“Leave It To Beaver — And Wally”
A classic TV retrospective featuring Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers
Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow were natural performers, particularly when it came to interpreting their characters on Leave It to Beaver, which first aired on ABC and CBS from 1958 to 1963. With Tony as older brother Wally Cleaver, playing opposite Theodore Cleaver, a.k.a. The Beaver, the two actors truly seemed like the kids next door.
One key to their appeal was the huge assistance they got from the writers. The writers would script out the kids’ lines and then let their own kids rewrite them as kids from that era would actually say them. That gave Wally and the Beaver a freshness and naturalness not found anywhere else on television. Anyone doing research on 1950s slang as used by teenagers should forget watching the darker images and edgier precepts presented in movies like West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause, or The Blackboard Jungle. Instead, watch Leave It to Beaver, and take a quick course in how kids really talked in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
Instant Camera
Past young viewers at home more easily and instantly identified with Wally and the Beaver, while parents perceived the show through their children’s eyes, too. Mom and Dad may have wished to have offspring as ideal as those portrayed on The Donna Reed Show (the almost…
