Bob
Keeshan hid behind makeup and the horn of Clarabelle the clown on the
classic "Howdy Doody Show," and disguised himself with a gray
wig to play the grandfatherly Captain Kangaroo on his own celebrated TV
show.
But on this day, a Saturday in November in 1996, Keeshan
stood alone, without costume or character. He was visiting Denver as part
of a tour promoting his newest book, "Good Morning Captain: 50 Wonderful
Years With Bob Keeshan: TV's Captain Kangaroo." Hundreds of fans
would wait patiently for a chance to talk with Keeshan, ask him for an
autograph or to pose with them, and recount stories of what he meant to
them growing up.
To
many fans, Keeshan’s "Captain Kangaroo" was everything:
a substitute fatherly figure, a calming influence during their childhood,
a familiar voice and face. To me, he was a teacher, a storyteller and
clown, a foil of Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose, a target for ping pong balls.
And, on that November day, a confidant.
Outside of our own families, my wife and I had not told
anyone she was pregnant with our first child: a daughter, Madeline, who
would be born in June 1997. But something prompted me to tell Keeshan
my news, which delighted him. During the years of "Captain Kangaroo"
and after it left the airwaves, first on CBS and then on PBS, Keeshan
developed into an advocate for children. He offered me an excellent piece
of advice: Read to your child every day.
Not too long after my hour-long interview with Keeshan,
a package arrived in the mail. It was a copy of "Books to Grow By,"
a reference guide Keeshan published in early 1996 of what books are best
for children.
In
the years since, I had the pleasure to talk twice more with Keeshan, each
time on the telephone. Both conversations were lengthy, and provided insight
into his life and into "Captain Kangaroo."
The three interviews have been combined into the following
piece, which is intended to provide as complete a historical record as
possible into Keeshan’s life and career, including his never-realized
plans to return to television. He was hoping to produce a children’s
program called "The Captain and the ZooZoo Crew" in the years
before his death. Keeshan died in 2004 at age 76.
Q:
I grew up watching you, as probably everyone in the country did, but I
wanted to thank you for all those years of fun.
A: It was a pleasure. Always happy to hear that.
Q: I enjoyed your book. I actually read both of yours. I
read "Growing Up Happy," which was a very good book, and I read
this one this week. It’s wonderful to see these pictures.
A: Yeah, it is. It’s kind of a nice book. It was wonderful
to do. The reaction to it has been a lot of fun too.
Q: It seems, after reading the two books over a course of
a few weeks, that "Growing Up Happy" (full title: "Growing
Up Happy: Captain Kangaroo Tells Yesterday's Children How to Nurture Their
Own," published in 1989) was much more serious. Was it a conscious
effort to keep this a little bit lighter?
A: Yes. I think that’s the nature of this book. The
other one was biographical but much more personally biographical. This
book is much more fun, you’re absolutely right, and really designed
to elicit good solid memories, good positive memories of people who grew
up with the program. There’s probably somewhere around 220 million
grew up with the Captain in some way or another. About the only exceptions
are those who grew up in another culture and have come to this country
in recent years. "Growing Up Happy" was much more biographical
and much more a nurturing book; if you recall the subtitle of that book
was "Captain Kangaroo Tells Yesterday’s Children How to Nurture
Their Own," so that’s much more a useful book. A lot of people
have expressed the opinion it was a very valuable book to them in nurturing
their children, and that was really the intent of that book. Quite different
from the intention of this book, which is to, in a nostalgic way, recall
happier times.
Q:
I look back at that time in television, the ‘50s and the ‘60s
and I think of certain people. I think of you as Captain Kangaroo, I think
of Adam West as Batman, and George Reeves as Superman. They're always
in our minds as those people. Is it fair for people to think of you as
the Captain when you were really just an actor portraying a role?
A: Well, I don't think I was just an actor. I was the executive
producer and everything funneled through me. In the very beginning, everything
went through me. Obviously, the Captain's personality is me, is my own
personal feelings and philosophy. So all of that is as much a part of
the program as any actor might be. It's obviously more than that.
Q: Was there a point early on when you wanted to stop and
do other things?
A: I never had that Shakespearean disease. Never had the
desire to do something else. It's been a very busy time. I did six hours
of programming every week for most of the time. That kept us tremendously
busy, particularly producing and editing it and I had a very big hand
in writing it. I was serious about it. I am serious about it. I'm serious
about families and children. I'm an advocate. I spend a lot of time public
speaking on behalf of children and issues concerning young people. I just
left the National Association of Children's Hospitals board last year
after fulfilling my constitutional limit of six years. I've always been
involved in children's issues and family issues. This has been a serious
enterprise. It's not just a children's show that I did. Not at all.
Q:
You were fairly new as a parent back then, weren't you?
A: That was probably a great blessing, really. In the very
beginning the program staff was populated by young parents, so a lot of
our programming was intuitive at that time because we probably wrongly
assumed that most families were in the same situation as ours. We certainly
did not think about other families that were not in as good a position
as we were. We were people who were not worrying about food on the table
and poverty and everything else, which were existent then, not to the
extent that they are today in families in the richest nation in the world.
But we felt that we did understand what it was to be a parent with young
children. Then, as time went on, we did bring aboard child professionals
in various disciplines, child psychologists and educators and others whose
function really was to teach us about the needs of children. So we really
had a seminar going for 30-some odd years from some of the best child
professionals available. It was very useful to us because then we would
take that information, whether we were writers or producers or actors,
we would then take that information and translate it creatively into the
work that we were doing. That was very positive.
Q:
Was there ever a point when your children were embarrassed to be Captain
Kangaroo's kids?
A: No, because they were kept away from the show right from
the beginning. We really never made much of a big deal of it. We never
used them as a laboratory, we never questioned them. They may have watched
it, they may not have watched it. We never asked them. The community was
very respectful of our wishes. The schools never made a big deal of it.
As a result, they lived a very, very normal childhood.
Q: There were so many different characters on "Captain
Kangaroo" and so many different segments, how did it all get put
together?
A: Well, at different times in different ways. The show
really crossed the boundaries of a lot of changes in television, particularly
technical and production changes. So the putting together of the show
was done differently at different times. When we first went on the air
in 1955 we were live and so there were limitations to that. There were
also benefits from it. There was a wonderful spontaneity to it. But things
happen. We actually did two shows a day Monday through Friday. We would
do one at 8 o’clock for the Eastern Time Zone and in 40 seconds
turn everything around and at 9 o’clock did the show all over again.
Q:
The same show?
A: The same show, all over again, for the Central Time Zone
and the Mountain Zone. Then through a terrible, terrible process called
kinescope the show was shown on the West Coast. Then tape came along.
That was one development. Tape made it possible for us really to do the
show pretty much as we always had done it, because we couldn’t edit
tape in the very beginning, or we could but literally it could take an
hour to make one single edit so we just didn’t do it. So it was
basically a live show that was taped, and California got the live show
but with a better technical version. Then as time went by it became easier
to edit. Digital editing came along. So it was not only easy to edit,
there were all kinds of effects that could be achieved. The production
values changed considerably as a result of all this and ultimately we
were doing the show more like they do motion pictures and television because
we would 3 minutes here and a minute and a half there and we could always
do a 20-second segue. All of this came together in the editing suite.
We could mix and match shows. We could take, for example, we could do
a story a fairy tale of some kind or our interpretation of a fairy tale
which would require large sets maybe and guests and so on. Expenditures
which we could never have afforded when it was done just for the one live
show. But now because we were able to tape it and edit it and perfect
it, it went into the library. That might then be amortized over 12 runs
over three years or something of that sort. All of those things, there
are hundreds of details of that nature that changed the way the program
was done.
Q: How long would it take to do one show?
A: As opposed to doing a show in one hour straight in the
live days, we did the show in pieces. So it was done in maybe 25 different
pieces. Or there might be 20 pieces and there might be four pieces from
another day, so there’s no way to say it took us an hour. It actually
took us a lot longer to do each show in total than it did when we were
live and that’s because we were doing more ambitious programming.
The production was much more ambitious. That was not possible in live
days.
Q:
The signature characters on the show —
A: Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose and Grandfather Clock, Dancing
Bear — how many of those characters were there from the beginning?
A: Well, Bunny was there from the beginning and Mr. Green
Jeans of course was there from the beginning, as was the Captain. Mr.
Moose came along about year two. Dancing Bear maybe year three. They were
all there pretty much in the early days. There were a lot of other characters
that were introduced over those years that even I forget at this point
that didn’t work out, so we abandoned them.
Q:
What’s the process? Do you have a staff meeting and say we need
a Dancing Bear?
A: That’s a good example really of how accidentally
things come along. We had a meeting and we were listening to a record
that we’d just received. Believe it or not, it was a record, not
a tape or a CD, but it was a record called the "Dancing Bear."
We just sat around and said how do we do this? Somebody said how about
Gus in a bear suit? Gus being Gus Allegretti. Gus said, "Yeah, I’m
game," and so we had a nice bear suit made that Gus crawled into.
It was not a lot of fun but he is a great talent. Then we just had him
dance to this record, the "Dancing Bear," and that was that.
Then we got mail. A lot of people said oh, we love that dancing bear.
Let us see him again. So we repeated the number but then we also started
writing other material for him. We made him a character on the show and
within a year or so he was a very well established character on the program.
Bunny Rabbit just came along in the beginning. Mr. Green Jeans, we didn’t
create Mr. Green Jeans, he [Lumpy Brannum] did. It was his own personal
character. It represented everything that he felt strongly about. The
environment and animals. He was of course by background a musician, a
very good one, and played for Fred Waring for 16 years prior to coming
to our show. But he had had an avocation. He had a small farm in Pennsylvania
and tended his garden. He was tied to the earth. He was tied to animals.
And that was just his personality, which we took full advantage of, which
turned Mr. Green Jeans very much in that direction.
There really is no great magic to it. It’s just a combination of
intelligent planning and even with all of that it sometimes, very often
doesn’t work, there’s a lot of chemistry and a lot of luck
there. There are other characters that probably were planned as well but
just didn’t pick up, just make it. You see that every year at this
time of year when you see the new shows. They look good on paper. Wow,
this is going to make it. Then you look at the first show and you say
this ain’t going nowhere. Because it’s a combination of writing.
That’s where it all begins, writing and production and the actors
and the chemistry between them, the director and so on. This business
is a very very difficult business to write a rule book for. If I could
write a rule book or guide on creating a successful program, I would have
done it a long time ago and would have retired to my palace on the mountaintop.
Q:
You were constantly evaluating what worked and didn’t work on the
show?
A: Oh, sure. It’s a constant ongoing process. Absolutely.
Q: Were there things that you thought would work well and
you were wrong?
A: Oh, sure, all the time. Probably much more than the ones
that made it. Now you’re going to ask like what? I don’t remember
most of them. You forget them.
Q: You forget your failures.
A: Yeah. Well, you don’t forget your failures. It’s
just that you remember your successes. Because successes are around and
they’re there and they become important to the program and what
they do becomes important to the program whereas a failure’s maybe
on the program four or five times when we realized it wasn’t working
and that’s that. You don’t really remember them very well.
Not that you intentionally try to forget them out of embarrassment or
whatever, but there’s nothing to remember about them except they
didn’t work.
Q:
Tom Terrific was added at what point?
A: Tom Terrific came on very early, probably a year or so
into the program. One of our agreements with CBS was that they would supply
us with animation and it was animation that we would approve. We went
through everything that was available. They had just bought Terrytoons
and had the whole Terrytoons library so they felt very comfortable.
We went through that whole Terrytoons library and there was almost nothing
that we wanted to use. A lot of it was theatrical releases from the ‘30s
and all kinds of material that we felt inappropriate. The attitude toward
racial matters and ethnic matters. Believe it or not, in the ‘30s
cartoons had all of these things mixed in it. I can remember one. I always
cite it as an outstanding example of the kind of thing that we saw. Two
golfers were teeing off and one says "fore" and shouts "fore,"
and out of the bushes jumps a guy with a long beard, obviously a rabbi,
who says "3.98."
Q: Inappropriate.
A: Yeah. Completely inappropriate. So we said we can’t
find anything here. And they agreed with us. They looked at and they agreed
with us. They said that’s not what you should be using. Why don’t
you do your own? So we went to Terrytoons and they were the producers.
A terrific guy who was one of my writers, Gene Wood, was assigned to the
task and Gene and a bunch of the other people devised this character,
Tom Terrific, and other characters, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog and
the villains, Pittsburgh the Pirate and Isotope Feeney. Gene wrote the
storylines and actually lived at Terrytoons and supervised the production
of it. That’s how Tom Terrific came into being.
Q:
Why was it important to have animation as part of the show?
A: It was really a technical thing. It was live and it gave
us three and a half or four minutes of relief to regroup ourselves. Animation,
as we had envisioned it originally, would have been about a third of the
program material and as it actually turned out it was probably less than
a tenth of the program material. But it gave us the physical relief in
doing the show.
Q: At what point did you realize that Captain Kangaroo would
be a successful show?
A: I thought it was great from the first minute of the first
day. I was prejudiced. I thought we had a very different and new approach
to programming for young people and if we remained faithful to our principles
of catering to the intelligence and potentially good taste of the child
then we had an opportunity to do some very, very good programming. I was
probably one of the few that thought it would really make it because it
was nonconventional. It did break a lot of rules. It wasn’t the
commercial venture that most programming was then and it wasn’t
one-tenth the commercial venture that most children’s programming
is today.
It did break all those broadcast business rules and fortunately we were
in the right place at the right time. We had CBS and in those days CBS
was really quite a wonderful place. We had Mr. Paley. We had Frank Stanton.
They were the two top executives and they were very, very supportive.
No. 1, they were understanding of what we were attempting to do and they
took pride in it. So when the sales department complained they couldn’t
sell the show, Frank Stanton stepped in and told them just relax. We’re
going to stick with it. Of course, eventually it did become quite successful
commercially, in three or four years and they weren’t complaining
anymore, but it did have to prove itself. It had to break all those rules
first. You don’t get that anymore.
It’s a very, very high-pressure business now, financially, and if
you don’t get ratings numbers in the first three episodes there’s
a red mark put to the show and you’re gone.
Q:
So you think if you were launching it now, it wouldn’t last?
A: Oh, no. Not at all. It wouldn’t get on the air
today. We once, I forgot what year it was, somewhere in the ‘60s,
we did a "Carol Burnett Show" and Carol played the part of a
network executive and I played myself. I was coming in and making a presentation.
She was wonderful, of course, as she is.
She said, "Let me understand this: You’re a captain, but not
necessarily a captain of anything. And you have a bunny rabbit that actually
communicates with you and you have this moose who talks." She went
down the characters. "A grandfather clock that speaks poetry."
And she was getting herself more hysterical as she enumerated all the
elements of the show, which sound ludicrous when approached from that
direction, of course. But that’s probably pretty much the reception
we would get today from a network executive.
TOM TERRIFIC
The producer of those wonderful but simple cartoons was Gene Deitch
who took over as the producer and guiding genius of the Terrytoons studios,
helping to create and develop many films for the them besides the adventures
of Tom Terrific and his dog Mighty Manfred.
Tom Terrific's main villain was Crabby
Appleton, that mean old man who did everything that he could to ruin
the fun of many kids and to make poor Tom and Manfred's lives miserable.
Luckily for all of us our two heroes foiled this miserable. fink and
taught him the hard way that crime doesn't pay. The late Lionel Wilson
did the voices for "TT".
Tom Terrific didn't last too long on Captain
Kangaroo, the films were eventually replaced by Lariat Sam and later
by The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo, the Toothbrush Family, Ludwig,
and The Adventures of Simon In The Land of Chalk Drawings. Mr. Keeshan
did the narrations for the Simon cartoons, the original narrator for
the British version of the films was character actor Bernard Cribbins.