{alltv} Childhood nostalgia on DVD

The baseball legend and word mangler Yogi Berra once said that nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

But there are exceptions and the television series Leave it to Beaver is one, depending on your age and attitude to cultural artifacts of your youth.

Leave it to Beaver generated 234 episodes (plus the pilot) over six seasons from 1957-1963. Please ignore the 1980s revival and the 1997 movie. While three seasons of the original have already been released separately, the entire collection arrived this week in a marvellous 37-disc box set from Shout! Factory (with the black-and-white photography beautifully restored). For me, Leave it to Beaver: The Complete Series is childhood personified. It is nostalgia.

It is also an illusion, a fragment, a whimsy. Even though I relate to the intimate concerns that Theodore (Beaver) Cleaver become obsessed about -- from the dreaded mystery of the teacher's note home to mom, to his haircut trauma, to his eagerness to win a Good Citizen Award -- I know this is not reality.

By that I mean all reality of the era, everybody's reality. Things were not really "better" then. The American Dream did not exist in life.

I would soon learn, in the early 1960s, that my neighbours in the United States lived in a racially segregated country, that the Cold War gave truth to nuclear war paranoia, that my own tumultuous family life was never going to be like the Cleavers, nor other families in Hollywood shows such as Father Knows Best.

And, of course, humanity was more complicated than the daily trials and tribulations of an American grade school kid played by Jerry Mathers every week on TV.

At the same time, Leave it to Beaver did deal with the reality of a naive and mischievous eight-year-old Grade 2 student, as the Beaver was when the series went to air on CBS Oct. 4, 1957, the same day that the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik Satellite and turned up the front burner on that Cold War.

Beaver's concerns were his reality, and familiar to many American and Canadian kids. I like to think there are some life lessons buried in the 234 episodes that would still ring true, even if kids today thought the series quaint and old-fashioned (it is).

Leave it to Beaver was well-written, everyday stuff. Co-creators Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher mined their own children's lives for the shenanigans that Beaver, Wally and their friends got up to. The first broadcast episode, directed by Norman Tokar, is actually quite cleverly constructed and photographed, especially when the Beaver tries to run away from home.

There is also amusing detail. As the Beaver researches ways out of town, he comes across a travel agency's window display. The price to Chicago: $12.50; to Toronto: $52; and to Mexico City: $98.95. Not enough pennies in the piggybank for even the cheapest escape.

The show was well cast, starting with the engaging Mathers, who recently attended a cast-and-crew reunion that also drew Frank Bank, Tony Dow and Ken Osmond (of the Cleaver parents, Hugh Beaumont is deceased and Barbara Billingsley is 94 years old).

Leave it to Beaver knew what it was doing from the beginning. The narrator tells us, as we watch a soda jerk spoon out two scoops on top of a cone: "When you were young, you had your own set of values, values that nothing could change. An ice cream cone was a snow-capped mountain of sheer delight. An autographed baseball was more precious than rubies. And a note form the teacher meant only one thing: Disaster! And that's our story tonight on Leave it to Beaver."