Do These Things Happen in Threes?

My childhood TV heroes are dying: First, Curt Gowdy, now Don Knotts.
Gowdy was Gowdy, but Knotts was Barney Fife, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, the Reluctant Astronaut and so much more. He was one of the funniest men who ever lived. His acting was one-dimensional. Honestly, almost every character he played was some version of Barney. It just didn’t matter. The years he spent as the bumbling, loveable deputy on “The Andy Griffith” show earned him enough currency to last the rest of his life and well beyond. People laugh as hard today at Barney’s misadventures as they did forty or more years ago. Five Emmy Awards are outward and visible symbols of his comedic greatness. Griffith got top billing, but there’s no disputing that Knotts was the star of that show and everyone else supported his character. When the show wrapped in 1968 after being on the air since 1960,, it went out on top: #1 in the ratings, according to statistics reported by the Associated Press.
Younger people may remember his work on “Three’s Company,” but Barney defined his career.

Knotts died Friday in Beverly Hills at age 81.

The AP’s description of his film career sums up his acting style:

Knotts' G-rated films were family fun, not box-office blockbusters. In most, he ends up the hero and gets the girl — a girl who can see through his nervousness to the heart of gold.

In the part-animated 1964 film "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," Knotts played a meek clerk who turns into a fish after he is rejected by the Navy.


In the 1967 film "The Reluctant Astronaut," co-starring Leslie Nielsen, Knotts' father enrolls his wimpy son — operator of a Kiddieland rocket ride — in NASA's space program. Knotts poses as a famous astronaut to the joy of his parents and hometown but is eventually exposed for what he really is, a janitor so terrified of heights he refuses to ride an airplane.
His character is accidentally launched into orbit is a space capsule. He endures a series of bumbling misadventures, but ultimately returns to Earth a hero.

The AP's summary continues: In the 1969 film "The Love God?," he was a geeky bird-watcher who is duped into becoming publisher of a naughty men's magazine and then becomes a national sex symbol. Eventually, he comes to his senses, leaves the big city and marries the sweet girl next door.
He was among an army of comedians from Buster Keaton to Jonathan Winters to liven up the 1963 megacomedy "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." Other films include "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966); "The Shakiest Gun in the West," (1968); and a few Disney films such as "The Apple Dumpling Gang," (1974); "Gus," (1976); and "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo," (1977).
In 1998, he had a key role in the back-to-the-past movie "Pleasantville," playing a folksy television repairman whose supercharged remote control sends a teen boy and his sister into a TV sitcom past.
Knotts made people laugh. When people my age were kids, we loved his characters in a way only the innocent can. He was an example to us. He taught us that you don’t to be perfect to be loved. Now, he’s gone. But the lessons and the laughs he leaves behind will live on.

Sphere: Related Content