"He was one of the few guys on the show who really played a character and created it," Dow added, chuckling as he mimicked the evil laugh Osmond would unleash when his character was launching one nefarious scheme or another and trying to pull Wally and his younger brother Beaver into it.
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"He was a terrific guy, he was a terrific actor and his character is probably one that will last forever," Dow told The Associated Press on Monday. He was the closest thing the wholesome show had to a villain, and viewers of all ages loved to hate him. He constantly kissed up to adults, flattering and flirting with Wally and Beaver's mother, and kicked down at his peers, usually in the same scene. Ken Osmond's Eddie Haskell stood out among many memorable characters on the classic family sitcom "Leave it to Beaver," which ran from 1957 to 1963 on CBS and ABC, but had a decades-long life of reruns and revivals.Įddie was the best friend of Tony Dow's Wally Cleaver, big brother to Jerry Mathers' Beaver Cleaver. "He had his family gathered around him when he passed. “And Beaver himself…there’s never been a cuter kid."He was an incredibly kind and wonderful father," son Eric Osmond said in a statement. As Jacobs and Jones further assessed, “Wally was the perfect teenager: a letterman in sports, popular with the girls, his eyes on his future.” Those children, Wally, and the Beaver were played to precision by Dow and Mathers. He came out of his youth with one dream, which was The Dream of America in those years: to build a materially better life for his children." He had grown up in the poverty-stricken farms of the Depression, had been hardened by that but had been instilled with an unshakable set of values (“Why, when I was a boy, Beaver, we understood the value of a dollar”). The founder of the family, father Ward Cleaver, was the American of his generation. "Leave It To Beaver was a monument to an America that we always wanted and never quite reached.
CHARACTERS ON LEAVE IT TO BEAVER TV
In July 1986, media historians Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones explained in TV Gold magazine: But such was not the case on Beaver.įrom there, Ackerman made sure that Dow would find his way to playing opposite Jerry Mathers in L eave It to Beaver. Mom and Dad may have wished to have offspring as ideal as those portrayed on The Donna Reed Show (the almost too-perfect Mary Stone as played by Shelley Fabares, and her sassy, younger but ultimately wiser brother Jeff Stone, as performed with precision by Paul Petersen).
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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. Instead, watch Leave It to Beaver, and take a quick course in how kids really talked in the late 1950s and early ’60s. 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.
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That gave Wally and the Beaver a freshness and naturalness not found anywhere else on television. 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. One key to their appeal was the huge assistance they got from the writers.