![]() From 1960 to 1968, the sitcom was top-ranked in the Nielsen reports, its final season it was the highest-ranked show on television, and it ran in syndication for decades after, producing multiple spin-offs. While Andy Griffith’s initial run ended 54 years ago, it’s a show whose popularity was and remains astounding, especially for a Civil-Rights era show about a white Southern sheriff. In “Opie’s Piano Lesson” race is never even mentioned, even as it remains the organizing factor of this imagined colorblind white rural South. In clear contrast to Charlie, Conroy’s presence helps create domestic harmony (literally, he plays the piano) in the Taylor home. Here the use of color-Flip’s grey sweatshirt, light brown suit, and khaki pants-functions to visually integrate him into the white world of Mayberry. The episode’s consistent othering of Chinese American characters, elevates their difference in a way that is palpable and distinct from the colorblind world Flip Conroy enters a few weeks later. ![]() The limits of a white liberal and assimilationist narrative, which reward appropriate stances towards capitalism and by extension American democracy, only extend so far in “Aunt Bee’s Restaurant.” Even as Mayberry’s residents are delighted by the new Chinese Restaurant, which functions as an assertion of their tolerance for difference, Chinese American characters are only integrated into the imagined white town as long as they remain tethered to the stereotypical space of the restaurant. ![]() The episode thus positions Charlie, to borrow a term from Cindy E-Feng Cheng, as a “foreigner within,” where he functions as a “welcome immigrant,” who yet remains permanently marked as different and foreign (quote from Melissa Phruksachart’s “The Asian American Next Door”). Ultimately, the Chinese American characters-and the emblematic red-create discord in the Taylor home that is only eased when Bee decides to leave the restaurant business (her decision governed by having received an ominous fortune in a fortune cookie). This color scheme reinforces both Charlie and the restaurant’s otherness Charlie’s red glasses further equate him with this space, marked as exotic and different from the white space of the Taylor home. Even in the Taylor home, when characters speak of Charlie and/or the restaurant, red appears via props like a lamp or a sewing kit. Red lions, red paper lanterns, and red costuming to evoke stereotypical Chinese representations. Over multiple episodes, this color palette is normalized and collapsed with their whiteness.īy contrast, the space of the new Chinese restaurant bursts with deep reds. Fitting distinctly into this world, characters like Aunt Bee and Andy’s (Andy Griffith) love interest Helen (Aneta Corsaut) often wear blues and whites, matching them with the décor, suggesting a comfort and harmony between characters and place. Brown, blue, green, and gray frame many of the shots of the town’s prime locations from Andy’s house to the jail and even Opie’s (Ron Howard) classroom. The palette of white Mayberry is decidedly neutral. ![]()
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