“Pissed me off”: the song Ron Howard called “the bane of my existence”
Everyone has at least one song that they’d be thrilled to never hear again for the rest of their lives, and Ron Howard is no different. His reasons have nothing to do with infectious earworms, though, with the actor and filmmaker instead plagued by the lingering ghost of residual childhood trauma.
It might sound excessive for someone to say that a single song had had a detrimental impact on their life, but those naysayers should probably remember that Stephen King’s wife, who he married in 1971, for context, threatened to leave him should he ever subject her to Lou Bega’s ‘Mambo No. 5’ once more time.
The author learned his lesson, but Howard couldn’t escape his particular ghost. One of the most difficult things a young actor faces is when they age out of the type of roles that made them famous and need to try segueing into on-camera adulthood, which has been the breaking point for many once-prosperous careers.
Instead, the Happy Days star opted to wash his hands of thespianism altogether, directing his first feature in his early 20s and never looking back. He had a backup plan in mind for years after growing increasingly disillusioned with his performative prospects, but that didn’t mean he could escape from his reputation.
Howard had been a household name since he was a nipper, thanks to The Andy Griffith Show‘s Opie Taylor. Unfortunately, even when he left the small-screen favourite behind, people refused to forget. One especially traumatising incident came during his days as an aspiring basketball player, when he lined up to take a free throw in a high school game.
As soon as he stepped up to the line, the opposing team’s band “tried to psyche me out by playing an abrasive, mocking version of The Andy Griffith Show‘s theme song,” he wrote in his memoir, The Boys. It was the latest instance of what he referred to as “Opie-shaming,” and this time it had gotten under his skin.
“I can’t pretend that those kids’ taunts didn’t affect me,” he admitted. “They pissed me off. The word that I would use now, which I didn’t know then, is reductive. I resented that these mean-spirited teens were publicly mocking and ridiculing me for a role that I had played, and I resented the corresponding insinuations: that I must be a pampered TV star, a lame-ass, a wimp.”
Unsurprisingly, Howard explained that he’s had “a complicated relationship with that famous whistled theme song” for the last 60 years. While it “evokes fond memories of Andy’s warmth and the joy that we took in working together,” there are also downsides: “There were times in my life when that damned song was the bane of my existence.”
For years, Howard would remain extra suspicious when he was out and about, and every now and then, he’d “hear whistling along with derisive laughter, and that’s when I knew that I was being mocked for some jerk’s amusement.” If, for whatever reason, you don’t like Ron Howard and meet him face to face, then remember that the easiest way to annoy him is to whistle the Andy Griffith theme tune.
