In season 2, episode 27 of The Beverly Hillbillies a car drives off from their mansion and the passenger side of the car is blacked out. Anyone know why?
If this is the clip you’re talking about, I’m not sure it isn’t just a quirky shadow that fell over the car. If you look at the white car behind it (look really fast or you’ll miss it) you’ll see the same darkened passenger side.
I don’t think it’s a shadow. It looks like a spray painted splotch. Like it was added during editing. Almost like animation. And it cuts off at the edge of the hood.
Notice that it doesn’t move or change at all when the car is in motion. A shadow would move or change.
Also, you can’t see through it at all into the back seat like you can through the other part of the windshield. You should at least be able to see a silhouette of movement through it as they get into the back seat but you don’t.
Quite odd, indeed.
Perhaps when the shot got to post production they realized the camera was reflecting in the windshield and instead of reshooting the scene they just blotted out the image for that short time.
Wonder who noticed this. It’s such a short clip. I wouldn’t have seen it if it wasn’t pointed out to me.
WAG? Someone they didn’t want to pay residuals to when the DVD came out.
I thought it looked rather crude and in keeping with the tech of that time.
There was tech in 1961? Who’d a thunk it? 
It does change when the car is in motion. It’s stationary before the car moves. Also, a shadow would definitely cut off at the edge of the hood. How would you see it past the edge?
Definitely added for video release.
Wow, this is a true mystery. Has this ever been discussed in places where Hillbillies obssessives congregate? One would think so, but if not it certainly deserves a conspiracy theory of its own!
According to Wiki “Fifty-five episodes of the series are in the public domain (all 36 season-one episodes and 19 season-two episodes), because Orion Television, successor to Filmways, neglected to renew their copyrights. As a result, these episodes have been released on home video and DVD on many low-budget labels and shown on low-power television stations and low-budget networks in 16-mm prints. In many video prints of the public domain episodes, the original theme music has been replaced by generic music due to copyright issues.” It looks like that episode might be one in the public domain, so without knowing who put it out it might be impossible to find out the reason for the shitty edit.
We don’t if any of the other releases contain that crappy edit.
But “edit” as commonly understood refers to footage cut out (or put in); what we have here requires optical alteration of a quite deliberate nature, but who or what is being removed from the scene, and why? We demand answers!
Depending on what it was a shadow of it should cover more of the hood.
But it’s not a shadow. I played this over and over again on a large screen. It definitely looks like something added in post. It jiggles just a bit in a way that it would if someone went frame by frame and blotted someone out.
For a while I thought it might be a reflection of the man in the black suit standing on the left. But he moved and the black spot didn’t change when he did.
An answer might be found in the same episode put out by a higher quality distributer.
Quite. And I appreciate your volunteering to track down that better version.
I played it on a big screen in slow mode and it does look a lot like it was intentionally blacked out. I still think it could have been a shadow but if it was done intentionally it could have simply been covering up a iglare from the windshield. I don’t think anything in the car could be clearly seen that would need covering up.
I don’t see anything. But, hey, its Friday after 3pm.
This seems to be a higher quality version of the same scene, at timestamp 18:06.
It shows the same blacked out area. And it has a WGN logo, so this presumably was a broadcast version.
For all of us who have gone completely OCD on this, Decades TV will have a Beverly Hillbillies marathon on 9/17-9/18, so we may be able to watch the show on the big screens in our own homes.
The episode aired two weeks after Addison Richards died. Maybe he’s in the car?