My Brother's Girl
- Episode aired Apr 16, 1958
- 30m
Mary Ellen Rogers schemes to get unsuspecting Wally to ask her to the school dance, using her friendship with Beaver to get closer to his big brother.Mary Ellen Rogers schemes to get unsuspecting Wally to ask her to the school dance, using her friendship with Beaver to get closer to his big brother.Mary Ellen Rogers schemes to get unsuspecting Wally to ask her to the school dance, using her friendship with Beaver to get closer to his big brother.
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaWhile Beaver plays in Mary Ellen Rogers' basement with her dad's electric train layout, there is a close-up as the trains go through a tunnel, where "JC & BM Railroad", is painted over the opening. This is a tip of the hat to the writers and creators of the program, Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher.
- GoofsMary Ellen tells Beaver that there's Ginger Ale in the "Ice Box". An Ice Box was the predecessor to the refrigerator. It used ice that was delivered daily by an Ice Man to keep food from spoiling.
- Quotes
Theodore Cleaver: [Beaver confides in his Dad that he took Wally over to Mary Ellen Rogers's house, and they basically told him to get lost] You know, Dad, now it's all over with, I feel kinda silly.
Ward Cleaver: Well Beaver, I'll tell you something about women. They have a wonderful capacity for love and understanding. Their tenderness and their sweetness are all-encompassing. But at times, they do have a knack of making us men look very, very silly.
June Cleaver: [unknown to Ward or The Beaver, June has been listening] I heard that, Ward Cleaver!
Theodore Cleaver: Oh, hi Mom.
Ward Cleaver: Yeah, hi Mom.
June Cleaver: [annoyed] Hi. Ward, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, putting ideas like that in The Beaver's mind.
Ward Cleaver: Oh yeah? Do you know what Mary Ellen Rogers did? She used The Beaver in order to get Wally to take her to the dance tonight. And don't look so shocked, because it's exactly what you predicted she'd do.
June Cleaver: I'm not shocked. As a woman, I'm very proud of Mary Ellen.
Ward Cleaver: You mean you think women *should* act this way?
June Cleaver: It's the way women *have* to act. Well, if we sat around and waited until you men got interested in us and got good and ready to settle down and have families, why this whole continent of America would be nothing but buffaloes, jack-rabbits and grizzly bears.
Wally is in eighth grade, probably a teen-ager, and is faced with pressure from his mother (and his female peers) to attend a school dance, organised by the mothers to encourage (coerce?) otherwise disinterested boys into paying attention to the girls, who, the dialogue tells us, are ready and waiting. Wally is so disinterested in the idea that he tells his parents, without batting an eye, that he is going to the dance, and will be going there with Eddie Haskell. Meanwhile, one of the more aggressive (I mean assertive!) girls - Mary Ellen Rogers - has hatched a plan to trick Wally into being her date by chatting up The Beaver at lunchtime and letting him come to her house to run her father's electric trains. Her plan is that sooner or later Wally will come along with The Beaver and she will have Wally on her home turf. Beaver is oblivious to the plot, but not to how his association with Mary Ellen would look to his school pals, let alone to Wally. He confides in his parents, but makes them promise not to tell Wally, "Because we're s'posed to hate girls."
The 'women's liberation' influences, beginning to enter the mainstream of society in the 1950s, are obvious throughout the story. For example, when Ward expresses his disapproval that Mary Ellen is trying to snag Wally by tricking The Beaver, June counters that as a woman she is proud of Mary Ellen's approach to Wally. Society's embrace of homophobia would come later, in just a few years making it improbable at best that a boy of Wally's age would 'hate girls', as he says in this episode, let alone announce that he's going to take his best (boy) friend to a school dance. For half a century since Wally and The Beaver, and Mary Ellen Rogers and Eddie Haskell and the rest, sitcoms have consistently reinforced the 'modern' boy-girl assumption that some form of dating needs to begin long before the teens, and situations in which boys see girls as 'yucky' just aren't as funny as they used to be.
As for this episode, does Wally end up going with Mary Ellen to the dance, or does he give the corsage to Eddie Haskell instead? No spoilers here. The whole series is on DVD for viewers to see for themselves. Not all episodes, however, are as charming and nostalgic as this one.
- hawked-off
- Jan 10, 2021
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- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- Runtime30 minutes
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- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1