Dwayne Hickman, the actor who played the Dobie Gillis on television in the early 1960s, is 80 years ago today. A former actor and television executive at CBS, Hickman is known primarily for teenager roles on television sitcoms. He found fame on CBSs “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” Born in Los Angeles, California, Hickman is the younger brother of child actor Darryl Hickman. While working on Bob Cummings television show in 1958, Hickman was cast in the lead of Dobie Gillis, which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963. Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus played his opposite-minded parents. Although at the shows debut the Dobie character was a teenager in high school, Hickman was then twenty-five years old. After playing Dobie for four years (with fellow former Loyola student Bob Denver as his sidekick, Maynard G. Krebs), Hickman found himself stereotyped as a youngster when he was too old for such roles. Hickman found his future in entertainment behind the scenes, being involved in production roles. From 1977 to 1988, Hickman served as a programming executive at CBS, a role which he spoofed in several on-camera roles. He worked as a director on various television series, including Designing Women and Head of the Class. He reprised his role of Dobie in two television reunion broadcasts, the one-shot pilot Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis (1977) and the TV movie Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis (1988). His autobiography is entitled Forever Dobie. The show broke ground in depicting elements of counterculture, particularly the Beat Generation (albeit primarily embodied in the stereotypical form of the beatnik), not seen in earlier series. Dobie’s partner-in-crime was televisions first beatnik, Krebs, who became the series breakout character. An enthusiastic fan of jazz music (with a strong distaste for the music of Lawrence Welk), Maynard Krebs plays the bongos, collects tinfoil and petrified frogs, and steers clear of romance, authority figures and work (yelping Work?! every time he hears the word). Always speaking with the vernacular and slang of the beatniks and jazz musicians he admired, Maynard punctuates his sentences with the word like and has a tendency towards malapropisms. Series star Dwayne Hickman would later say that Dobie represented “the end of innocence of the 1950s before the oncoming 1960s revolution.” Here, Hickman and Denver overhear Tuesday Weld as she talks to Warren Beatty, who appeared on the show.
Posted on: Sun, 18 May 2014 05:01:01 +0000
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