Boy, did the Beaver (Jerry Matthers, below) get in trouble when he wore one of the monster sweatshirts above to school in a 1962 episode of “Leave It To Beaver.” As the decade ensued, the Monster Craze “mainstreamed” monsters. © NBC Universal Inc. REMEMBER THOSE TORCH-WIELDING villagers in “Frankenstein”? That’s how adults felt about monsters in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Adults, by and large, hated monsters. At best, they feared monsters would give their children nightmares. At worst, they regarded monsters as false idols that glorified the occult. The Monster Craze would one day achieve the unthinkable; it would “mainstream” monsters, make them family-friendly. But before that accidental revolution took place, monsters were frowned upon by parents, educators and clergy — not to mention, the politicians who sought their vote. There’s an episode of “Leave It To Beaver” that encapsulates adult attitudes toward monsters at the time. In “Monster Sweatshirts” (Season 4, Episode 35), which aired June 2, 1962, Beaver (Jerry Mathers) and three of his buddies purchase — you guessed it — monster sweatshirts. The shirts cost $3.75 each at Tilden’s Sporting Goods in downtown Mayfield. The monsters on the shirts are generic; Beaver buys the one with three eyes. While the boys wear the shirts on a bustling street, a woman shoots them a look of disgust. This is only the beginning.
In an early, pre-adolescent act of rebellion, the boys make a pact to wear the shirts to school the following day. Alas, when the big day comes, only Beaver honors the agreement. He is promptly sent to the principal’s office, and later, his dad grounds him for the weekend. (You could say Beaver’s dad, Ward Cleaver, didn’t have a leg to stand on. The actor who played him — Hugh Beaumont — was a star of “The Mole People.”) BUT PRIOR TO THE MONSTER CRAZE igniting in 1957, monsters — and adult discomfort with them — had been in a state of slumber. For the most part, there hadn’t been movies about conventional Gothic monsters for a long while .. . unless they were meeting Abbott and Costello. (The final film to feature classic Universal monsters Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man was, in fact, 1948’s “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”) Thereafter, the monsters you saw onscreen usually fell into two categories: aliens from outer space or irradiated giant bugs that attacked entire cities. No less a body than the United States military fought them off.
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