Men (and boys) have been getting their comeuppance ever since radical feminism took root in the 70’s. No more Father Knows Best, now it’s all Dumb and Dumber. Society is clamping down on toxic masculinity, don’tcha know.
@aligncare I'm assuming you referenced
Father Knows Best the television show. If you'd ever heard the radio original that preceded its television incarnation, you might not make the reference---in the radio
Father Knows Best, Jim Anderson was anything
but the calm, reasoning, affectionate but firm head of the household. In fact, in his original radio incarnation Jim Anderson was a classic putz who thought he ruled with an iron fist, reeked of sarcasm, and usually got himself caught with his pants down when one of his three kids began a particular infatuation that ended in disaster. (
Oh, nooooooooooo! was Father's usual show-closing, exposing-himself-as-clueless line as disaster struck.) About the only difference between the original Father and, say, Chester Riley, was that even as a putz Jim Anderson had a refinement about him. (Riley, of course, had a big heart and a brain that was his worst enemy, on radio and television alike; he was so hamfisted and oblivious to the disaster his buttinski-ism caused you got the impression that his wife was about two seconds away from braining him with an iron skillet or sticking his fool head into the Mixmaster.)
Robert Young originated the role on radio and was the only one of the radio cast to move with the show to television. The radio show (which ran six years) invariably opened with a commercial in which the youngest daughter would ask about the product, Mom would reply and advise daughter about her father's approval of the product, ending with, " . . . and your father knows best!"---in a more than slightly sarcastic tone. Only on television did he become the type we remember---even though he looked more as though the show should have been called
Grandfather Knows Best; even now I'm astonished to remember how many television (and, since I became an old-time radio lover some years ago, radio) parents sounded and looked old enough to be their kids' grandparents. (The aforesaid Riley---played by William Bendix---looked more like his kids' grandfather than their father, too, but then when Bendix died in 1964 one wag suggested he'd been born at age 58, his age at his death.)
Why didn't the rest of the radio version's cast move to television with it? It was Robert Young's idea: he came to loathe the original premise because it was laughs at the expense of relationships and---this is something to bear in mind when people remember
Father Knows Best on television as being a little too fictional a portrait of family life---at least as unrealistic a family portrait as the saccharine kind. He thought an entirely new cast plus himself would make the show a little more like what its head writer Paul West came to prefer, and West was in position to know: West is usually remembered as being a real-life television version of Jim Anderson, who had four kids to Anderson's three but was remembered as being
exactly as gently tolerant but firm as the television character for whom he wrote.
(The classic example of Jim Anderson's tolerance, I remember well, was son Bud's nervousness about a confrontation with a cop, and when Dad said when he was a kid one of his best friends was the town sheriff, Bud shot back, "Really? Wild Bill Hickock?" To which Dad wouldn't blow his top but merely rejoin, "Just
how old do you think I am?" You couldn't get away with a wisecrack like that in my house when I was growing up. [I was born the year after
Father Knows Best moved to television.] I had parents with million dollar hearts but absolutely
no patience or sense of humour when it came to children just being children. In my house you got beaten up worse for mere human mistakes---or, in my case, too, for not knowing how to handle yourself in a fistfight if someone got you into one, thanks to a father who thought it was something you were born knowing rather than something you needed to be
taught, and a mother who didn't have the guts to stand up to and against that kind of abuse---than you did for
genuine misbehaviour or disobedience. I suppose you could say I've had a sad enough last laugh: I've out-lived my
entire childhood household, both of my parents [my father died at 39; my mother, at 61]
and my too-wild-oat younger brother [38, shot to death].)
