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greenpeep (3)
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I thought she was a bit annoying, but it wasn't the actor's fault that the writers threw some scary puppet at her she was supposed to talk to.
What I didn't like is at the end of the series, Robbie's gone, Katie is still there, Chip and Polly get married, which leaves poor Ernie to just walk through scenes -- or I should say bounce through scenes, because they always had him bouncing in, most of the time with Dodie there, and many times they're told to go in the other room, and that's all you see of them.
No wonder the show ended.
I lived in Michigan and then moved to California as a kid.
When I was really little, men wore suits and even hats. They stopped in 1960 when JFK didn't wear hats. Women, when they'd go "to town" -- I wasn't in a rural area, but this is what they referred to going out shopping -- wore hats, and before my time, in the 40's and early 50's, they wore gloves too.
Things got more informal as time went on, but women still wore dresses. My mom would wear pants around the house during the day, but would change into a dress before my dad came home until well into the 60's.
As far as kids and school, both in Michigan and California, boys wore nice slacks and dress shirts and leather shoes, like loafers. Girls had to wear dresses and nice shoes. When we came home, we would change into our "play clothes," to go outside and play so as not to mess up our school clothes. Before every school year, we would be taken out to get new school clothes, and of course we would wear some from last year that still fit.
Of course in the 60's, the shirts got shorter and we had rules. If they thought your skirt was too short, they sent you to the office, made you get down on your knees and they would measure the distance from the floor to the bottom of your dress or skirt. If it was more than two inches, you either got sent home or a note was sent home with you.
I once was wearing a dress that was the appropriate length but had matching shorts under them. The gym teacher was outraged and said she'd send a note to my mother. I told her to go ahead, she wouldn't care since she picked it out.
In the 70's, they gave it up, couldn't control it anymore, and we could wear jeans and tennis shoes, as long as there were no holes.
Female attorneys couldn't wear pantsuits to court until the late 70's or early 80's. Even then, it raised eyebrows.
It wasn't a matter of laziness. He was considered a big star at the time, and it was a real coup to get an actual movie star to do a TV show and have their name on it. He was in Disney movies at the time, but before that, he was a romantic lead.
When he signed up, they made a provision that he could do all his scenes at once, and come back at the end to do any clean-up work or scenes that had to be done with him. So everything was filmed out of order.
The sons said that it was good for their acting because when he was gone, they had to play their scenes to a script girl who was reading his lines.
I heard this in interviews with the actors who played Chip and Ernie the past few years. They didn't mention anything about Fred MacMurray liking or not liking them or having a hard time with them.
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