Characters from the 1960s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” live forever with streaming services and YouTube.
- One such character is “Aunt Bee”, who is the aunt of the main character Sheriff Andy Taylor.
Andy is a single dad to his son Opie, so Aunt Bee fills the role of housekeeper and matriarch to the household. She is renowned for her cooking skills. Aunt Bee goes through quite a transformation in the series 6th year when the episodes were first filmed in color and cigarette ads were recently banned from TV. Her fashions become less dowdy, and she makes better choices in the men who choose to seek her affections. During the black and white seasons, her suitors include an itinerant handyman, a traveling medicine man who sells the teetotalling Bee an alcohol-based “elixir”, a chain-smoking dry cleaner, and a rough and tumble mountain man. The color episodes have her keeping company with a retired Congressman, a visiting pastor, and a visiting professor and lecturer. My theory is that this transformation is due to a central air conditioning and heating system being installed into the Taylors house. The summers in North Carolina can get quite hot and I’m sure that Aunt Bee was exhausted after cooking up her famous fried chicken or baking her award-winning apple pie for Andy and Opie. The HVAC system would have cooled things off in the kitchen and may have eased her other household chores as well. With less dust and cigarette smoke to clean, she had time for a complete makeover. The town mechanic,Gomer Pyle, left to join the Marines. His replacement “Goober” could have been recast as a qualified HVAC technician to service the Taylor’s new HVAC unit in a recurring role. Perhaps he would have become another suitor of Aunt Bee.