Life’s Lessons The Beave Taught Us About Right And Wrong; Now A New Movie Will Do It Again

Some say that everything they needed to know about life, they learned in kindergarten.

Others of us say that everything we needed to know about life, we learned from “Leave It to Beaver.”

We not only got all the lessons of kindergarten - play nice, do unto others, your parents know more than you think, share your toys, etc. - they were dramatized for us in half-hour weekly episodes. We weren’t only told to remember to bring money when you take a girl out to dinner, we saw what happened to Wally Cleaver when he forgot.

“Yes, I think that’s true,” says Jerry Mathers with a hint of a laugh when asked if “Beaver” was a handbook on life. Mathers, of course, played The Beaver, real name Theodore Cleaver, son of Ward and June and brother of Wally.

“The moral precepts of ‘Beaver’ are universal,” says Mathers, 45 and still an entertainer. “That’s why it’s probably more popular today than when it first came out.”

That first “Beaver” appearance came on Friday, Oct. 4, 1957. Jimmie Rodgers’ “Honeycomb” was the country’s best-selling record. Our first compact car, the Rambler, was a month old. Little Rock’s Central High School had been integrated for nine days.

The original “Beaver” ran for six years, finishing its run about 10 weeks before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The cast moved on, television moved on and the country seemed to have moved on - until in March 1983 the Cleaver family reunited for “Still the Beaver,” a look at the sometimes melancholy lives of the Cleavers 20 years later. Everyone attended except Ward, who had died.

The movie led to a Disney Channel “Still the Beaver” series, and today, with “Beaver” reruns thicker than infomercials on cable TV, Mathers says with some wonderment that “in L.A., you can see six hours of ‘Beaver’ a day.”

And since too much in popular culture is never enough, Universal Pictures is planning a “Leave It to Beaver” movie. Open auditions for The Beave were held Sunday at the Palladium in New York. The requirements were to be 7 to 13 years old and pack an 8-by-10 photo.

Mathers, who says he feels protective of the Beaver character, thinks the movie is a great idea. A lot of people who approach him about Beaver, he says, are preteens, and this will give them their own Beaver.

Not to mention their own Eddie Haskell.

Now, The Beaver and Wally were basically good kids who unfailingly meant well as they screwed up.

Eddie was a different story - oily, insincere, two-faced, four-flushing. He was not a good kid. He was a weasel.

The weasel in all of us.

Every time we smile and nod at somebody we really don’t want to smile and nod at - a teacher, a parent, a police officer, the judge, the boss - we are Eddie Haskell.

Like Eddie, we have been caught or almost caught at something, and now we are lying through his teeth to ooze our way out of it.

“Why, hello, Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver,” Eddie would say as they walked in and found him tormenting The Beave. “I was just helping young Theodore with his homework.”

“We all know an Eddie,” says Mathers. He laughs. “Unfortunately.”

Mathers actually has a theory on why the whole “Beaver” show has stood up so well, and while it’s not unique, it’s pretty sturdy.

“First, we weren’t movie stars,” he says. “We weren’t 20 feet high. We came right into your living room on a small screen. We were your friends, the people next door you watched grow up.

“Second, the show was very well written. It wasn’t built on jokes; it was built on stories. The reason you see so many standup comedians with shows today is that they’re built on jokes. The writing is designed to set up punch lines. The humor on ‘Beaver’ came out of characters and situations. So it was universal. People come up to me all the time and say, ‘You know, that same thing happened to me.”’

But the fact is, says Mathers, no one in the “Beaver” family was thinking about timeless drama and big statements.

“We weren’t looking to document the 1950s or American culture,” he says. “We were making a sitcom.”

OK. And Eddie Haskell was just helping young Theodore with his homework.