...compared to how he looked in The Andy Griffith Show. And the Andy Griffith Show started 2 years before this came out. How did that happen? It didn't take THAT much longer to make a movie back then...did it? Is there a chance that Ron Howard filmed his parts way back in '59 or '60 and the movie just wasn't finished and ready for release until '62?
shareTMM started filming Jan.1961. It was released June 1962 (Mason City, Ia. premiere).
shareRon Howard was born in 1955. He was five years old when Andy Griffith started in 1960. So he would have been six when Music Man was filming. If you watch the first season of AG, you see that RH IS a little boy. You may be thinking of later seasons where he grew up. He looks just like Opie in MM, I think.
Correction 2/2/10. I see by imdb that Howard was born in 1954, so he was a year older than the ages I originally gave. Sorry. But he still was a small child... as an adult, he is only 5'9"...
Watch The Trouble with Harry and see how young Beaver Cleaver is.
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I did sixty in five minutes once...
There is also the fact that they probably used a different scale between Andy Griffith and The Music Man as far as what distance the camera's were from the actors. Remember AG was made for tv but MM was made for the big screen so they had to probably pull back quite a bit more from the actors than they would have for a program made originally for television.
Good point.
shareIn AG, they probably had to stage things so that RH was in the frame with the others. Did you notice that they all mostly sat in many scenes? While in MM, they mostly stood, marched, danced, and walked so the fact that he was small was more obvious. Ron Howard was really a wonderful actor at that age. He wasn't able to read and had to learn his lines by having them read to him.
shareYes, he was small and really quite adorable.
shareHis hair was longer (wig?) which probably made him look smaller. Also, his father had a small part in the movie. It would make sense as he would of had to have been on the set anyway.
shareI thought I read somewhere that filming for the Music Man was done before the Andy Griffith Show started. He seems to be smaller in TMM than in TAGS.
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