Leave It To Beaver: The Complete Series (Shout Factory)

Marc: That was hilarious, I had forgotten about that. I wonder if that was her last appearance on film?

 

Airplane was right around 1980, and she had a few more years as Mrs. Cleaver in the Still the Beaver cable TV series. I think she also had an occasional guest-starring role here and there.

 

Thanks! Yes, I found out she did a few more things after the New Beaver show. Definitely did some local theatre work. There is a great picture of her with Tony and Jerry not long before she passed in 2010.

 

You're right about Rusty's stage mother: I've read that same thing not too long ago... I wonder what she did or said to upset everyone so much-Hopefully she wasn't demanding second billing for Rusty!

And I think I agree with you that Larry Mondello was a better "instigator" than Gilbert... Gilbert was okay, but yeah, Larry took the cake... It's been awhile since I've seen the show, especially any mid run to late run shows, but it seems like Whitey got in there with getting Beaver in trouble too: Wasn't it mainly due to Whitey's egging on The Beaver on that Beaver climbed up into the "cup of soup" billboard, or was it mainly one of his other buddies? (been so long since I've seen it, I've forgotten!).

 

Barbara Billingsley was the voice of "Nanny" on the "Muppet Babies" show too. She was pretty busy in later years.

 

Yeah, that show ran from 1984 to 1991 (!).

 

I didn't do the bathroom flood thing, but it IS enjoyable watching the show to see Beaver get in trouble

Yes, Whitey was the bowl of soup instigator and then he sort of takes a secondary role to Gilbert .
I'm just four of five episodes from the end of the series now and I can see why they wrapped it up .

Tony Dow looks like an adult and Jerry Mathers has gotten old enough that it would just look silly to keep sticking him in the kind of misadventures that the series depended on. At his age he would have just looked like an idiot, and that wasn't what the series was going for.

 

Yeah, I agree with you on that-They hung it up at the right time... I can't say it with 100 % certainty, but it seems like I read somewhere that Jerry wanted to go to regular high school and be a "regular kid" for the most part, so that also played a factor in them not doing the show any longer? Whatever the case, it left the air before it got too out of hand...

 

Yes, I have read that about Jerry also, somewhere .

I think it's pretty cool that the cast were all friends and stayed that way throughout the years .

Sadly, I think the only cast member that fell into the "child star has a tough time later" was Stanley Farfara.

I didn't realize until fairly recently that Stanley's brother Tiger Farfara played Wally's bespectacled friend Tooey.

 

Ah, I remember that well -- I worked on the show on and off for five years, along with fellow colorists Chris Devlin and Joe Cook. Muppet Babies was tough because of the chromakeys involved when the characters would open the door and film clip images would be visible through the animated opening. Very challenging because we did all that during the mastering process, not in editing.

 

Kudos- I always though those parts of the show were cool.

 

I believe Beav's buddy Richard was also involved in these recordings.

Yeah, Stanley fell on hard times. He actually got his act together near the end of his life. I heard him on a podcast before he died and he talked about the show, his hard times and what he was doing at the time. He got cleaned up and I think he was doing art and had a website. I don't believe he had any contact with this brother (I think Tiger had pretty much written him off).

Here's an article on Whitey:

Remembering Stanley Fafara...WHITEY from Leave it to Beaver! | Silver Screen Artists


Recent pic of Tiger:



Tiger's son Dez is the vocalist for Coal Chamber.

And "Gee Beav, I dunno....." Gilbert (Stephen Talbot) today:



He has a lot of disdain for the show and the character he played. He used to post on the IMDB message boards and would answer fans' questions on the site but the message board is now gone.

"In the interests of historical accuracy I should say that, yes, Gilbert was a troublemaker and an occasional liar, but my character was certainly no Eddie Haskell – that leering teenage hypocrite who spoke unctuously to parents ('Well, hello Mrs. Cleaver, and how is young Theodore today?') and venomously to the Beav ('Hey, squirt, take a powder before I squash you like a bug')."! [8] "I have spent my adult life trying to conceal my Leave it to Beaver past or correcting the historical record. Either way the series has become inescapable. When I was a kid, I loved acting; in fact, I badgered my father and mother until they allowed me to work. But how could I have known as an innocent 9-year-old that I was taking part in a television program that would live on for 40 years as an icon for baby boomers? In the early '80s, I turned down an offer to revive my role as Gilbert in a dreadful Beaver reunion series. "I'm trying to establish myself as a documentary filmmaker and an investigative reporter," I explained to the producers. "I can't go back to being Gilbert!"[

 

Joe Connelly's (and Bob Mosher's) gentle family writing style is so memorable. The earliest shows are best for me. Jerry Mathers was perfectly cast. Mosher apparently had a big family and, although he started off writing for Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy's radio show, by the time he and Bob created Leave it to Beaver, they were convinced to write from their parenting experiences. Connelly had seven children. I rarely see an episode, but last time I checked they held up pretty well.

 

Interesting about Stephen: I can see wanting to "escape" the Gilbert past when he was younger and wanting to do other things (documentary filmmaker/inverstigative reporter) but the new "LITB" series was almost 35 years ago: I would hope he would have made peace with it more or less in that amount of time... I would imagine he could even cash in a bit if he wanted to, by doing signings at shows like Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow do on occasion...

 

I think in his statement he was talking about at that time of the new Leave it to Beaver series he was trying to establish himself as a documentary filmmaker, which he has accomplished since.

As you mention, all these years later after doing well in the business hopefully he looks back more affectionately at the series but the new series was started only 20 years after the original one ended, so maybe at that point he was still sensitive about being thought of as "Gilbert" only.

 

That is something I caught onto when I was younger, I seemed to pay attention to actors credits: I put the two Farfara names together and figured they were related... When I was really young, it seems like I might have even thought Whitey and Tooey were supposed to be brothers on the show.

 

Don't forget about the 25th anniversary show:

 

I've been watching the first season's episodes on MeTV recently, and yesterday saw the first appearance of Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford on it. He was a bully then, to both Beaver and Wally. And I was delighted to see that venerable character actor Richard Deacon as Lumpy's father Fred Rutherford, he cracks me up!

That guy made guest character appearances on soooo many shows in the 50s and 60s, adding his unmistakable look to each part.

"See you down at the salt mines, Ward ol' man."

 

I had no idea until recently that Richard Correll's father was Charles Correll, who was the voice of Andy of Amos and Andy. I assume Richard got the gig from the Connelly/Mosher connection, as they were the main writers for Amos and Andy during it's latter years on radio.

 

We were watching My Three Sons last night, the episode where Bub finds a job at a "stuffy" men's clothing store. One of the customers is a teenage boy and his mother. The boy is none other than Rusty Stevens playing a Larry Mondelo like character. He is eating an ice cream cone while trying on jackets. When he appeared my wife said "Look, there's Larry".

It has always been said that Rusty Stevens left LITB because his family moved from California to Philadelphia in 1960. The episode "Bub Gets A Job" is from the second season and aired Feb 8, 1962. Now if Rusty Stevens moved away in 1960 then why was he still appearing in TV shows? Upon futher investigation Barbara Billingsley has said in a TV Archive interview that Stevens was dropped because his overbearing mother caused grief for the producers of the series.

That is the first time I have ever heard that, I always assumed he just moved away but it looks like by him appearing in other shows after LITB that what Barbara says is probably true.

 

That's interesting... I don't watch "My Three Sons" too often, but I would have liked to have seen a slightly older Rusty Stevens...

 

I should have asked this earlier in the thread: Regarding the "Complete Series" from Shout! Factory, are the DVDs single sided discs, or are they double sided?

 

Single sided.

 

I'm glad to read that...