Word: keeshan
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...yellowface" precedes movies, and the innate realism of films didn't discourage early actors. In 1919, the year Richard Barthelmess played the sensitive "chink" in Broken Blossoms, the Danish actor Warner Oland played his first Chinese in The Lightning Raider. Oland looked no more Chinese than, say, Bob Keeshan, yet he was cast "yellow" dozens of times, including in four films with Wong, and culminating in 16 Charlie Chan movies. When Oland died, in 1938, Missouri-born Sidney Toler was tabbed to replace him; he played the sleuth in 22 films, until his death in 1947. Wong had played...
...known as a child how good for me Robert J. (Bob) Keeshan intended Captain Kangaroo to be, I'm sure I never would have watched it. Keeshan, who died last Friday at 76 from a long illness, meant his children's show to counter TV's violence and hyperstimulation--all of which, of course, I consumed greedily on other programs. But like the orange-and-black "helping hand" signs in the windows of my 1970s Michigan neighborhood (telling kids to which houses they could run to escape from bad adults), the Captain's Place was a kind of haven...
...Keeshan, like great television artists from Ernie Kovacs on, was in a fundamental way pushing back against the very medium he loved. In 1948 he got his first onscreen job, as Clarabell--the mute clown who spoke by honking a horn--on what would become the Howdy Doody show. Kids loved Clarabell, but something about the show's boisterous atmosphere didn't fit with Keeshan's feeling that children's television should be "intimate." When CBS gave him the chance, in 1955, to create his own kids' show, Keeshan made Captain Kangaroo something very different...
...Many of Keeshan's grownup fans may have been surprised to hear that he was not older than 76 when he died. Over the decades Keeshan literally became the kindly old man he created at only 28--he didn't grow his soup-strainer mustache until the mid-'60s, and his face and figure gradually rounded into kindly Falstaffian proportions as the years went by. (The bowl haircut, however, was always a wig.) Though he cautioned parents against using TV as a baby sitter, knowing some would anyway, he made himself into a virtual grandfather. "It was not a show...
DIED. BOB KEESHAN, 76, who played the beloved Captain Kangaroo on CBS-TV for 30 years; in Windsor, Vt. (See Appreciation, page...