Normally the MeTV schedule for MY THREE SONS interferes with the morning dog-walking routine, so I don't get to see it very often, if at all. But this morning, with the wife and dog out of town, I stumbled upon an episode this morning and was happy to see one-half of my avatar as a focus of the episode. Cynthia Pepper played neighbor "Jean" who Mike was dating, and this episode had him out late all the time to the dismay of Bub, but then he explained that he was working on a birthday surprise for Jean. Meanwhile the other two boys regale Jean with stories of Tramp being out carousing all night and hilarity ensues. Mr. Pepper, on the right of my avatar had short blonde hair in this episode.
Does anyone think Home Improvement is a little bit like this show? Besides the fact that HI and MTS both have three sons.
Now that it has cycled back to the first season it is evident that the show was much better early on. We've enjoyed watching the first season again and record it on the DVR and we all sit down as a family and watch it when the kids get home from school.
Been watching on TV Land. DVR them and watch over the weekend. First season over, a few episodes into the second. Other than that, been decades since I watched and I am loving the show. Each character is well developed, well formed and quite likable. No character is perfect. Plenty of funny crosstalk and one liners. The show is all over the place. Some episodes are zany, silly slapstick while others are introspective heart to heart, character to character gab fests. None of the guys is a super duper stud, but the women like them all just fine. There are contrivances, sure., in order to tell an entertaining story in 25 mins, but imo this is the way TV should be. In the days before bingewatching and DVR or VCR, the show's job was to entertain the masses for a half hour after work and by golly it does.
I have finally caught a few of the B&W episodes as of late. IMHO William Frawley steals the show. Everything that he says is funny.
Frawley was fantastic on the show. In interviews over the years, all four actors who played the sons have expressed a great deal of affection for him and said that the show was never the same after he left. Stan Livingston (Chip) considered him to be a surrogate grandfather, and told of a story where Frawley presented him with a much-desired custom surfboard for his birthday. He later found out that Frawley himself went down to the surf shacks at I believe Venice Beach to buy it. In response to an earlier post, Frawley left because he could not longer pass the insurance physical. The insurance company would then not insure the show in case something happened to him. The producers took a chance and did 13 shows, with an uninsured Frawley, to ease him out of the show. Tim Considine (Mike) said that Frawley was in failing health that last year and had problems remembering his lines (Considine recalls pulling on Frawley’s pant leg to prompt him to say his lines). He died about a year later. BTW, the difference between the first and last seasons is jarring. It’s like a different show.
I fondly remember watching this series in the 60s. Some of my earliest memories are of watching Bub interact with the boys.
Holy jeez I disliked this show. Then menfolk bustled around tucked into bathrobes and pyjamas, then when it went to color it seemed there were nuns on set measuring womens' hemlines to make sure nothing was more than an inch above the knee. Or maybe that was just 60s TV?
I was born in 1964. I remember watching this show with my family from '68 to '71. So I am only familiar with the color seasons with Uncle Charley. I watch these now, and I still like them- probably for the same reasons I still like "Family Affair": comforting nostalgia for the good family days. Yes- both shows are a bit slow moving and sometimes a bit too nice. But is that really so bad? That said- I have never seen the black and white seasons. I'd like to! They seem to get higher praise.
My whole family enjoyed it, especially the first 5 seasons but the show had worn out by the end. I think when MeTV finally got up to the 11th and 12th seasons my daughters didn't really care for it. But if we were to turn it on and one of the first 5 seasons were on I know they would sit and watch. As I stated earlier in the thread I had never seen a single episode of this show until it aired on MeTV a couple of years ago.
After we completed the show I asked my daughters if they wanted to see Uncle Charlie talk to Pooh Bear. They were quite confused at first but amazed when I showed them this:
I watched the color ones as reruns throughout the 70s. Always liked the show and still do. My comment was in reference to never having seen the earlier B&W episodes until quite recently. I have always like William Frawley, whether in Lucy or Miracle on 34th Street, so seeing him as Bub is a treat.
The Livingston boys loved William Frawley. Here's some info: That there was no love lost between former I Love Lucy co-stars William Frawley and Vivian Vance was certainly no secret in Hollywood, but Frawley had been willing to set aside any personal differences when Desilu proposed a spin-off series starring Fred and Ethel Mertz. Vivian Vance absolutely refused, however, and Frawley never forgave her for denying him a steady paycheck. “On the third season of our show, lo and behold, Lucy decided to do The Lucy Show and they were on the next stage over from ours,” Stanley Livingston recalled. “She probably picked that stage knowing Bill and Vivian would have to pass each other. When Bill saw Vivian, he’d yell some sort of obscenity at her. He got me to participate in a couple of his pranks. When she was doing a scene, he’d get us kids on the show to sneak in and knock over a stack of empty film cans or throw them like a Frisbee to make a big racket and ruin her scene so she’d have to do it again.”
That’s a great story. When Viacom prepared the syndication package in the 70s, they knew that they wouldn’t be able to sell 380 episodes to the local stations, so they just picked a selection of the color shows (roughly the first 5 1/2 seasons of color episodes). Local stations were very hungry for color reruns in the early to mid 70s, since so much of available content was still in B&W. It’s too bad that this meant that the best episodes sat on the shelf. When we watched the reruns, my mom would talk about the oldest son, Mike, who moved away. We never saw Mike and thought she was just confused. LOL. When Nick at Nite picked up the series in the 80s, I tuned in, expecting to see the shows I remembered watching 10 years earlier. I was shocked to see these B&W episodes and realized there were a lot of episodes we had never seen before.
The list of shows which were both black and white and color is a long one and in every instance that I can think of, the black and white episodes are FAR superior. My Three Sons, Petticoat Junction, Beverly Hillbillies, Combat, The Fugitive, 12 O'Clock High, The Andy Griffith Show, Bewitched, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Dr. Kildare, Farmer's Daughter, My Favorite Martian, etc. Is there a show in which the color episodes are better?
I saw the afternoon reruns in the late '70s and enjoyed a lot of the episodes. You're right that only seasons 6-11 were in the syndication package. In the late 90s, a local station ran a bunch of 12th season episodes. I remember watching a few of them and thought they were kind of dull. The earlier seasons were much better. I think I've only seen a handful of BW episodes. One thing that's puzzled me - the series left CBS in 1972. According to some old copies of TVGuide that I have, some Canadian stations were showing reruns as early as 1974, but I believe it didn't hit syndication in the US until the fall of 1976. What took so long? You'd figure after waiting so long, some of the interest in the series would subside. Most of the time when a series is cancelled, it hits syndication immediately - unless the network was still using it for daytime reruns, which they weren't by late '72. For the record, no station I can receive currently airs this, but I'd love to see it again.
Do you have MeTV? They show them in chronological order so eventually the will show the first 5 seasons. They are far superior to any of the color episodes. I noticed that they show M3S in order but MASH and Andy Griffith seem to be random, I am not sure they are in order. I believe they only show the first 5 seasons of AG and I have been waiting for the last episode of MASH to air since I haven't seen it since it originally aired.
in the fall of 1967 when Robbie (Don Grady) and Katie (Tina Cole) got married, CBS wanted them to have separate beds. Grady objected, saying it was ridiculous for a young married couple to sleep in separate beds. They agreed to have a single bed but to have one person out of the bed when filming in the bedroom or not facing each other when they were both in bed and the scene ended. The Junior High I went to through June 1969 didn’t not allow female students to wear pants or shorts. Four girls tried changing into pants during a change of class. The principal escorted them to a ladies room and stood outside waiting for them to come out in proper attire. That fall when I was in high school in the next school district over, that school not only allowed women to wear pants but had an indoor smoking area for students during lunch. Tina Cole has said there were two times she and Grady almost got married but “the first time I wasn’t ready and the second time he wasn’t ready”. Ernie Livingston says when the show ended, CBS offered him $50,000for his residuals. He turned them down and estimates he got $200,000 . Which came in handy when his career slowed and the six years he was doing cocaine. At one time when he went to see his dealer, the guy panicked and pulled the trigger on his gun. Fortunately the gun misfired. The dealer was more upset by the gun’s malfunction than the fact he almost shot somebody
I did find some here and they don't seem to be in any particular order. The one I just brought up appears a bit grainy. Internet Archive Search: subject:"MY THREE SONS"
