Leave It To Beaver – The Complete Series (1957 – 1963/Universal/Shout! Factory DVD Set)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B Episodes: B+
Never
expecting to see an entire Complete
Series set of Leave It To Beaver
anytime soon, I said what I thought of the series in some earlier DVD set
releases of the show as follows:
First Season
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3064/Leave+It+To+Beaver+-+The+Complet
Third Season
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10014/Leave+It+To+Beaver+%E2%80%93
Now that
all six seasons are all here, there are a few things to add. For one thing, the show was smart to quit
while it was ahead and still on top; something too few hits do today. Also, the show’s success is uncanny in its
idea of creating the near-perfect family or the kind everyone wished for
because form the outset, the cast and its acting meshed exceptionally
well. Despite the time, the child acting
is not as bad as so many other movies and TV shows of the time.
Barbara
Billingsley (who was later perfect as the voice of the mother figure nanny in
the animated Muppet Babies) became
one of the more realistic safe “good mothers” in TV history and Hugh Beaumont
(the second big screen Michael Shayne) was father Ward, making up the
seamlessly happy suburban marriage and all the myths that followed. Tony Dow was very believable as older brother
Wally with all of his problems and Jerry Mathers had already been playing cute
kids in comedies, a drama (see Bigger
Than Life on Criterion Blu-ray elsewhere on this site) and even an Alfred
Hitchcock film (The Trouble With Harry
in 1955) before becoming immortalized in the iconic role. Yes, he could have been a legend just a few
decades ago if he was around for Our
Gang/The Little Rascals, but he
got his own show instead.
The show
had outside actors playing one-time roles (or a few) over the years, but it is
surprising how few are name actors and how much the scripts managed to
naturally focus on the main characters.
For the record, other actors we noticed in the 2nd, 4th,
5th and 6th Seasons of note include Lurene Tuttle,
Veronica Cartwright (Ridley Scott’s Alien),
Alice Backes, Hal Smith, Barry Gordon, Keith Taylor, Edgar Buchanan, Lee
Meriwether, Ryan O’Neal, Bert Remsen, Don Drysdale (playing himself), Tim
Matheson, Ed Peck, Kathleen O’Malley, Ralph Montgomery, Diane Sayer, Fletcher
Allen, Carole Wells and Frank Sully.
It should
also be noted that Director David Butler, who helmed so many episodes, was a
longtime film director whose work includes the 1930 Science Fiction/Musical dud
Just Imagine whose model work was
recycled repeatedly in hundreds of other projects. That became a sort of camp classic and Butler more than proved
he could handle comedy directly here as he had in other such feature films.
For what
we might think of now as a children’s show or conformist show or family show,
this is more savvy, intelligent, rich and fun than the stereotypes about it
would have you believe, much like Father
Knows Best, another underrated quality classic of the period. This family is very functional, believable,
workable, pleasant and is the kind of show with the kind of characters that
made TV a permanent fixture worldwide.
They made up the kind of family millions wanted to be in, even if it was
for w while and the writers found a way to make this work for seven years. Leave
It To Beaver has not lost its charm and if anything, is an otherworldly
time capsule of a 1950s that never really existed, but when you watch, all you
have to do is dream.
The 1.33
X 1 black and white image throughout is, when all is considered, very
impressive for a show of its age. It may
not look as good as the original Twilight
Zone or I Love Lucy, but it is
in better than just about any other show from the early period of TV filmed in
35mm. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is
about on par, though I wonder how good the show could sound in an uncompressed
audio format and with some more work.
The combination as it stands brings the show to life in a way no one
could have imagined when it first hit the air or played in syndication in the
decades since. It suddenly does not seem
as stuffy or as nostalgically distant.
Extras
include a booklet with an episode guide for each season, a more recent radio interview with original
series co-stars Jerry Mathers and Frank Bank from Stu’s Show across several
seasons from the individual releases (the last three of which will likely
happen later), plus we get a bonus DVD that includes a reproduction foldout of
the original 1959 Money Maker game, a couple of rough-looking promos for the
show on ABC, Forever The Beaver featurette made when the New Leave It To Beaver was launched, Ken
Osmond & Frank Bank Remember interview piece, The Drum Major Of The Toy Parade
clip with theme composer Dave Kahn of the hit Hopalong Cassidy who later worked on Mister Ed and It’s A Small
World, the original pilot episode of the series that did not have Dow or
Beaumont. Instead, Max Showalter (The Anderson Tapes, Sixteen Candles) was Ward and Paul
Sullivan was Wally.
Leave It To Beaver is an American TV classic and
this box set shows why.
- Nicholas Sheffo
