![]() ![]() We day-care kids slumped against one another, 20 or 30 of us, on an enormous carpet remnant - our hair still bed-headed, our coats still on - in front of a black-and-white television (although the show went color in 1969), watching "Captain Kangaroo." Mr. (CBS mailed out Picture Pages to millions of children in the 1970s.) Green Jeans (played by Hugh "Lumpy" Brannum, who died in 1987) was still with him, but the "Tom Terrific" cartoons enjoyed by the generation before me had by then disappeared.Ĭaptain Kangaroo's boat was no longer a boat but a kind of studio-playroom, "the Captain's Place." Parts of the show were still devoted to animated shorts - the British export "Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings," later spoofed by "Saturday Night Live" comedian Mike Meyers - or segments by Bill Cosby, imploring us to get out our Picture Pages and do busy work with him. ![]() By then, "Captain Kangaroo" had been on almost two decades Mr. ![]() My own memories of the Captain center around preschool years in the early 1970s, when on weekday mornings I was delivered to a day-care center in a Presbyterian church building. Keeshan understood that dual-career families of the 1970s and '80s relied on the Captain for years to becalm the manic quality of weekday mornings in the American household, letting the youngest ones sit, already bundled, in a sleepy Cheerio glaze in front of "Captain Kangaroo" while everyone else started the station wagon, put on makeup, barked at one another and otherwise frantically tried to get the day in gear. A sacrilegious reinvention, in 1997, with a new guy playing the Captain, was a bomb.) (His show was canceled in 1984, and survived another six seasons on PBS in a different format. Though he allowed that the world had changed considerably since "Captain Kangaroo" first appeared on CBS in 1955, and parents were busy and kids were bored. In appearances before early-childhood educators, psychologists and parents' groups, or as a motivational-speaker-for-hire, or with the Coalition for America's Children advocacy group he helped start, Keeshan always cautioned against letting television baby-sit your kids. Like his friend Mister Rogers, who died nearly a year ago, Keeshan lived long enough to be regarded with such sentiment and respect that grown-ups turned to him for authoritative advice and the occasional scold when we seemed to go astray with our own kids. (Except when Ping-Pong balls fell from the ceiling. In a world designed to be noisy, he built a show around calm. Captain Kangaroo, in his Carnaby-street red blazer with white trim, his bowl-cut bangs (a hairpiece) and those enormous walrus sideburns (also false) snaking around his cheeks, was just a really good man. It allowed men (and a few women) like Captain Kangaroo to simply exude an almost suspicious amount of niceness. Having no edge is an admirable quality, but one that almost never flies today. Keeshan had many talents, and he had no edge. Captain Kangaroo, who was in real life Bob Keeshan, died yesterday at age 76 after a long illness, according to family members. ![]() These were television's uncles, misters, misses, cap'ns and klowns. The passing of Captain Kangaroo is another reminder that we have lost too many of those career performers who, in the early age of television and out of the apparent kindness of their hearts (and contracts), came across the airwaves only to teach, entertain and be silly - without any trace of irony or larger entrepreneurial scheme. ![]()
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