Word: beaver
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...major markets around the country. When the show took a vacation this summer from WTBS in Atlanta, which reaches an audience of 21.2 million, the station received a greater volume of viewer response than it had for any other syndicated show. There are more than a hundred Beaver fan clubs across the nation, dubbed "The Loyal Order of the Beaver." Ex-Star Mathers today commands $4,000 for a lecture...
Weekly, the values of middle-class America were tested on the show's half-hour and proved sound. Like My Three Sons and The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver is based on a reassuring assumption: the family, solid and resilient, is the ultimate sanctuary from the world...
...Beaver however, was different from the extended televison family of Rustys, Juniors, Buds and Kittens: he seemed real. The world of Beaver, notes Mathers, "was seen through the eyes of a child." To the Beav, adults were an alien and slightly comical species whose rituals could be observed and mimicked. Other television children were passive; problems happened to them. Beaver actively courted trouble. He brought home live snakes, fell into a steaming billboard soup bowl, and cut his own hair so that he resembled a precursor of punkdom. Beaver was not streetwise, he was backyard-wise. He was good...
...Beaver twitted the values of his parents without actually undermining them. In the secular Cleaver household, cleanliness was a substitute for godliness, yet Beaver only washed up to his wrists because hidden dirt didn't matter. Despite the show's recurring theme of honesty, Beaver's behavior routinely triggered layers of good-natured deceit. Ward secretly helped Beaver with his homework; June stealthily took over his paper route; Beaver kept...
...minor characters were as memorable as the major ones. Beaver's sidekick Larry Mondello looked and acted like a pint-size W.C. Fields. Wally's chum Lumpy Rutherford was just that. And of course there was the incomparable Eddie Haskell (Ken Osmond). If Mayfield was Eden, Eddie was the serpent slyly tempting Beaver to bite the apple of mischief. A leering skull dressed in a cardigan sweater, Eddie was smarmy to his elders and sneering to his peers. "Hey, Wally, if your gunky brother comes with us, I'm gonna Oh, hello, Mrs. Cleaver, I was just...