The Andy Griffith Show: The Complete Third Season [DVD]

The third season of The Andy Griffith Show has come to DVD with a bonus feature that's a fascinating relic of an era of television that was soon to disappear -- the series sponsor spot, in which cast members, in character and on their established set, plugged the sponsor's product. It was a couple of years later that sponsors ceased to buy 100 percent interest in the commercial time (and control) of series -- other series, especially sitcoms, did the same sort of promotions, some of which, such as The Dick Van Dyke Show cast plugging Kent cigarettes, are awkward -- if not downright difficult to explain or excuse -- today. The Griffith spots here are unusual, however, in that the plugs and their setups are keyed to elements of the specific episodes on which they appeared, and refer to elements of those episodes. All of it -- the commercial spots and the shows themselves -- looks beautiful, and the audio is a good match for the visual quality. As with the other DVD editions of the series, the chapter breaks match the commercial break points of the original programs, with five to an episode. The shows themselves demonstrate how this series managed to stay on the air for eight seasons -- the writers were always reaching in new directions and deeper into the character relationships and successfully mining not only new levels of humor but also coming up with a serious subtext; the relationship between Andy Griffith's Andy Taylor and Ron Howard's Opie Taylor, for example, takes on a new level in the opening episode of this season, as Andy learns something important about a child's imagination and also about a parent's trust in his own child's word and judgment -- but the show also manages to be extremely funny. Each of the five discs opens automatically to a simple and very easy to use menu.