief ("If we don't laugh at that joke, he fires us. Well, not fires. He suspends us without pay forever."). I wish we got to meet the Chief but, like Maris in Frasier, it's better that we don't. Then, he can become the craziest boss ever.

Anyway...Sarah, the woman who runs the phone company, is Hank's Mother. But, they've had a fight and Hank ran away from home a week ago. (Mom wouldn't let him have a dog.) Oliver asks Hank to talk to his Mom about their phone. Well, the next morning, the pole is there and Oliver is a hero for bringing a Mother and Son back together. Of course, Oliver has no idea what they're talking about but he gets a phone out of it.

Lisa does a lot of meal preparing in this episode and a lot of standing around being pretty and charming. In fact, Oliver doesn't really do too much either. They just sort of react to everything around them a lot for the first half. Then, when JC Felton arrives at the house, they just act normally (the way they've been acting for the past nine episodes) and it does, indeed, look like they're a bit crazy. In the second episode of My Three Sons, they bring in an old lady who watches the Douglases (no, this time it's Steve and his three sons) and thinks they live in a hellhole. A second episode, before we've seen everyone do their thing, is far too early for this sort of thing. And, the episode isn't that great. Here, with JC Felton, it's perfect. Mainly because the episode is paced very quickly. It cooks along and suddenly, halfway in, Felton is there and, in rapid succession, he goes from room to room and then winds up up the pole and then on the ground. Nicely done. GA would do this again but much later when the world is far more complex. (What would Felton have done with Arnold or a flirting Ralph, I wonder?)

It's not only the swift pace that makes the episode such a joy but the fact that it's funny. For some reason, Haney mistaking Judson Carter Felton, prominent NYC attorney, for his pal Gomer always makes me laugh. And, when Mrs. Ziffel does the same thing, I laugh again. Floyd Smoot's yell to NYC is funny. Uncle Joe's trouble with everyone's name shows that, perhaps, Joe works best in short bursts rather than as the constant flim-flam man that he is in Petticoat Junction. Well, I think so. Could you imagine a show devoted to Mr. Haney? I'd go mad. Short bursts of their comedy works best...Although, an Eb and Hank Kimball show? Anyone?

Every episode adds a little something extra. Every episode raises the "Laugh-O-Meter" a little higher. Wonderful show. If you watch this and you don't laugh, then I don't know what to tell you because it's funny. Maybe One Day At A Time is more your speed. It's shot on cheap video and it's topical (circa 30 years ago) so...that must mean something. What I'm saying is that if you watch this and don't like it...you won't like GA. If you watch it and like it, let's keep traveling. This is good stuff.

Next episode: The first one I recorded on Betamax back in 1986.