Barbara Billingsley

Apparently she didn’t understand a word of what she was saying but went for it anyway, and Gods love her for it. Jerry Mathers felt that she was a gifted comedienne and much more talented than the show ever gave her a chance to be. And he would in fact cite Airplane! We all know it’s one of the things that shows off her skills, and if you don’t know that, what are you doing here? You could be watching Airplane! instead. In fact, we all could. What are we doing? It’s available on like six streaming services; go watch Airplane! Magpies watch party?

Okay, yeah, she had a lot more career than that. Obviously we have to talk about Leave It to Beaver. She felt the character was a lot more than other people did. She thought June Cleaver was the heart of the show. She did 235 episodes of it. Plus the 1983 made-for-TV movie Still the Beaver. Then 101 episodes of the Still the Beaver TV show. An episode of the strange ‘90s Nick at Nite experiment Hi, Honey, I’m Home. An episode of the mostly forgotten TV show Baby Boom.An episode of Amazing Stories. An episode of Elvira’s Movie Macabre, featuring The Human Duplicators. And, for some reason, what is surely a deeply bizarre episode of The Love Boat.

Which is good, because the residuals for the original show were crap, so at least she could get residuals out of the rest of it. Apparently you at the time only got paid the first half-dozen or so times the episode aired, so the fact that Boomers and Gen-Xers had it airing on at least one channel all the time as we grew up meant nothing for her finances. Man, I’d ride the June Cleaver train as far as it would go, too, and if they wanted me on an episode of The Love Boat, well, they’re expecting me.

And, yeah, a lot of the rest of her career was based on the June Cleaver mold. Not just playing Aunt Martha in the unnecessary ‘90s movie version. The announcer in the Frankie and Annette nostalgia flick Back to the Beach. Honestly any time I see her in things from post-Beaver, I assume it’s drawing on the nostalgia. Which is kind of a shame, because she did have a long, if not entirely distinguished, career before then, going back to “blonde girl with hives” in “So You Think You’re Allergic” from 1945. On the other hand, it’s certainly why she was cast in Airplane! So there’s that, at least.

However, much as Gen-X saw her as June Cleaver, we also saw her as Nanny. Was she cast in the role because she was June Cleaver? Yeah, probably. It feels in keeping with the show. For all we know, Nanny was wearing pearls the whole time, and we didn’t know because all we saw was a pair of striped socks. It’s interesting, though; we as kids watched 107 episodes of Nanny letting the Muppet Babies go on adventures, albeit imaginary ones for the most part. She was in theory being paid to supervise them and spent very little time in the room. We really were a neglected generation, weren’t we?