Customer Reviews

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis 18 Volume Set

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I barely remember these, as a seven year old - but I am delighted to state that they have held up far better than expected. For writing that is fifty years old, they seem as if they were produced yesterday. Tuesday Weld is remarkable - funny, nuanced, peppery, intelligent and stunning. The entire cast is perfection. To my knowledge, this is one of the first TV shows where characters addressed the camera in Shakespearean asides or soliloquies. Very effective and very fresh. The pacing is fast, the jokes dead on and droll and of course Bob Denver, as the beatnick Maynard, is the looney but eerily, culturally presaging Maynard. The prints are not restored, but they are completely watchable and look exactly like I recall them on our black and white TV. Run out and find these - and you will laugh out loud, they way my world-weary twelve year old nephews did. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

"The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" remains one of my all-time favorite TV series (along with "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and The Twilight Zone"), so I was delighted to find the entire series on one set. Unfortunately, these prints are no better than my old Beta and VHS copies recorded from the old Christian Broadcasting Network and TV Land. In fact, that's exactly where many of these recordings come from -- dubbed from cable TV broadcasts, complete with network logos on the screen. The syndicated versions have several minutes cut to make way for extra commercials, so you're not getting complete episodes in many cases. Despite the less than stellar quality of the prints, this series is still one of the all-time greats in terms of writing and performance, so until Fox (or whichever company now holds the rights) gets around to an official release, this bootleg set is as good as you're likely to find. The copyright on each of these episodes was renewed, by the way, so the films are not in the public domain, which makes it all the more surprising that none are available legitimately.

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THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS: ELEVEN CAMPUS STORIES, about a likeable Minnesota teen who tries and tries but tends to fail humorously with his studies and with the town's pretty girls, was written by humorist Max Shulman and first published in 1951. Dobie's travails helped re-introduce youthful college humor into the U.S. mainstream after the dislocations of WWII and the G.I. bill. The book caught on with the reading public and in 1953 was re-published, and that same year MGM worked the Dobie theme under a slightly different title, THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS. Set at a stuffy and rather grim Midwestern liberal-arts college (whose motto was "WORK. WORK. WORK. STUDY. STUDY. STUDY. LEARN. LEARN. LEARN"), the film was not tremendously successful; though packed with some of the last "new faces" processed through Metro's star system (Bob Fosse, Debbie Reynolds, Bobby Van), and Hans Conreid as a stuffy English professor, the golden hue of the classic early-Fifties MGM musicals didn't emerge, in part because the flick was a cheapie, filmed in black and white to save money. Bob Fosse later joked that it was the first time Metro had made a black-and-white musical since 1938, and he wasn't far wrong.

But the Dobie legend, like the irrepressible teen character himself, could not be quashed. In 1959 Shulman adapted some of his short-story source material with producer Martin Manulius; the results were offered to CBS-TV as a pilot; the network bought the show and had Twentieth-Century Fox film it; whereupon THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS dug in and ran for four full seasons (1959-1963), a respectable run at the time, all of it on Mr. Paley's network. Shulman himself dominated the screenwriting process for most of the show's first three years; it is from him that we have the now-iconic opening scenes of Dobie pondering his postadolescent pensees beneath a replica of Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker." Shulman picked the name "Thalia Menninger" from among a number of even clunkier-sounding names in his original Dobie stories ("Pansy," "Chlotilde," et al.), as the high-maintenance busty blonde Dobie follows like a lovestruck puppy who will do (almost) anything to win Thalia's (temporary) affection. Thus was Tuesday Weld groomed for stardom, probably because her spunky character and solid acting skills showed through, despite a script that called for the machinations of a juvenile gold-digger who will resort to (almost) anything to get rich, even at one point claiming the family was impoverished because of multiple chronic illnesses. We, the audience, knew Thalia was destined to hook up with lazy aristocrat Milton Armitage (Warren Beatty) eventually, and in a kind of life move imitating sitcom art, Weld and Beatty headed out of the high-school classroom and into movie stardom. From Shulman's imagination also came Dobie's father, a hotheaded grocer named Herbert, chosen among several occupations in the eleven short stories, which were under no particular obligation to preserve unity of character. In those stories, Dobie appears variously as a college student with majors in English, Journalism, Biology or art, also a high-school senior, a law-school student, and a university pre-med candidate who blows up the chem lab's only carboy(a kind of big, scary bottle, at that time usually glass, that holds corrosive liquids and/or fermenting alcohol), so Dobie must scramble to make amends. The sitcom straightened out the chronology and tracked Dobie from high school into junior college. Even at the time THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS began production, Dwayne Hickman had turned 25, and by the time he had tracked through the second half of high school into the first half of college at end of production, he was 29 yet still convincingly portrayed the chipper and self-assured late-adolescent Shulman created.

Reasonably well-informed monochrome mavens, whether they first glommed onto Dobie in prime-time, Nick and Nite in the Eighties or late-nite runs today on MeTV, have learned or remember Dwayne Hickman as Dobie, Frank Faylen as his irascible grocer father, and a pre-Gilligan Bob Denver as beatnik buddy "Maynard G. Krebs." The network knew it was on to something in Dobie's potent clashes with sex, the Establishment, plutocracy and nonconformity; after Weld and Beatty left the show in came Sheila James (Kuehl) as Zelda Gilroy, who unlike the limited-acceptance Thalia was wholeheartedly in love with Dobie; yet Dobie, for years and years, maintained he was not interested in her. Steve Franken was brought in as Chatsworth Osborne, Jr., who was backstoried as Milton Armitage's cousin, and who brought his own, William F. Buckley-type snide drawl to the role of poor little rich boy, constantly assuming he is best because he has the most money.

But consider Maynard. It is hard to conceive today of one character who raised so many eyebrows with a goatee, a hole-ridden sweatshirt, a devotion to jazz (usually the best free-form stuff of the turn-of-the-Sixties), and whose locutions bridged the gap from Jive Kid to pre-Hippie ("Like wow, man." "This track is the grooviest.") He and Dobie were close friends, save for the times Maynard's almost dogmatic nonconformity and refusal to even try to learn advanced subjects put off Dobie, his last social redoubt. Maynard blamed his scholastic failures on the enlightenment of Zen Buddhism, when lack of focus and perhaps paucity of grey matter are more likely explanations. Not to belabor the subject, but Maynard was Dobie's social conscience at a time when the mainstream saved their scorn for beats like him; Dobie, bless him, saw the good in Maynard despite his father's continuing antipathy toward the jive-spouting junior hipster who was a living example of "underachiever" even before that term entered common parlance. Gillis, Senior, correctly grasped that Maynard's lotus-eating values were, however unintentionally, a direct rebuke to his own Depression-reared, World War Two-toughened mandates and the rigidity all that entailed. So DOBIE had a handle on the generation gap even before the term was coined about four years later. In one gaggle of episodes between high school and junior college, the boys were even inducted into the Army together (the draft at that time being almost inescapable for real young American men); miraculously, though Maynard was soon booted out of the service, he emerged with goatee intact. In the intervening years, something of an urban legend has arisen that the actors themselves, Bob Denver and Dwayne Hickman, met each other on set; the truth is, they were both undergraduates at local Loyola-Marymount in Southern California and knew each other before the full-time acting bit struck.

Another of the joys of this singular series is the wealth of character actors the show tossed up with such apparent nonchalance, anything from bit to recurring roles to series regulars (Florida Friebus as Dobie's mother, the actress who later became the little-old-lady-who-knits in group therapy on THE BOB NEWHART SHOW). Actors ranged in age and experience from movie and commercial-radio vets to coming TV regulars. William Schallert, before he became Patty Duke's TV Brooklyn father, played a testy college prof perpetually set on edge by Dobie's blithe ignorance and Maynard's ostensibly Zen-based lack of ambition. Many ongoing and occasional smaller roles were filled by the likes of Joyce Van Patten, Darryl Hickman (Dwayne's older brother, who played, winkingly, brother Davey Gillis); Michael J. Pollard as Maynard's cousin Jerome Krebs, Raymond ("Milburn Drysdale") Bailey as Dobie's college Dean; Clifton Sundberg as the Armitage family butler, and Dabbs Greer as Zelda's father. Any imagined "Versatility in Light Broadcast Television" award surely would have gone to veteran Doris Packer, who played Beaver's elementary-school principal Cornelia Rayburn on "Leave It To Beaver," at the same time she was shuttling from the Universal lot over to Fox to play Milton Armitage's mother (Clarice Armitage), later Chatsworth Osborne, Jr.'s mother (Clarice Osborne)... each other's sister-in-law in one individual, if taken literally. Doris Packer's comedic range was formidable, and she seemed to have exploited late middle-age to the hilt in defining her characters: no-nonsense but kid-friendly principal Rayburn, then the local society matron (or is it matrons?) on DOBIE: crusty, haughty, the very stereotype of that era's women's club battle-axe, yet who has reserves of empathy and insight that are not easily tapped. Similarly, Dobie's father Herbert (Frank Faylen) is a terror to contemplate as the tyrant of his mom-and-pop grocery store, and many episodes contain at least one instance of Herbert threatening to "kill that boy." Homicidal he wasn't, but stolid in a way that makes Lou Grant look like Hawkeye Pierce.

Despite what today would be considered a relatively brief run for a commercial-network series, all of it filmed in black-and-white, there is much to treasure about DOBIE along with the sharply defined characters and well-chosen talent to portray them. That was an interesting time, TV-wise, perhaps most so at CBS, "The Tiffany of Networks": DOBIE helped fill the sitcom gap between the radio-personality-based TV of the earlier Fifties (LOVE THAT BOB, OUR MISS BROOKS) and the broadcast ruralism that was kicking at the barn door by the time the show went off the air in 1963 (PETTICOAT JUNCTION, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, later GREEN ACRES and early HEE HAW). During the time of DOBIE's run, those looking for serious drama could tune in THE TWILIGHT ZONE, also on CBS, which articulately, almost offhandedly, dealt with topics such as racism, social ostracism, and global nuclear holocaust. By way of contrast, another CBS sitcom that also ran 1959-1963, like DOBIE, was DENNIS THE MENACE, in which William Paley's lack of ageist bias shows through much more acutely than it had with Dwayne Hickman: Jay North, heading toward adolescence, played the perpetual kindergartner Dennis Mitchell. One TV critic of the time whose name I would mention if I remembered it said that the problem with DENNIS THE MENACE was that the social and physical gaucheries (I'm paraphrasing) committed by a child of five or six or seven are understandable, even amusing, but played out by a much older child who should know better, they're a pain in the neck. Yet at the time, most TV critics would have considered DENNIS the same side of the broadcast coin as DOBIE: sunny, slice-of-life CBS Americana with a strong central character and a very capable cast. We see now that some of DOBIE's wrinkles -- the double dose of Doris Packer, Dobie's habit of "breaking the fourth wall" beneath the Rodin to talk to the audience directly at the start of the show, the sometimes unfathomable best friend one sticks with through thick and thin -- echo THE GEORGE BURNS SHOW or anticipate SEINFELD, in a very satisfying way.

So you may be wondering whether you should plunk down three figures just to sample all the DVD's that comprise THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS. I share the frustration of those who, like me, were at the fuzzy end of the marketing lollipop when this series with its many, many episodes came out on DVD three years ago: not predominant enough as a series to sell at a handsome but not extortionate markup, like FRIENDS, yet not quaint enough to be available at competitive prices on discs issued by almost anyone: THE GEORGE BURNS SHOW. As a reviewer, I have no intention of discouraging sales, but for the person who hasn't yet caught Dobie during its prime-time run, on TV LAND-sponsored networks in the Eighties, or (currently) late at night on MeTV, there is hope -- Dobie shows no signs of going away. You might also consider getting hold of a used version of the book THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS: ELEVEN CAMPUS STORIES from 1951, 1953 or the Bantam paperback reissue from the early Sixties; used copies of these books take a while to locate but are not necessarily all that expensive. Another possibility is to surf online for a free copy of what is today probably the book's best-known chapter, "Love is a Fallacy," which played as an early episode of DOBIE with the roles of mentor and pupil gender-reversed. I have faith in THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS: as much as a period piece it may have been, and despite the last third of the series' drift toward mere sitcom-ism, the enduring values show through: a good-hearted but average young man can succeed as long as he doesn't violate principles he knows are wrong; cutting satire and social hodgepodge in those houses of cracked mirrors we call American high schools; the genuine affection of one buddy for another. There have also been two made-for-TV Dobie movies in the intervening almost 50 years. But for the TV show that started it, here's a fictional Maynardesque plug: "It's like, cool, a forever classic."

PS -- Trivia Note: Why did Dobie's hair look like a post-disco fashion statement the first year of the show? Because CBS execs didn't want to remind the viewing public that he had already played a teenager on a prior sitcom. Actually, Hickman's hair was tinted more of a strawberry blond, but in studio black-and-white, close cropped, he looks like a champagne blond. When the show went into its second year of production, that stricture was let go, and for the reamaining three years we see Hickman's own naturally brown hair, in beautiful black and white of course.

"Speedy Delivery...exactly what was describe...it's a gift for my uncle who misses the way TV used to be...he's going to LOVE IT!!!"

How great to see Dobie and Maynard on DVD. I've been waiting for a volume set like this for years.
Like Groovy. They don't make tv shows like these anymore.

I have not yet watched all of them, but those I have gave me the impression that this is a collection of episodes that didn't make the original cut for airing, because I watched Dobie when it was aired and don't remember any of these; and they aren't as funny as I remember the series.

Good video transfer, though.

this series was very special in the 50s
as it is today
i feel anybody from my age group will love the nostelgia
happy viewing

The high moral values that the first TV reared generation learned, by the early sixties, started to get some serious writer support in this often socially satirical popular sit-com. Contrast the sexual and so-called work ethic values in Dobie Gillis as opposed to the ones written about in series, of the same years, like "Leave It To Beaver." A friend of mine's mother's friend helped write some the the last of the Bever episodes, and she was having trouble in the 60s still portraying the by then old fashioned and Puritan-like sexual mores the show had always portrayed. Though the writers of both series still got in some pretty caustic comments about the sordid ways of the world, the transfer of the an open attitude toward sexuality had not yet gone from Playboy Magazine to general public participation in a general US popular "sexual revolution" on the part of the WWII baby boom generation.

"Love That Bob" had co-starred Dwane Hickman as Comming's nephew, and that show made a playboy-like lifestyle seem benign. The self-hatred of the religious concept of "original sin," the means by which God enables people to be born into this world, is still one of the means by which, still, religions and politicians brainwash the young and mostly poor to fight wars enriching even the already wealthy, lead by the old, dynastic families, corporations and assorted Manmmon and Mars worshippers.

Even though Maynord G. Krebs was an attempt to co-opt and ridicule an anti-war and anti-alienated work-yourself-to-death capitalistic life, portraying the already disappearing beatnik culture, even jazz, an art form generally hated by fascist reactionaries like J. Edgar Hover, as stupid and lazy goof-offs, the mid sixties Hippies founded a lifestyle that reminded me of the Hebrews as portrayed in "The Ten Commandments." They paired up fast, were extreamly faithful to partners, and large numbers joined the "back to the land movement," many eventually becoming like the Johnny Carson produced movie homeowners in "The Big Chill."

In the late 1980s, during the Reagan fascist spell, the "Captan" from the "Gilligan's Island" series came to our town to help in a charity event, and David Faustino was there too. I walked up to the captan, even more rotund than when he was on the island, and said "Hey now sir, how'd you like working with Maynard G. Krebs, and he smiled very broadly, shook my hand regularly Roman fashion, indicating we had no sword in our right hands, and then immediatly switch me into the thumb embraced clasping handshake so popular in the 1960s amon the hip young people then.

No words needed, just two souls meeting at a mind oasis, in the midst of the myopic intellectual, moral desert created by the right-wing Milton Friedman "new economics," started in the mid-sixtiers falacy, that there's no difference between economic wants and needs, everything is just a want.

"Repeal the sixties," as President Reagan said he'd do, has been largely done And the Bush-Clinton-BushII presidencies have repealed the 1930s, except to adopt many of the same measures enacted by Nazi Germany in the early 30s.