In 1971 Andy had a short lived series on CBS in which he played the mayor of a small town. He played a new character named Andy Sawyer in a town called Greenwood. What I don't understand is why didn't he just resume playing Andy Taylor, who had left Mayberry by this time anyway and we could pick up his story without affecting Mayberry R.F.D., which was still on the air but in its last season.

Don Knotts appeared on the first episode as an unnamed restaurant owner, but to really make things confusing, George Lindsey and Paul Hartman guest starred in their familiar roles as Goober and Emmett. Wouldn't Goober and Emmett have noticed that this mayor Andy Sawyer is a dead ringer for their old friend and sheriff Andy Taylor?!

I would love to see this episode. Does anyone know if any tapes of this still exist?

those questions can be answered with just 2 words: IT'S HOLLYWOOD!

And, I don't know if any tapes of the show exist. Try Columbia House at www.columbiahouse.com.
Also, this site has a section called "tape trading".

I actually have the first three episodes of the new andy griffith show and yes it is very odd to see andy interacting with goober & emmett as themeselves and don knotts playing another character.....

Hey, I don't know if this will help ya, but if you go to www.mayberry.com and search the archive of their Digest Newsletter, there WAS a guy who was selling DVD's of this show.
He also has Angel In My Pocket, a film with Andy in it from 1969, on DVD. I haven't ordered them because I don't have a DVD player, but you might wanna take a chance. If you private message me, I will give you his email adress.

Have a nice day:wave:
Banjo Jerry

I just saw the tape of the "New Andy Griffith Show". How bizarre! What was Andy Griffith thinking? Andy and his "new" TV family arrive at their new house to be surprised by Goober and Emmett, who are described as "old friends" of Andy's. Yet they hardly seem to know Andy's family. Andy tells his family how Goober and Emmett drove all the way from "their home" so they don't mention Mayberry directly, but it implies they do not live in Andy's new "old" town Greenwood.

The plot is that all of Andy's old friends want Andy to use "his position as mayor" to get a permit to build the business of their choice on a piece of rezoned land. (I'll give away the plot since who cares, in the end, Andy gives the land to none of his friends, the winner is a retired farmer who wants to build a boarding house).

When Don Knotts arrives Andy says "you son of a gun" and although he is never mentioned by name as Barney, he obviously is-he might as well have been since universes already crossed with Goober and Emmett. Doesn't anyone realize that Andy Sawyer is a dead ringer for Andy Taylor-or are they the same person?

In the year since we had least seen Andy Taylor on Mayberry RFD he could have divorced Helen and abandoned his new son and sent Opie to boarding school, then married this Lee (maybe the kids were Lee's from a prior marriage) and then changed his last name to Sawyer to avoid all this embarassment. (But most likely, not!)

Or maybe this show is set in a different universe where he is a different Andy so Goober and Emmett and "Barney" are also not really the same (since Mayberry was not mentioned by name) but are just very similar to the lovable characters we know from the original series.


Andy should have just continued the role of Andy Taylor. If he really wanted Lee Meriwether in the show she could have replaced Aneta Corsaut as Helen and Ann Morgan Guilbert could have played Helen's sister Nora instead of Lee's sister Nora. (Another side note-since The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show are in the same universe through the Danny Thomas Show, that puts Nora in the same universe as Millie Helper from DVD) Andy and Helen just had a son, they could have just skipped a few years which a lot of shows did anyway, and the daughter wasn't needed or she could have been Helen's niece instead of their daughter. Opie could have gone to college and Aunt Bee had already left to go live with her sister.

At any rate, it was still fun to see these long lost episodes.

I haven't seen any around the stores...

http://www.yesterdayland.org/Yes1.gif

Here's a simple sitcommy explanation why Andy Taylor and Andy Sawyer looked so much alike and had the same friends: Identical Cousins!

Problem solved.

I just saw the tape of the "New Andy Griffith Show". How bizarre! What was Andy Griffith thinking? Andy and his "new" TV family arrive at their new house to be surprised by Goober and Emmett, who are described as "old friends" of Andy's. Yet they hardly seem to know Andy's family. Andy tells his family how Goober and Emmett drove all the way from "their home" so they don't mention Mayberry directly, but it implies they do not live in Andy's new "old" town Greenwood.

The plot is that all of Andy's old friends want Andy to use "his position as mayor" to get a permit to build the business of their choice on a piece of rezoned land. (I'll give away the plot since who cares, in the end, Andy gives the land to none of his friends, the winner is a retired farmer who wants to build a boarding house).

When Don Knotts arrives Andy says "you son of a gun" and although he is never mentioned by name as Barney, he obviously is-he might as well have been since universes already crossed with Goober and Emmett. Doesn't anyone realize that Andy Sawyer is a dead ringer for Andy Taylor-or are they the same person?

In the year since we had least seen Andy Taylor on Mayberry RFD he could have divorced Helen and abandoned his new son and sent Opie to boarding school, then married this Lee (maybe the kids were Lee's from a prior marriage) and then changed his last name to Sawyer to avoid all this embarassment. (But most likely, not!)

Or maybe this show is set in a different universe where he is a different Andy so Goober and Emmett and "Barney" are also not really the same (since Mayberry was not mentioned by name) but are just very similar to the lovable characters we know from the original series.


Andy should have just continued the role of Andy Taylor. If he really wanted Lee Meriwether in the show she could have replaced Aneta Corsaut as Helen and Ann Morgan Guilbert could have played Helen's sister Nora instead of Lee's sister Nora. (Another side note-since The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show are in the same universe through the Danny Thomas Show, that puts Nora in the same universe as Millie Helper from DVD) Andy and Helen just had a son, they could have just skipped a few years which a lot of shows did anyway, and the daughter wasn't needed or she could have been Helen's niece instead of their daughter. Opie could have gone to college and Aunt Bee had already left to go live with her sister.

At any rate, it was still fun to see these long lost episodes.

I do remember this show dimly, and remember it seemed to come and go in a flash.

Seems that I just figured Andy was sort of doing a "reboot", that this really was the same Andy, in post Mayberry era... and I suppose that's what it was meant to be since there was Emmet and Goober right there, and the in-theory really smart move of bringing Barney back.

Other than just the fact that I do remember that the show aired, that's almost all I can remember.

A few years ago I found a site that explored the show, including stills, and wonder if that's still available online... hang on...

Hoot!

The New Andy Griffith Show

http://youtu.be/qbkVNRNW2Xk

And...

http://youtu.be/RECTK3ansOY

Weird but wonderful stuff... has to be a "Mirror Mirror" universe, right?

In 1971 Andy had a short lived series on CBS in which he played the mayor of a small town. He played a new character named Andy Sawyer in a town called Greenwood. What I don't understand is why didn't he just resume playing Andy Taylor, who had left Mayberry by this time anyway and we could pick up his story without affecting Mayberry R.F.D., which was still on the air but in its last season.

Don Knotts appeared on the first episode as an unnamed restaurant owner, but to really make things confusing, George Lindsey and Paul Hartman guest starred in their familiar roles as Goober and Emmett. Wouldn't Goober and Emmett have noticed that this mayor Andy Sawyer is a dead ringer for their old friend and sheriff Andy Taylor?!

I would love to see this episode. Does anyone know if any tapes of this still exist?

This may have been covered more fully in another thread, but it looks like Andy Griffith was having trouble connecting with viewers in his projects immediately following his departure from Mayberry RFD... the story of The Headmaster, which was quickly retooled into the New Andy Griffith Show is a fascinating though not pleasant one for fans. As I noted earlier, I was just a child when all these events were going down, and at that not following the ins and outs of television back in those days... here's a link on the story of Andy Griffith's Headmaster series...

http://www.tvobscurities.com/articles/headmaster/

"...Broadcasting called The Headmaster one of the new shows on CBS “calculated to generate a youth mystique,” although in its March 9th issue it called the series The Andy Griffith Show, suggesting that the title change had not yet spread throughout the entire television industry [...] In The Headmaster, Griffith would star as Andy Thompson, the headmaster of a small, coeducational private school in California. Joining Griffith in the cast were Claudette Nevins as Margaret Thompson, Andy’s wife and an English teacher at the school, Jerry Van Dyke as Jerry Brownell, the school’s football coach and Parker Fennelly as Mr. Purdy, the school custodian. In the CBS fall preview for The Headmaster, Griffith explained that 'since all of our students are teenagers we’re going to try to deal with many of the situations that young people come up against these days. And in all of these stories there’ll be a combination of comedy and drama.'..."

Then suddenly in January 1971, the Headmaster simply changed to The New Andy Griffith Show!

"...There will be no dramatic transition–his wife will not run off with the plumber, nor will the school burn down–but sometime next January Andy will be relocated in a small town down South, “about 15 or 20 miles from Mayberry,” Linke says seriously. He will have no wife, one housekeeper, maybe two children. Some details remain unsettled–he may be a farmer, or even a sheriff again. But the show will not be called “Farmer” or “Sheriff.” Of the 53 shows that outranked Andy [in the latest Nielsen report] , only five were new this season. The title will be “The Andy Griffith Show,” or possibly “The New Andy Griffith Show,” so that this time there will be no mistake." -Joan Barthel

This is still not the site I remember, but a very good one.