Return to Green Acres

While it was a treat to see the old cast back together, the film suffered from "Reunion" fever that plagued many of the reunion movies of the era. Hatching a silly plot involving spies and trying to stretch it into a two hour movie was a huge mistake.

If they had bothered to watch the old series they would have known that the deviation from the original was killing what they were making before they even filmed it!

The old show consisted of wacky characters that the audience cared about, not some crazy plot that drags the characters out of the places we like to see them in. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it didn't even show the interiors of the characters homes, and in the case of "Green Acres," the old Haney Place (the Douglas's farm) and Druker's Store were practically characters in themselves.

Besides that, in updating us on the town of Hooterville they forgot to include anyone from "Petticoat Junction," or even the Shady Rest Hotel, for that matter! This was a cookie-cutter production designed to cash in on nostalgia for the series. The actors were great, the script a shambles, and sadly the last time we got to see Pat Buttram, Alvey Moore and Eva Gabor act together.

They should have left the good work that was the original series..alone.

This is one more movie based on a TV show which feels like it was written by someone who never saw the show, and based the script on what people had told them about it. It has the right characters, place names, and situations, but none of the wifty, oddball humor which made the show special. It was good they could get (almost all) the same actors back from the original series. As usually happens in reunion movies like this, something happens to threaten the situation, and the characters band together to (everyone say it together) "SAVE THE TOWN!" The end of the movie is everyone saying "Well, now we can go back to normal!" It's almost as if the scripts for these things come in a kit--they're that stereotyped.

I agree with the previous reviewer who said that this reunion movie must have been written by someone who had never seen the original show. In a way, Green Acres was like Seinfeld for the 1960s, in that there were no lessons or morals learned and very little seriousness or sentimentality - just lots of weird humor (except for some lovey-dovey scenes between Oliver and Lisa at the end of some episodes). This is also a show that had a lot of fun breaking the 4th wall, with characters making references to the opening credits and such. That said, what on earth were the writers thinking when they wrote this movie? The movie isn't even funny - did they forget that Green Acres was supposed to be a comedy? The plot is very cliched - a greedy business man conspires with Mr. Haney to buy everyone's property in Hooterville and turn it into a mall or something. This results in many serious, sappy scenes that have none of the wacky flavor of the original. We even have a "lesson," as Eb's teenage son learns to appreciate his rural hometown instead of thinking it's boring. We also have a romance between the Ziffels' niece and the businessman's son, which I think only makes the show drag even more. Stick with the original - the only reason to watch this movie is if you're curious to see how the cast looked after 20 years.

Yes, it missed the mark big time. I've always felt that reunion shows of this ilk (i.e.,old 30-minute sitcoms) should be done in the same 30-minute time-frame. And, in this particular case, should have been done on similar sets as the TV show instead of filming outdoors in real settings. Because the producers and/or writers chose real-life settings for this reunion show AND stretched it to two hours, the look and feel of the show was completely alien to the original series. For me, that was the first glaring mistake. They should have stuck to the cheap indoor sets and made it a half-hour long. Maybe then they could've used the money they'd have saved and spent it on better writers, because the next glaring mistake was the bad writing. It stuck out like a sore thumb. I give this movie two stars instead of one, because the only endearing aspect of this "mistake" was seeing most of the original cast together again.

If y'all grew up with the original TV series and its surrealistic humor, take a pass on this production...better yet, watch it once to just to learn one can't bring back the past. There's none of the off-the-wall humor of the TV series. Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor) has to work hard to deliver stupid lines. Even Arnold Ziffel is phoning in his performance...although this Arnold is probably the tenth-great grandpig of the original. (Where's Cynthia, the basset hound??)

I watched this mainly to see if it was any good. There's two hours of my life I'll never recover.

Now, even though I've seen one-sentence reviews, I have to post 600 characters to put up mine. Thank the IMDB people for such discrimination.