Hacker Cinema
Leave It to Beaver
1957 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 6 seasons
Created by Bob Mosher
An inquisitive and often naïve boy, Theodore 'The Beaver' Cleaver, has adventures at home, in school, and around his suburban neighborhood. The show also starred Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont as Beaver's parents, June and Ward Cleaver, and Tony Dow as Beaver's brother Wally. The show has attained an iconic status in the US, with the Cleavers exemplifying the idealized suburban family of the mid-20th century.
1 positive1 negative11 neutralfrom 13 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
15 comments on Hacker News
Yeah, Leave it to Beaver had an episode where Beaver befriends a Hispanic boy that only speaks Spanish.
Yeah, trying to think of the origin of the style... Sorayama was the king but perhaps he owes a little to Richard Corben. And perhaps Richard owes something to the guys in So-Cal like Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and his "Weirdo" t-shirts. (Ha ha, notorious enough at the time to inspire a Leave it to Beaver episode.)
Yeah, I see how they slot in now with the whole Ed "Big Daddy" Roth Weird-Ohs craze (circa 1969). There's a cringey "Leave it to Beaver" TV episode whose existence shows the cultural impact the "weird ohs" had on suburban norms (Beaver and his boy-pals each have a weird-oh shirt they agree to all wear to school on the same day ... well, you can guess how that plays out).
I've only been looking at older houses and I assumed gray tones had something to do with old movies or Leave it To Beaver being black and white.
Not sure if you're messing with me, but Beaver Cleaver is the name of a famous sitcom character. Awesome show IMO, you can watch the entire series for free on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/leave.it.to.beaver.complete.series
"The norms of consumer culture and domesticity were disseminated via new and popular forms of entertainment – not just the television, which became a fixture in middle-class American households during the 1950s, but also women’s magazines, popular psychology, and cinema. Shows promoting the values of domesticity, like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, became especially popular. These shows portrayed the primary roles of women as wives and mothers. Lucille Ball, in I Love Lucy, inevitably met with disaster whenever she pursued job opportunities or interests that took her outside of the household." [0]
What is striking about this video is not only the advancement of technology but also women actively working outside the home which was counter culture for the time even though the one woman sitting down symbolically is in a subordinate position with the man standing over her.
[0] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera/1950s-america/a/women-in-the-1950s
(Yeah, I know better than to mention something like this here.)
If we're talking globally though, I don't think anything has ever had (or will ever have again) the global saturation of The Simpsons. I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver never had international success and existed at a time when TV wasn't as globally popular. Even within the US, Leave it to Beaver never broke into the Nielsen Top 30. Meanwhile in many countries, The Simpsons got the treatment you're talking about. I grew up in Australia, where at least 7 episodes of The Simpsons have aired in primetime per week for almost 30 years, and for half that time most people only had 3 commercial channels. I just checked the TV guide, and it's running from 6:30 PM to 9 PM tonight on network TV and airing 6 episodes throughout the day on cable. If you're under 45, The Simpsons saturated popular culture during your youth, and the same is true for friends and colleagues from around the world. 40 year old Mexicans and 4 year old New Zealanders know the same show in a way that was never true for Lucy or Beaver.
The Simpsons have nothing on post WWII tv shows like I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver etc. When there were very few tv channels and after when some tv shows played on repeat forever anytime the networks needed something to fill a slot you’d get something close to saturation of knowledge of characters and situations. Even for wildly popular series like GoT this will never happen again. The consolidated audience isn’t there. For a brief post war moment there was accidentally a TV canon.
> We're not talking about the episode of Leave it to Beaver where Wally smokes a joint.
As a big Leave it to Beaver fan I find this hilarious. And would pay anything to watch this episode if it existed.
You clearly haven't seen some of the horrifying stuff that slips past the filters. We're not talking about the episode of Leave it to Beaver where Wally smokes a joint. There is a category of malicious amateur cartoons that look kid friendly in the thumbnail and in the first few minutes, and then become sick. The Elsagate stuff was part of that. I have seen, on YouTube Kids: an ice cream truck driven by a cartoon animal, who poisons and kills the other cartoon animals; and a knock off Mickey Mouse cartoon where Mickey rips his own head off unexpectedly with full blood and gore. This is not "have a discussion with your kids" territory, it's nightmares and trauma. As a parent, the risk of that happening obliterates the value proposition of YouTube for kids.
I've noticed that on monitors at 120hz and 240hz, full motion video starts to look strange. Not just high resolution animated graphics renderings, but also legacy recordings of live action pre-dating HD standards.
Old NTSC and PAL recordings, and even Black and White TV shows like I Love Lucy or Leave It To Beaver, take on this interpolated, ultra-modern slick feeling of remastered image post-processing.
I can't tell what's going on, but I see it when I view certain monitors, at friends houses, in department stores and at some fast food restaurants that provide a TV in the dining room.
Re-runs of TV shows that I've watched hundreds of times on CRTs and first generation flat-screen monitors, have a certain quality and leave a distinctive impression, that a subset of recent monitors augment, contaminate and tamper with.
I can't tell what's going but I know it when I see it. I suspect that there may be some software inbetween the transcoder circuit and the final illuminated raster that attempts to reduce flicker, and provides virtual frames automatically tweened when low frame counts are encountered.
Few people agree with me, or notice a difference, but it's there, man.
It's there.
"Pro quality" TV series? You mean like "CSI: Miami"? Or "Gilligan's Island"? Or do you mean movies like "The Smurfs" or the US version of "The Vanishing" or "Leave it To Beaver"?
Yes, I'd gladly do without all that TV and all the movies, and most or all of the books. Oh, and the popular music. Especially the music by Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato and Ashlee Simpson.
How is buying a house and working a job a safe thing?
I'm Canadian. We Canadians grow up extremely aware of our behemoth neighbour. We watch your TV, your news, your movies. Your culture permeates our culture.
And your culture celebrates home ownership and working a job as the American dream. From Leave it to Beaver to Desperate Housewives and Weeds, your culture (and ours) is all about having a job and owning a home. It's part of the American dream.
How many people pursuing that dream lost their job and their homes? If you're unemployed and homeless through no fault of your own, how do you feel when you see bankers, who are at fault, getting bailed out by the government?
The Occupy Wall Street movement is about pointing out how unfair it is to bailout the rich without doing a thing for the middle class.
As for health insurance, does the author sound like he has a few extra thousand dollars kicking around to pay the deductible?
> I'll tell you why. because Apple's number one priority is the user experience. You need that kind of control if you want the best possible user experience.
If Apple applied their logic to the Universe (or at least Earth) we would all be living in an episode of Leave it to Beaver to 'improve the user experience.' What if you don't want to live in a Leave it to Beaver universe? Too bad.
I have ended up watching several Leave it to Beaver episodes lately.