leave it to beaver (1 Viewer)

[jimmyjet]

just finished the series.

watched the original pilot - dont recall having seen that before.

it was cute.

i like the guy who played ward. i have seen him a bunch of times on other stuff. i guess his real name is max showalter, but he went by casey adams on this show.

billingsley had a little bit different flavor on this, which i liked. she was a little more in charge than she was with beaumont. for the time, they may have felt that it wouldnt go over as well ?

i dont know paul sullivan. his acting was okay. the main thing that i found wrong is there was too big an age difference between wally and beaver.

and the old man from dennis the menace (mr. kitchell ?) was in the show. i dont think i have seen him since i saw dennis as a kid !!

richard deacon and diane brewster had interesting roles. i think they should have had fred in the series more often.

 

[jimmyjet]

i dont know if any of you saw the special with osmond and bank, but i was curious if any of the guys ever had romantic interests with any of the girls ?

ken said that both he and tony dated cheryl holdridge. but i dont think there was any animosity, so they probably were not interested at the same time.

no mention of pamela or any of the other girls.

 

[jimmyjet]

i guess quick flashes do indeed register in our sub-conscious, at least part of the time.

i finished beaver a couple weeks ago or so, and started watching quantum leap.

it has all these real quick flashes at the start of the show, with different years attached.

i am not sure how long it took, but i finally started thinking that i saw wally and beaver ?

so last night, i had my hands glued to the remote, hitting pause quite a few times.

and i got it. a picture of wally and beaver - it lasts less than a second, so it is barely up there !!

 

[Mr. Handley]

Just finished up the last couple of episodes of the series. Kinda weird how Gilbert and Whitey disappeared in the penultimate episode and a young Tim Matthieson is now Beaver's pal. Also, something that always bugged me about the "Family Scrapbook" episode is the pictures...just who took the pictures of such supposedly intimate moments such as Beaver and Larry peeking at his sister's diary? Otherwise, I thought the final episode was a great way to wrap-up the series...you just didn't see such "final" episodes in those days.

 

[Joe Lugoff]

There's something very strange and different about that penultimate episode, "The Clothing Drive." It's my least favorite episode of all 234. It was directed by someone who directed only one other episode and written by a writer who wrote no others (for good reasons, I'd say.)

I suspect it was filmed much earlier, maybe as a test for the newcomers, and found substandard. Then, after it was known it would be the series' final season, they went ahead and used it, but saved it as the last totally new episode, figuring it couldn't do much harm to the show's reputation that way.

It even has Ward and June bickering with each other in a way they never did at any other time in the series. And Beaver is even more moronic than usual, if such a thing is possible.

It's a good point made about "Family Scrapbook." LITB was one of the least "dumb" series in TV history, with stories that could really happen and hardly any "impossible" situations. Then at the end we're supposed to think there was some hidden cameraman following them around everywhere, even hiding in bedrooms when Beaver and Larry are up to their secret mischief, such as reading Larry's sister's diary.

It's a shame such a great series had to end with two pretty bad episodes. But I suspect they never dreamed we'd still be talking about it half a century later.

 

[LeoA]

I was watching a episode of Leave it to Beaver a few days ago on MeTV. Not sure what season it was, but the episode when he fell into the soup bowl on the billboard was on yesterday so it was an episode or two prior to that one.

Anyways, there was a transition between two scenes. The entire picture flipped around and the 1st frame of the next scene was on the other side and then it continued. It was much too well done with the audio to be something that they added to splice two scenes together when cutting something out for syndication so I assume it was original.

How would they have done something like that before computers?

 

[John Hermes]

A flip-over wipe is done with an optical printer where the original film is rephotographed, allowing it to be altered or distorted, creating the special effect. This dupe section is then spliced in between the end of scene A and beginning of scene B.

 

[Greg_S_H]

I've been watching the Beav every day on MeTV. It may not be the best way to watch it, but I don't have the DVDs and it's worked fine until they skipped a ton of season 5 episodes (they started season 5 with episode 5x9, "Beaver's Ice Skates"). I've loved this show since I was a kid and it's still fun. I don't think I disliked a single episode from seasons 1 though 4. Season 5 is a little rougher. Tonight's was "Beaver the Bunny," which was just plain bad. 6th graders dressing up as animals for a school play? Ugh. I'm also not thrilled that Miss Landers is pretty much gone. I still remember there being good episodes coming up, like Lumpy the U-Boat Commander! And the one where Eddie moves into his own place and acts like a big shot, but the landlady reveals that he cries every night.

 

[Regulus]

I've been watching the Beav every day on MeTV. It may not be the best way to watch it, but I don't have the DVDs and it's worked fine until they skipped a ton of season 5 episodes (they started season 5 with episode 5x9, "Beaver's Ice Skates"). I've loved this show since I was a kid and it's still fun. I don't think I disliked a single episode from seasons 1 though 4. Season 5 is a little rougher. Tonight's was "Beaver the Bunny," which was just plain bad. 6th graders dressing up as animals for a school play? Ugh. I'm also not thrilled that Miss Landers is pretty much gone. I still remember there being good episodes coming up, like Lumpy the U-Boat Commander! And the one where Eddie moves into his own place and acts like a big shot, but the landlady reveals that he cries every night.

Looks like season five was the season LITB "Jumped the Shark".

 

[TravisR]

The later seasons of Leave It To Beaver work for me because I like the Wally stories that they did. And if you put Eddie or Lumpy in an episode, it'll probably be a good one.

 

[Gary16]

The later seasons of Leave It To Beaver work for me because I like the Wally stories that they did. And if you put Eddie or Lumpy in an episode, it'll probably be a good one.

+1

 

[bretmaverick2]

LITB is a lotta fun to rewatch on MeTV.

Just watched it this morning. Actually saw one I don't remember seeing before (Richard and Beaver sharing a leather coat).

I don't have the DVDs either but hope to some day.

In regards to MeTV, I wish they would do a couple of things - They could show reunion movies that were done a lot in the 80s/90s for older series like Beaver. They would be fun viewing on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Second, I wish they would show failed spinoff series or pilots in some sort of showcase format. Maybe in two hour blocks at various times.

 

[Oliver Ravencrest]

I don't get MeTV but I did catch a few episodes on Antenna TV a couple of years ago, the show holds up well. I prefer the middle to later seasons. My favourite episodes are the tea cup billboard and Beaver joins the record club, just based on the ones I remember. Eventually I'll get the DVDs.

 

[Radioman970]

fanboy here. One of the best DVD series sets I've ever gotten. Thanks to HTF for a heads up on a crazy price years back.

I watch and watch and watch these and they just keep on coming. Amazing value that puts so much that came after to shame.

Really, I should get a free web page sometime just so I can go on and on about how much I love this show and what it means to me. complete with pictures of me watching it, graphs showing my level of elation before and after each.

/gushing

 

[Greg_S_H]

The tea cup is probably the most iconic episode. I definitely like the Wally episodes and enjoy the last two seasons in general, but they did seem to want to keep the Beav younger than he was. On another forum, though, someone was complaining about the record club episode. I like that one. "Don't bother me, Wally! I'm sailin'!"

 

[Mike Frezon]

I agree wholeheartedly with everyone here about the greatness of LITB.

Except...I'm on record as being an "early seasons" guy.

And, let's remember it's a soup bowl and not a teacup!

 

[Greg_S_H]

"I'll climb up there, but you're a dumb kid, Whitey."

To himself: "Sure, *I'm* a dumb kid!"

 

[TravisR]

In The Soup is my favorite episode. Followed closely by Wally's Practical Joke where Wally and Eddie pull a crazy (yet very funny) joke on Lumpy in retaliation.

On a LITB-related note, in the neighborhood around my house, there was new sidewalk cement poured this summer and I wanted to write "And Jerry Mathers As The Beaver" in it. I didn't do it (mostly because I'm a'scared of getting caught but also because I don't want to deface public property) but I wish I had because it would be amazing for someone who remembers the show to be walking down the street and see that written in the sidewalk.

 

[Greg_S_H]

Another bad one tonight with "Beaver's Long Night," where he and Gilbert get scared from a movie and imagine Lumpy and his pal are gangsters waiting to kill them. I wonder if Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly started to pull back by this point. Most of the earlier episodes that they didn't directly write would be rewritten by them, or they would take a credit alongside the writers or it would say, "Written under the direct supervision of."

Some of the earlier ones this year were enjoyable. I liked the ones with Penny, who is unfortunately gone from the show after Beaver the Bunny, I believe. I'm hoping this is just a bad patch, but it's been a while since I've seen these seasons so I don't remember for sure.

 

[LeoA]

Beaver's Long Night is one of my favorites. What kid, when in the company of another kid, hasn't let their imagination runaway from them? It's one of the few later episodes that focus on Beaver that I really like.

But I like all the seasons pretty much equally, I just flip flop on who my favorite character is. Beaver and his pals are the highlights of the early seasons, but Wally, Lumpy, and Eddie more than compensate for Beaver becoming a teenager over the last couple of seasons.

My favorite moment of this entire series occurs in what I believe is the first episode, when Wally grabs some dirt out of the aquarium for their turtle and tosses it into the bathtub full of water so that it will leave a ring and fool their mother into thinking that they took a bath.