‘DENNIS THE MENACE’ (SEASON 3): WITH MR. WILSON’S SUDDEN EXIT, WHO WILL REPLACE HIM?

[TMC]

https://drunktv.net/2023/09/24/denni...series-review/

“We sure are going to miss good ol’ Mr. Wilson.”

By Paul Mavis

Sooo loooooooooong, Mr. Wilson. If you’re like me, the current sad state of affairs on every conceivable level of human existence makes me run to vintage TV discs like Dennis the Menace. And yes of course I know that’s denial and escapism (my two favorite hobbies, after drinking and whoring), and yes, I’m well aware that living in the past is potentially perilous for your mental state (…like it’s healty to embrace the verkakte reality of today’s world, you morons), and no, of course I don’t believe things were perfect back when Dennis the Menace was originally airing. However, at least in terms of entertainment for entertainment’s sake…they most definitely were better. No question (you can always take your counter-argument and ram it straight up your Oppen-Barbie hole if you disagree).



A few years ago, Shout! Factory released Dennis the Menace: Season Three, a five-disc, 38-episode (yikes!) collection of the series’ 1961-1962 season. As fans of the series know, season three saw the death of “Mr. Wilson” co-star, Joseph Kearns. Despite the comedic chops of his formidable replacement, Gale Gordon, the handwriting was already on the wall for the series when George Wilson suddenly just…disappeared one day from Elm Street, never to return. Dennis the Menace, this third go-around, is still tightly written and expertly produced, with numerous series-best episodes, but it’s obvious, too, that Dennis will soon be getting too big for those britches.

Suburban Hillsdale, America, circa 1960. If you round the bend on Mississippi Street, you won’t have to get too close to 627 Elm to hear a strident, “Helloooooooooooo, Mr. Wilson!” called out by little Dennis Mitchell (Jay North). A rambunctious, inquisitive, tow-headed walking disaster zone in stripped shirt and overalls, Dennis means well, but this red- blooded, all-American boy simply can’t help but lay down a path of destruction wherever he goes…particularly when he visits “good ol’ Mr. Wilson” (Joseph Kearns), the Mitchell’s next-door neighbor. Retired to the good life of 1950s suburban America, George Wilson wants nothing more than to putter around his house with his various hobbies, including bird watching, coin collecting and especially his garden, before settling down every afternoon for a quiet snooze on the couch.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wilson is frequently driven to gulping straight out of his nerve tonic bottle, such is the ruckus caused by hero-worshipping Dennis, who likes Mr. Wilson so much that he’s very probably going to kill George with hyper-kindness. George’s saintly wife, Martha (Sylvia Field), thinks Dennis a dear, sweet little boy, but even she knows there are times when Dennis shouldn’t be around grouchy George…and those are precisely the times that Dennis strikes with completely innocent mayhem.

The parents of such a child could rightly apply for sainthood, too; however, engineer Henry Mitchell (Herbert Anderson) and lovely housewife Alice (Gloria Henry), get exasperated with Dennis, as well—until they realize he’s just a boy with good intentions…and low impulse control skills (remember those? They’ve been drugged and bullied and shamed out of existence today). Rounding out the gang are Dennis’ good-natured, willing best friend Tommy (Billy Booth), and that “dumb ol’ Margaret” Wade (Jeannie Russell), who is forever trying to wrangle a horrified Dennis into playing house as her “husband.”

This season, when George suddenly “goes East” on a trip and/or to “settle an estate,” his brother, writer John Wilson (Gale Gordon), comes to stay at George’s home…where he becomes the latest target of towheaded Dennis’ killer friendship.

If you were a kid like me growing up back in the ’70s, you had no idea about the “reality” of television or its stars. You might read an Earl Wilson column about Archie Bunker bitching for more money, or catch Rona Barrett on Good Morning, America discussing the latest contretemps on the set of Laverne & Shirley.

However, if you wanted to know what happened to the first Mr. Wilson on an old show like Dennis the Menace, you were probably out of luck: no internet to instantly look up fifty stories (and fifty conspiracies) on his death, no serious history books on television in the local library, and the most you’d probably get out of your parents, if they remembered, was that he died and that was it. In a weird way, that less-obsessed, pre-media crazed time contributed to that almost dreamlike feel TV had back then for us (or at least me); television just…was for kids.

It existed in this strange world of old and new shows butting up against each other without rhyme or reason, and if one day the old Mr. Wilson was replaced with a new one, you wondered about it…but somehow on some weird level it made sense because you knew deep down none of any of it made sense. And you weren’t going to get any answers, either. You just experienced this warped reality. You didn’t look for explanations.

Of course today, that’s all different. Now, if you even watch network television, you can find out anything about its “stars”…and that’s why they hold almost no weight with viewers: there’s no distance, no magic. With the internet, you can easily look up all the particulars of Joseph Kearns’ death from a cerebral hemorrhage on February 17th, 1962, and you can speculate on blogs with hundreds of other TV fanatics about whether or not his strict Metracal diet (a liquid diet drink) was the cause, while gabbing about thousands of other equally “juicy” TV stories (Jay North’s supposed abuse on the show is one of classic TV’s all-time biggies).

But back in the early seventies, watching reruns of Dennis the Menace as a kid, Mr. Wilson was there one day, and the next day he wasn’t, and you wondered about it for five minutes before you just let that shadowbox dream-maker carry you along blinking into new fantasies. After all, you could always see him again when his episodes cycled through the syndication roster.

Truth be told, that knowledge of Kearns’ passing does set up a rather morbid curiosity in the viewer while watching this third season of Dennis the Menace. Of course there’s nothing in any of the cast’s behavior here to suggest some weird occult predestination of Kearns’ fate (although how spooky is the coincidence that Where There’s a Will, the episode where Mr. Wilson makes out a will and leaves everything to Dennis, was the last episode to air before Kearns’ own death, just six days later…?).

And Dennis the Menace being a typical model of Hollywood television production efficiency, there’s not the slightest trace of acknowledgment from the remaining cast, on any level in the subsequent episodes, that the show’s co-star has actually and for real, died. Everyone moves on in that supremely odd TV world, as if nothing has happened. That doesn’t stop us from looking for signs, all the same…but they’re simply not there.

Getting past that vague shadow that hangs over the experience of watching season three of Dennis the Menace, just as with seasons one and two, the quality of the episodes is consistently high…if perhaps (just a tad, perhaps), played out. Silly but ingenious plots work out with almost metronomic precision, yielding big laughs from the expert cast.

Episodes like Mr. Wilson’s Safe (where Dennis has to be hypnotized to remember the combination to George’s new wall safe) or Dennis and the Pee Wee League, where George uses psychology to get the boys to transfer their hatred for cello lessons, dancing with girls, and washing, to the baseball, for big runs (did Bill Lancaster watch this before writing The Bad News Bears…because it’s pretty similar), seem slight and even inane at first glance, until they build and build cleverly from one topper to the next.

Indeed, that expert situational/slapstick “build” is a hallmark of Dennis the Menace (and many other classic sitcoms from this era), with the various script writers coming up with a seemingly endless supply of ever-increasing mishaps that grow into a major calamity—with Mr. Wilson almost always the sufferer. The season opener, Trouble From Mars, has Mr. Wilson accidentally putting on Dennis’ space helmet and getting it stuck, leading to the fire department eventually raiding his house.

The Fifty Thousandth Customer, a beautifully constructed episode, has Mr. Wilson building himself into a frenzy to be the 50,000th customer into crabby Mr. Finch’s (Charles Lane) drug store, the winner getting a five-minute shopping spree…with of course Dennis beating him to it. The show tops this by having Dennis best the stingy Mr. Finch—who stored everything of value on high shelves—by smart Dennis climbing the walls and throwing everything into a hammock. The script has Dennis sweetly giving Mr. Wilson everything he wanted (there’s genuine affection from North to Kearns in their scenes together…or at least it looks that way).

A Quiet Evening finds possible Dennis replacement Seymour (Robert John Pittman) causing havoc with babysitting George by spending his valuable dime in a candy machine (the subsequent events are expertly staged, culminating in a hilarious third degree of George by the cops, a la Dragnet). The Man Next Door is another precisely-designed farce, with everyone suspecting each of being the notorious neighborhood thief (veteran comedy director Charles Barton, who again directs almost all the episodes here this season, is a master at such simple yet effective comedic staging).

Television historians (blech) take note: Calling All Bird Lovers, a delightfully bizarre entry from Russell Beggs where some hepcat musicians mistake one of George’s bird call concerts for a jazz session, has what has to be one of the first unmistakable drug humor jokes in a network sitcom…on Dennis the Menace, no less (after one of the squares flips out, the jazz enthusiast wonders, “I don’t know what that cat was taking…but I sure would like to have some!”).

And best example of the “build” here has to be my favorite episode this season, Keith Fowler’s and Phil Leslie’s The Fifteen-Foot Christmas Tree. Here, George takes it upon himself to dismiss the Mitchell’s puny, spray-painted tree so he can take Dennis and Henry into the woods to chop down a real Christmas tree. Of course, the disasters begin almost immediately (he breaks the ax handle on the first swing), before some stray passersby in the woods scam them out of twenty bucks, saying they own the property (hilarious), before the men are trying to get the tree on a bus because they lost their car keys (I hit the floor when the drunk woke up on the bus, peering through the tree branches that surround him, thinking he’s in the woods). The sight of George’s final creation—a hideously mangled abomination of a Christmas tree—is priceless. And of course, Dennis repeats his Christmas tradition by sweetly singing Silent Night at the end of this genuine work of TV comedy art.

Of course, no review of Dennis the Menace‘s third season would be complete without mentioning Kearns’ replacement, Gale Gordon. You can see the producers scrambling to maintain their production schedule after Kearns’ unexpected demise when they plug in first Willard Waterman as grocer Mr. Quigley into George’s shoes (to no effect: Waterman was priceless as a supporting player, but he fades in the long run), and then Edward Everett Horton as George’s Uncle Ned (he was introduced in an earlier Kearns episode).

Once Gale Gordon comes in, the series finds a beat again—not the same as Kearns’ beat, and frankly not as good as his, but a beat nonetheless, with the producers probably feeling that Gordon was the way to continue with the series. As a huge fan of Gale Gordon’s on the various Lucy Show incarnations, it’s a pleasure to see him here, looking sleek and smooth, with his silky delivery that gives way to brief explosions of rage that are quickly smothered. He’s a gem, as always, and probably more technically proficient an actor and comedian than Kearns.

But importantly: he’s simply not Kearns, and it’s difficult to feel any of the connection one felt between Kearns and North here. Understandably, Gordon was probably feeling his way through an enormously difficult situation, knowing he was an outsider in a production “family,” and that his continued presence would eventually lead to another regular, Sylvia Field, being let go. We’ll wait till the fourth and final season to fully evaluate him as the “new” Mr. Wilson, but as for these few last episodes of season three, Kearns is sorely, sorely missed.

It’s certainly possible that even though it took most of the season for Kearns’ remaining episodes to play out, the news of his death in mid-February could have had a negative effect on Dennis the Menace‘s ratings (like all those kids that cried with they saw the headlines that Superman‘s George Reeves was dead). Just as likely, Dennis‘ direct competition—NBC’s Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color at 7:30—was to blame, as well, for the former sitcom’s 11th Nielsen position tumbling to a still more-than-respectable 17th for this third season (no doubt aided by CBS sandwiching the sitcom comfortably between 15th place Lassie and 19th placer, The Ed Sullivan Show).

ABC’s adventure series, Follow the Sun, was no serious threat, but NBC’s lure of Disney in color, followed by a hip sitcom, Car 54, Where Are You? (anchored by an equally hip cartoon, The Bullwinkle Show at 7:00pm, and followed up with the giant killer, Bonanza at 9:00), was sure to siphon off some the kiddies (as well as the adults who might have wanted to avoid answering any uncomfortable questions like, “If Mr. Wilson died like it said in the papers, why is he still on TV?”). The following year, Dennis the Menace would drop out of the Nielsen Top Thirty altogether, pole-axed by the loss of Kearns, the rapid maturation of Jay North, the continued presence of Walt Disney…and a hip Flintstones spin-off for the kids, The Jetsons, over on ABC.

• ‘Dennis the Menace’ (Season 2): ’60s sitcom’s highest rated season
  
• ‘Dennis the Menace’ (Season 1): Comic strip-turned-sitcom remains delightfully fun

[stevea]

Originally Posted by TMC

...Truth be told, that knowledge of Kearns’ passing does set up a rather morbid curiosity in the viewer while watching this third season of Dennis the Menace. Of course there’s nothing in any of the cast’s behavior here to suggest some weird occult predestination of Kearns’ fate (although how spooky is the coincidence that Where There’s a Will, the episode where Mr. Wilson makes out a will and leaves everything to Dennis, was the last episode to air before Kearns’ own death, just six days later…?)....

Wilson left Dennis an old watch, not "everything."

[Duster76]

The timeline of the moves made by the production team in the immediate aftermath of Kearns cerebral hemorrhage gives new meaning to the old show business expression, "the show must go on". On Monday February 12th the table read for the episode Dennis and the Dodger took place with the show's writers frantically rewriting Wilson's lines for the Quigley character. As we know Kearns passes away six days later and before he was even in the grave the production company announces the hiring of Gale Gordon as the new Mr. Wilson.

The show's filming schedule was about three months ahead of the air date, you have to wonder what might have been the decision with respect to the episode "Where There's A Will" if it had not been scheduled for the night of February 11. If the episode had been scheduled a week later would CBS have decided to pull it? It might have never aired during the original run of the series.

[ThisLittlePiggy]

Originally Posted by stevea

Wilson left Dennis an old watch, not "everything."

Can you imagine how angry Mrs. Wilson would be if Mr. W. had left it all to Dennis?!

[TMC]

‘Dennis the Menace’ (Season 4): Dennis is an older menace in boomer sitcom’s final season

July 25, 2024 Drunk TV

Sooo looooooooooong, Dennis…and not a moment too soon.

By Paul Mavis

It’s officially summer, and as I’ve written many, many times before, when the thermometer hits 90 degrees and the humidity index isn’t too far behind, I need to “check out” for awhile, if you know what I mean, and some golden age, expertly-crafted network television is usually my go-to for staying cool “upstairs” (it’s either that, or a cocktail of acamprosate, disulfiram, and naltrexone…with a wine cooler chaser).

Wrapping up our look here at Drunk TV of Dennis the Menace, one of the best-remembered boomer sitcoms, Dennis the Menace: The Final Season, a five-disc, 38-episode collection, released by Shout! Factory a few years ago, encompasses the CBS sitcom’s fourth and last go-around, from the 1962-1963 television season. With Gale Gordon’s “new” Mr. Wilson firmly entrenched, along with an instant presto wife, played by Sara Seegar, everything should be business as usual at 627 Elm Street.

Sadly, though, it’s not. The scripts aren’t nearly as tight or as funny this final fourth time; the conflict between Dennis and Mr. Wilson is muted to the point of ennui; and that little bastard Dennis had the nerve to grow up—he ditches his bib coveralls and pullover for chinos and a polo shirt…and even his cowlick takes a more conservative profile.

Suburban Hillsdale, America, circa 1962. If you round the bend on Mississippi Street, you won’t have to get too close to 627 Elm to hear a strident, “Helloooooooooooo, Mr. Wilson!” called out by fifth-grader Dennis Mitchell (Jay North). A rambunctious, inquisitive, tow-headed walking disaster zone in a striped polo shirt and chinos, Dennis means well, but this red-blooded, all-American boy (ask your grandparents…) simply can’t help but lay down a path of destruction wherever he goes…particularly when he visits “good ol’ Mr. Wilson” (Gale Gordon), the Mitchell’s new next-door neighbor.

Unlike his brother, George (the late Joseph Kearns), who previously owned the home and who was retired to the good life of 1950s suburban America, John Wilson is a working writer (the biggest a-holes on the planet), constantly looking for an angle for his magazine assignments…and a little peace and quiet to tap out his stories. John’s pragmatic, slightly smart-assed wife, Eloise (Sara Seegar), enjoys Dennis coming over—just as much to have him annoy John, as to see his smiling face.

The parents of such a child could rightly apply for sainthood; however, engineer Henry Mitchell (Herbert Anderson) and lovely housewife Alice (Gloria Henry), get exasperated with Dennis, as well—until they realize he’s just a boy with good intentions…and low impulse control skills. Rounding out the gang are Dennis’ good-natured, willing best friend Tommy (Billy Booth), and that “dumb ol’ Margaret” Wade (Jeannie Russell), who is forever trying to wrangle a horrified Dennis into playing house as her “husband.”

What was once one the brightest, funniest sitcoms on TV…just doesn’t work anymore at this point. I’ve had a lot of fun watching this classic boomer sitcom from its very beginning (you can read those three previous reviews here), but it was apparent in season three that Dennis the Menace was already chugging along on borrowed time, with confirmation of that decline coming in this scattershot fourth and final season. The most obvious—but by no means the only—problem with the show is the loss of Joseph Kearns.

As I wrote in my previous review, Gale Gordon was a brilliant TV comedian…but something about his portrayal here of John Wilson is just off. Whereas there was real anguish and terror on the part of Kearns when he was buffeted and blasted by Dennis’ continued assaults (and real heart-tugging emotion when these obviously simpatico performers had their tender moments together), with Gordon, everything is rather reserved, and calm, even when he’s supposed to be enraged. Mild irritation for Dennis has replaced open anger; John Wilson is just too understanding and sweet with Dennis the Pest, and that throws the sitcom’s concept off its axis.

I rather like the addition of Seegar as John’s flip wife—even if her presence is arbitrary and unexplained. But no matter how funny she is, bantering with John and subtly egging on Dennis to annoy her husband, it can’t make up for the fact that she seems less interested in “mothering” Dennis as the previous Mrs. Wilson was (the sublime Sylvia Field). That change eliminates another thread from the concept: Mrs. Wilson is supposed to be a calming, maternal buffer between the eager-to- please Dennis and the fuming Mr. Wilson—not a wise-ass who wants the kid around only to piss-off her husband (there is a weird, beautiful moment in episode two, You Go Your Way, where the rigid bounds of TVland seem ready to bust when Dennis tells John the old Mr. Wilson let him cut his grass, to which John angrily replies, “Well, I own the house now, and I don’t….” before Eloise cuts him off in horror. There’s a lot of layers getting unpeeled there when she reacts with surprisingly real effrontery….).

And frankly, it doesn’t help that Jay North is growing up here, either. Certainly CBS was in an impossible spot: North was Dennis to so many viewers that they couldn’t have replaced him with a younger re-cast, but clearly, he’s too old for these shenanigans, and it shows. Merely changing his costume and pasting down his manufactured cowlick doesn’t successfully change the character, any more than having Dennis “grow up” in several episodes here—and that’s because the concept is being altered for the worse.

We don’t want a “growing up” Dennis the Menace (he was five-years-old when creator Hank Ketcham’s brilliant comic strip debuted in 1951…and he’s stayed 5 to this day in the on-going strip, an incredible 73 years later). Dennis should forever be a little tiny terror whose guile and smart-ass ways continually trip-up the adult world he navigates. If he’s older, how does that concept accommodate him?

He’s too old to idolize his older neighbor now, so the scripters throw out all that “my best pal” jazz, which ironically only serves to distance the characters even further from each other, creating more unease with the show’s evolution. They even make the mistake of having the grown-ups legitimately mad at Dennis for fouling up, because he can’t fall back on being a kid anymore to explain his screw-ups.

What kid wants to watch that happen on Dennis the Menace? They get that crap at home; they watch the show to see an escape from their own reality, where a little smart-ass causes a whole bunch of trouble, and the grown-ups simply throw up their hands because what else are they going to do with such an adorable little tot? Instead, they now want to watch an obviously older kid get yelled at all the time, by grown-ups who mean it? No, they don’t.

Now, there are some funny outings here (although none, sadly, are series-best). Anytime the show brings in supporting characters like man-hungry spinsters Miss Esther Cathcart (the sublime Mary Wickes) and Miss Tarbell (Bewitched‘s Alice Pearce), the show achieves a wacky Frank Capra/Abbott & Costello Show/Seinfeld alternate universe feel that scores every time (same thing whenever dodgy cop Sergeant Theodore Mooney, played brilliantly by George Cisar, waltzes in, laughing at everything). And veteran director Charles Barton, when given a script that can let him improvise with the physical gags, delivers some funny extended sequences in The Uninvited Guest, Tuxedo Trouble, My Uncle Ned, and The Creature With the Big Feet.

However…those passable entries are far outnumbered by episodes that either focus too much on Gale Gordon (was that part of his agreement to take on the role?), or that miss the original tone of the series entirely. A perfect example of all the problems for this fourth season are found in the season opener, The Chinese Girl, which plays like a bad Family Affair episode. How many fans of the series tuned into this horrible opener and quickly vowed to watch the animated The Jetsons from that point on?

Forget that it has very few laughs (if the first three seasons proved anything, it was that Dennis the Menace was a reliable laugh machine): why the hell is Dennis romantically interested in a girl? Show me that in the comic strip. If that isn’t bad enough, we get to see him dress up in a suit for a luncheon date (jesus), and get his first kiss—how many little television viewers blanched at that (I don’t need lessons in cultural tolerance from Dennis the Menace, either, particularly when they’re so heavy-handed)?

But it’s not just the opener; so many episodes this time out are either misguided conceptually, or just downright odd in their tone. Dennis in Gypsyland is probably the worst offender, with too much Gale Gordon and a premise that was played out long before 1962 (the sight of Gordon in a gypsy outfit isn’t insulting because it mocks gypsies, it’s insulting because it’s not funny). A Tax on Cats further embarrasses Gordon by having him become Hillsdale’s cat catcher (a supposedly successful writer is doing this why?), and then blows the concept by doing absolutely nothing with it.

Henry’s New Job has too little Dennis in an unfunny story about Henry being fired and Dennis running away from home. The Big Basketball Game must be trying for some kind of minor social message exploration when it features a poor kid who says, among other things, “I live in a dump.” Well, Dennis the Menace can keep that message, because viewers don’t tune into this kind of show for realism. They have enough of that in their own lives—it’s supposed to be escapism.

Location shooting is always a sure sign of producer desperation, and the two-parter to San Diego (San Diego Safari and Dennis at Boot Camp) is marred by plot contrivances, too few jokes, and even botched location shooting (San Diego apparently is nothing more than parking lots and motels). And the list goes on and on.

What’s most distressing, though, watching season four of Dennis the Menace, is seeing how Jay North has changed. No, not that he’s gotten older (he can hardly help that), but rather, his spirit seems oddly deflated. Maybe by this time he had gotten old enough where the “glamour and excitement” of doing the show had worn off, with him either balking at the kid-stuff he was asked to do, or becoming zoned-out bored performing like a trick pony.

Maybe it was the death of Kearns (some people assert it affected him rather strongly). Maybe it was the continued abuse he’s alleged to have endured by his parents. It’s impossible to say, probably, but even if North felt better about not having to wear that wardrobe anymore, there’s no mistaking that something is off here with his performance. Unlike the Dennis of old, where North created a rather astounding character of insane cheeriness and sly wit, here his energy is lower, he’s subdued, and even a little grumpy-looking at times. And who can blame him, quite frankly? Dennis the Menace just wasn’t the same, anymore.

And it’s not just me writing that, over 60 years on: audiences in 1962 rejected this season, too. What had been a Nielsen Top Twenty (the 17th most-watched TV show for the 1961-1962 season), dropped with a sickening free-fall out of the Nielsen Top Thirty altogether by the end of the 1962-1963 season. Direct competition for the family demo from The Jetsons on ABC may not have garnered that Hanna-Barbera animated comedy Top Thirty ratings, either, but it had to take a bite out of Dennis the Menace‘s available audience sample, while cool and steady Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color over on NBC stayed solid at 24th for the year (it would remain a Top Twenty/Ten hit for the next 12 years straight).

Clearly, audiences had tired of Dennis the Menace. Once cleverly (even brilliantly, sometimes) written, directed, and performed, Dennis the Menace had become subpar. The jokes just weren’t there anymore, nor the joy. The reasons could be many (North’s age, the loss of Kearns, the refusal to accept Gordon as a replacement, the general decline in the quality of the episodes), but there was no arguing with the numbers. Dennis the Menace was canceled in the spring of 1963, soon to be seen in repeats until this very day (and very probably for years and years to come).

[stevea]

^The writer does a pretty god job finding the "clunker" episodes in this season. And the LOL funny ones. The slapstick works. Sort-of villain Mrs. Elkins falls into a pit in a whirlwind of funny gags (leaving me to wonder how many takes this must have required) or Wilson conks Sgt. Mooney on the head with a fry pan--Dennis is barely involved in any of it--and it all works.

One problem with this Mr. Wilson--the writers couldn't seem to make up their minds whether he likes Dennis--or doesn't. From episode to episode this confuses the viewer.

[Duster76]

With respect to Jay North being too old for the part I made that observation in a thread in this forum a few years back (I upset one of the other posters to that thread).

The passing of Kearns gave birth to an opportunity that the network and the producers failed to identify. Of course that's understandable but it was an opportunity lost. Kearns was the perfect Mr. Wilson, he looked like a guy who had a drawer full of pocket protectors, had an organized wallet, stacked his coins by denominations, collected stamps, carefully labeled photos, used shoe trees etc. With his passing the show could have been pulled from the network schedule and completely recast and brought back as a midseason replacement. It was impossible for North to continue in that role, the entire premise is based on the master of chaos Dennis a pre-age of reasoning child, and his "friendship" with George Wilson whose life was devoted to tranquility, organization and structure. What a pair!

[biffbronson]

Quoting, regarding the ratings:

"...dropped with a sickening free-fall"

"Sickening" is an extremely odd and inappropriate word in use here. Startling maybe.

Anyway, of course in the comics there was no issue to contend with of Dennis growing up. The notable exception of a child growing in real time was the Skeezix character in the Gasoline Alley comic strip, the difference being his strip was a slice-of-life domestic humor / dramedy / mild adventure comic, while Dennis' was reliant on the outright humor of a very young boy.

[maniaguy6]

Originally Posted by Duster76

The timeline of the moves made by the production team in the immediate aftermath of Kearns cerebral hemorrhage gives new meaning to the old show business expression, "the show must go on". On Monday February 12th the table read for the episode Dennis and the Dodger took place with the show's writers frantically rewriting Wilson's lines for the Quigley character. As we know Kearns passes away six days later and before he was even in the grave the production company announces the hiring of Gale Gordon as the new Mr. Wilson.

The show's filming schedule was about three months ahead of the air date, you have to wonder what might have been the decision with respect to the episode "Where There's A Will" if it had not been scheduled for the night of February 11. If the episode had been scheduled a week later would CBS have decided to pull it? It might have never aired during the original run of the series.

Believe it or not Gale Gordon was actually hired while Joseph Kearns was in a coma. I don't have the article here and I should have saved it, but I had a free trial for newspapers.com a year or two ago and came across it. The article suggested that Joseph Kearns might survive, but not be able to return to the show until the next fall in order to have time to fully recover. So, Gale Gordon would have been a temporary Mr. Wilson, but only to finish out that season, if Joseph Kearns' fate was different.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by maniaguy6

Believe it or not Gale Gordon was actually hired while Joseph Kearns was in a coma. I don't have the article here and I should have saved it, but I had a free trial for newspapers.com a year or two ago and came across it. The article suggested that Joseph Kearns might survive, but not be able to return to the show until the next fall in order to have time to fully recover. So, Gale Gordon would have been a temporary Mr. Wilson, but only to finish out that season, if Joseph Kearns' fate was different.

That would explain why things were kept up in the air at the end of season 3--why George was on a trip, Sylvia Field stayed on, and Sara Seegar wasn't there yet (she was an easy hire later, since she was likely an easily available character actress).

[schmave]

True ... they couldn't really stray from the premise of George being away once it was established. It took until a few years ago for me to hear that the character of Eloise was first mentioned not in the first episode of season 4, but in "The Club Initiation." Not by name, but John snuck in during a conversation with Fred Ferguson that he was thinking of moving there with his wife. I don't know how I never heard that line until comparatively recently.
So right there, viewers were told that the show would have a different look in the fourth season. And the sharper among them probably surmised that there would be no place for Sylvia Field, almost as big a loss to the show as Joseph Kearns IMO.

[stevea]

I forgot about that--is that the episode with the goat?

Maybe by the time that was filmed, Jos. Kearns had died.

[schmave]

Yes and yes. John and Fred Ferguson were walking away from the garage when John said "and as you know, I'm thinking of bringing my wife and moving into this wonderful town of yours" or something to that effect.
Even in that episode, you could tell they were phasing Sylvia Field out. She only had a few scenes and was gone "shopping" most of the episode.