Forever remembered as Elly May Clampett, and therefore unable really to ever get past the typecast, Donna Douglas was just a good ol’ Christian gal from Louisiana.
Uh huh.
She’s sensational — and I’ve never seen a single episode of Beverly Hillbillies.
The Beverly Hillbillies were fun TV at the right time for real silly stuff, totally over the top simple plots geared for an eight year old sense of humor. I watched a couple of old episodes a few years ago and the best part of the whole thing was the theme song and Elly May, stuff that is so bad it is almost great.
And don’t forget The Twilight Zone. She was the ugly one.
I remember that episode well, and will have to get it on DVD. I never knew it was she.
The Beverly Hillbillies was part of a wave of shows that appealed to rural and small town people by poking fun of people they knew. Some friends of our family caught the pilot episode and invited us over to watch the second episode with them. They filled us in on the backstory from the pilot. I suppose I was nine years old. The humor was sometimes over the top with its broad caricature of the encounter between backwoods and big city. The main slogan from their commercials was “Winston tastes good like a cigarette had oughta.”
If you missed Beverly Hillbillies then you probably also missed Green Acres — same basic show but the premise was reversed. Clueless city folk trying to be farmers and being constantly outsmarted by locals. Both shows are worth watching — If only to better understand the roots of the America that used to be. Neither show would last for 10 minutes in today’s Woke culture.
…and the world is not the better for that.
The next to the last photo reminded me that women used to wear pants with the zipper on the side.