Leave It to Beaver

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Image:Leaveittobeaveronline.jpg Leave It to Beaver, a television situation comedy (CBS, October 4, 1957 to 1958; ABC, 1958-June 20, 1963), became even more popular in syndicated reruns than it already was in first-run production, as well as becoming a pop culture icon referencing idealised, even homogenised suburban American life as the 1950s crossed to the 1960s. But if that side of the show could be (and often is) considered flawed and even unrealistic, Leave It to Beaver was daring on its own terms---for being perhaps the first such show on television to present its stories as if through the eyes and mindset of young children.

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Simple Gentility

The show hooked around young Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver (played by Jerry Mathers; exactly how the character gained his famous nickname was never made entirely clear), and his awkward but earnest attempts to navigate an older brother, Wally's (Tony Dow) pre-teen and teenage growing pains, while heeding his gently firm but loving parents, Ward and June Cleaver (Hugh Beaumont, Barbara Billingsley).

Adding to the boy's curiosity, chagrin, and education were his own spunky friends, particularly Larry Mondello (Rusty Stevens) in the early seasons and Gilbert Bates (Stephen Talbot) in the later seasons; his sweet-natured but no-nonsense elementary school teacher, Miss Landers (Sue Randall); and, older brother Wally's pals, equally awkward Clarence (Lumpy) Rutherford (Frank Bank) and rebel-without-a-clue Eddie Haskell (Ken Osmond). The archetype of the Janus-like wiseguy who was the rebel among his peers and the obsequious yes-man ("Why, good evening, Mrs. Cleaver") to the elders he mocked behind their backs, Eddie Haskell ended up becoming at least as iconic as the show itself became.

Leave It to Beaver usually but not always aimed toward a moral lesson, causing its reference even now as an emblem of simpler American times, and the gentility with which the Cleaver parents delivered such lessons presented a parental ideal that may have appealed to television viewers but may also have been impossible to live up to, in a time when actual parents began having to struggle between sustaining the actual or alleged nuclear family and adapting to changes---economically and culturally---they may not have been prepared to make. Co-creator Joe Connelly was once quoted as saying he modeled Ward Cleaver's firm but wisely unimpositional style on the kind of father he himself wished to have had; if Ward sometimes seemed possessed of the gentility of a man of the cloth, it may have come from Hugh Beaumont's personal influence: Beaumont had become an ordained minister before he took up an acting career. (Beaumont also directed a number of the show's episodes in its final two seasons.) June Cleaver likewise became a model of the archetypal suburban mother, but that kind of mother assumed a climate in which one parent could run the house while the other earned its keep; that climate had begun to dissipate, for numerous reasons, even while the show held its place in the prime time lineup.

In telling the stories through the lens of a child, Leave It to Beaver had picked up on a hint from an earlier radio classic, The Aldrich Family, which seemed to imply that it was telling its stories as much through the eyes of awkward teen Henry Aldrich as through the adults in his life. The connection between the two shows went a little further: Norman Tokar, an actor and writer who co-wrote some Aldrich episodes midway through its radio life, eventually became Beaver's primary director for its first three seasons, and probably helped influence the viewpoint of the show's action.

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Syndication

After 234 episodes, Leave It to Beaver ceased first-run production, just as Beaver Cleaver had begun his transition from all-boy to awkward pre-adolescent beginning to struggle between holding onto some of his younger boyhood while learning girls weren't as "creepy" as he formerly believed. Co-creators Connelly and Bob Mosher, ironically, developed and launched a classic if campy send-up of Beaver's kind of family comedy with The Munsters a year later. But the show never really stayed off the air for very long; reruns were part of CBS affiliates' lineups in the mornings for several years to come, and once Nickelodeon bought its rerun rights in the latter 1980s---first for its Nick at Nite channel and, later, its TV Land channel---Beaver's permanent presence was pretty much secured. Today NBC Universal Television owns the syndicated rights and all properties related to the series.

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Beaver Grows Up

That presence wasn't hurt when a made-for-television reunion movie, Still the Beaver, appeared in 1983. The entire main original cast appeared except for Hugh Beaumont, who had died a year earlier. But Ward Cleaver was still a presence: the film's story used numerous flashbacks to the original show, as it followed young adult Beaver's struggle to reconcile divorce and newly-minuted single fatherhood, straining to cope by what his father might or might not have done, while facing the possibility of widowed Mom selling their childhood home.

It was as if to say that even America's old suburban archetypes didn't always have it so perfect. And its reception led to a new first-run, made-for-cable series, The New Leave It to Beaver (1984-86), with Beaver and Lumpy Rutherford running Ward's old firm (where Lumpy's pompous, demanding father---played memorably by Richard Deacon in the original series---had been the senior partner), Wally as a practising attorney and expectant father, June having sold the old house to Beaver himself but living with him as a doting grandmother to Beaver's two small sons, and Eddie Haskell being . . . well, Eddie Haskell, running his own contracting business and raising a son, Freddie, who was every inch his father's son---right down to the dual-personality obsequiousness and rambunctiousness.

The most familiar Cleaver house (into which the family moved for the show's third season) can still be seen at Universal Studios; it may also have been the house used for a later Universal-produced television hit, Marcus Welby, M.D.. (The ironies: kindly Dr. Welby was played by an actor whose previous claim to television fame was as a father just as wise and archetypal of formerly ideal suburban America as Ward Cleaver: Father Knows Best star Robert Young.) The fictitious Cleaver address was 211 Pine Street, Mayfield, which many believe to have been Mayfield, Ohio. Other recurring characters on the original show included Beaver's friends and classmates Judy Hensler, Whitey Whitney, and Richard Rickover; Gus the Fireman (memorably played by veteran character actor Burt Mustin), an elderly gent who befriended Beaver and his pals; and, Tooey Brown and Chester, a pair of Wally's other friends. (Whitey and Tooey were played by real-life siblings Stanley and Tiger Fafara.)

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Beaver Goes to the Movies

Considering young Beaver's love for hitting the movies on Saturdays, with or without Wally, it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise that a full-length feature film based on the show would be made in due course. 1997's Leave It to Beaver starred Christopher McDonald, Janine Turner, and Aleisha Andria (as "The Beaver"), but it was panned by many critics (although Roger Ebert gave it a favorable three star rating) and flopped at the box office, earning only $11,713,605, low by 1997 standards. Original TV co-stars Barbara Billingsley and Ken Osmond made cameo appearances in the film, but they couldn't have helped.

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Trivia

  • The show made its debut was same day the Soviets launched Sputnik (4 October 1957)
  • Leave It to Beaver's playfully bouncy theme song, which became as much of a show trademark as Beaver's baseball cap or Eddie Haskell's false obsequiousness, was "The Toy Parade," composed by David Kahn, Melvyn Leonard, and Mort Greene. The music seemed to be a kind of answer, if not an inversion, to Charles Gounoud's 1872 composition, "Funeral for a Marionette," adapted as the equally familiar theme to television's Alfred Hitchcock Presents. For Leave It to Beaver's final season, however, the song was given a jazz-like arrangement by veteran jazz and television composer/arranger Pete Rugolo.
  • As Lumpy Rutherford's pompous, demanding father (and Ward Cleaver's equally pompous and self-satisfied boss), Fred, Richard Deacon was working a second job for much of the life of Leave It to Beaver: he was concurrently familiar---and popular---for his battles of wits with Morey Amsterdam's Buddy Sorrell as spineless producer Mel Cooley, on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
  • False: Ken Osmond grew up to be rock legend Alice Cooper (who once took to wearing T-shirts on-stage, at the height of the rumour, emblazoned, "I'M NOT EDDIE HASKELL"). True: Osmond did take up a post-Beaver profession at which Eddie Haskell might have been sick: he became a police officer in southern California.
  • Before he made Ward Cleaver his acting trademark, Hugh Beaumont sometimes played heavies in film and television. Most familiarly, he played a former convict struggling to go straight and stay there for the sake of his wife and son, in an episode of The Adventures of Superman, a few years before Beaver.
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External links

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