MY THREE SONS: [A]fter the sixth season of My Three Sons, departed eldest son Mike was never again mentioned by name.
I was watching My Three Sons around the same time I was watching The Beverly Hillbillies and Leave It to Beaver (all in reruns), and I lived in one of those markets which showed only the "post-Mike" episodes. (I think the first one in the package showed him and his bride driving away from Bryant Park in the opening minutes.) I became quite a fan of the show as the family movied to "California", Robbie got married, he and Katie had triplets, chip got married, and even Steve got remarried. Years later, when I was in college, I got the opportunity to watch the "Mike & Bub" episodes (which I knew about but had never seen). I remember in one of the later "California" episodes (and please don't ask me to recall which one specifically), Steve introduced himself to... someone (I don't remember), and he said that he had three sons. (I remember that specifically because it coused me to raise an eyebrow.) Perhaps Mike lives next door to Chuck Cunningham.
I watched My Three Sons from the beginning, but naturally, I didn't see every episode. The Good Mrs. Benson is just young enough to have missed the Bub and Mike years. (Like so many, she'd assumed that the sons had always been Robbie and Chip and Ernie, and knew nothing about Bub.) One of the Roku channels runs My Three Sons, and we caught it from the first episode. To my delight, the GMB loved the show, so we binge-watched all 380 episodes.
That gave me a chance to collect all of the in-story details about the Douglases. While continuity mistakes popped up now and then, largely, the time frames were consistent, and I was able to put together a family tree, including dates of birth for Steve, Bub,. and the boys; the year Steve married Louise; and so forth.
With regard to Bub and Mike, the show maintained a queer sort of continuity. In Bub's case, after William Frawley departed the show midway through the fifth season ("A Woman's Work", first aired 07 January 1965) and William Demarest joined as Uncle Charley in the next episode, Bub was referenced quite a bit throughout the remainder of that season. "The Glass Sneaker", 23 April 1965, would be the last time Bub was mentioned in any way, when Chip says that both his grandfather and his Uncle Charley used to be in show business.
Mike got a little better treatment. In the sixth season, the series switched networks, from ABC to CBS, and was broadcast in colour. As you mentioned, Jeff, the first episode of that season---"The First Marriage", 16 September 1965---was Tim Considine's last hurrah as eldest son Mike. The opening scene shows the Douglas family and friends filing out of the church after Mike and Sally's wedding. Mike has a private moment with Steve in which he and his father express touching sentiments. Then Mike and Sally climb into their car and drive out of the show. The next two episodes cover Steve's adoption of Ernie, so the show could maintain its title.
Mike gets quite a few mentions throughout the sixth season. (One of the more sentimental times occurs when Steve talks to newly adopted son Ernie about his joining the family, in "There's a What in the Attic?", 21 October 1965.) "Marriage and Stuff", 23 December 1965, is practically a time capsule, as Mike and Sally, and the fact that Ernie was adopted get mentioned frequently. Steve even has a brief telephone conversation with Mike---though we hear only Steve's side of it. In my earlier post, I was wrong about the last time Mike was referenced by name on the show. (I had the episode right, but was mistaken when it aired.) In the second episode of the seventh season---"Fly Away Home", 22 September 1966---Steve takes the sons back to his boyhood hometown. When Steve runs into his former girl friend, they catch each other up on their lives, and Steve states that Mike is married and lives "back east".
It was when the Douglases moved to Los Angeles at the beginning of the eighth season that the attitude of the show got strange. Bub had already been long forgotten, and now it was like Mike never existed. A significant sequence in that season-opener has Steve reminiscing about moments with his sons in Bryant Park (clips from the previous seasons), and while even Ernie gets a special memory, Mike is omitted.
Other occasions, when it would be practically obligatory to reference Mike, such as Robbie and Katie's wedding, or Steve and Barbara's wedding, there isn't a hint to Steve Douglas' oldest son. Not even when Robbie takes Katie on a visit to Bryant Park in the tenth-season episode "You Can't Go Home", 07 February 1970.
It's easy to assume that Mike was put on the bus to Mandyville, but as I said, the show got weird about it. Direct mentions of Mike were apparently verboten---but there were two occasions when the show obliquely confirmed that there was another, oldest, son. One I mentioned earlier, about Steve recalling how the births of his first two sons went fine, "but there was a problem with Chip." The other odd reference also occured in the ninth season. I can't recall the specific episode, but it was during the arc that followed Katie's pregnancy. Steve has a heart-to-heart with Robbie about what it's like to be the father of newborns, and he begins his talk with "When your mother was having the first of you boys . . . "
That's awkward phraseology. Steve was clearly referring to Mike---if Robbie had been "the first of you boys", Steve simply would've said, "When your mother was having you . . . " Yet, it's a strange way to refer to Robbie's older brother, too. In natural dialogue, Steve would've said, "When your mother was having MIke . . . "
So, for some peculiar reason, the show was trying to have it both ways: there was no older son, yet there was.
Of these shows, I watched them all when first broadcast.
Pretty sure I only saw a few episodes of Petticoat Junction. I saw quite a few of The Beverly Hillbillies. I saw a lot of My Three Sons when William Frawley and Tim Considine were on, but only a few of the Uncle Charley episodes (It's amazing how many old movies William Demerest was in). Prior to that I knew Tim Considine from the Spin and Marty episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club. I wasn’t ten yet. Considine played Spin. It was a stronger part, so I remembered him. It was on for three seasons, the second and third titled “Further Adventures of….” and “The New Adventures of….” The premise was:
Marty Markham, a rich orphan attends summer camp at a dude ranch where he becomes best friends with Spin Evans.
So basically, young boys riding horses and such.
JD DeLuzio > Richard WillisNovember 29, 2025 at 8:10am
Beverly Hillbillies was the one I knew. People occasionally watched it at my place and my maternal grandmother was a fan, particularly of Granny. I saw a few episodes of My Three Sons and I recall one of my sisters saying there had been another son, back when. I caught up a bit on a cross-section of episodes several years ago. My older sisters had watched Petticoat Junction, but they'd dropped it by the time I was aware of it and so, again, I had only a loose connection to the show. I only know a few reruns that I caught at some point, including the one with Granny. Green Acres was an occasional watch at my house. I was still quite young when the "rural purge" occured, so these shows are mostly faint memories (My Three Sons wasn't rural, I know). For some reason, the episode, "Whatever Happened to Baby Chip?" stuck in my head. I was not really too surprised, when I caught a cross-section of eps, to learn that it reused the basic premise of "The Coffee House Set," but with different poorly-understood pop trends. That earlier episode, however, did introduce me to the "dirty cords" trend of the 1930s, which Steven admits he had followed in his youth. Even people who study history sometimes miss things.
Curiously, I recently noticed that Adventures in Rainbow Country is available on streaming. It's a Canadian show that received one season in 1970-71. I do recall us watching that regularly. It's a rural show, and one of the few series expressly set in northern Ontario, where I grew up. For some reason it featured Lois "Moneypenny" Maxwell as the widowed mother. The focus, as I recall it, was on her two kids (the daughter was played by Susan Olsen, who was all over Canadian kids TV in the 60s/early 70s. The son was played by Stephen Cottier; it seems to be his only acting credit) and their Anishinaabe best friend, Pete, who had wild rural adventures together. Pete was played by Buckley Petawabano, who became a cinematographer. In 1975, he appeared in the obscure, FNMI-made Canadian film Cold Journey which, incredibly, dramatized some of the darker aspects of the residential school system a couple of decades before the mainstream public started discussing them.
It's the northern part of the Great Lakes Basin, so its "rural" is a tad removed from Hooterville. I may have to watch a few episodes, and I definitely want to see if I can find Cold Journey.
I watched a lot of The Beverly Hillbillies, a fair amount of Green Acres and little or none of Petticoat Junction, although I rememver the show existing.
I remember watching My Three Sons, but knew nothing of Bub until years later.
As I may have mentioned before, we didn't get color TV until the 1980's - the Old Man was convinced for a long time that they emitted dangerous radiation - so when I was a kid I was enitrely unaware of the "shows transitioning from b/w to color" phenomenon.
We are currently in the middle of season three of both TheBeverly Hillbillies and Leave it to Beaver. Because I have already watched seasons 5-11 of TheBeverly Hillbillies, I will run out of "Hillbillies" before I run out of "Beavers" (which ran for six seasons). I will have more to say about both of those shows after each show's respective fourth season. I have already decided to slot My Three Sons into TheBeverly Hillbillies' slot after the Hillbillies' season four.
Like every new technology, at first color TVs were very expensive. For example, I never saw Star TrekTOS in color until I had my own apartment in 1970. I remember the scare about radiation but never took it seriously.
I may have mentioned that I recently watched all of Leave It To Beaver. I had watched it somewhat when It first telecast. None of the episodes rang a bell when I watched it all.
Last year (I think) I watched all of the Canadian show Anne with an E. It was based upon Anne of Green Gables. Anne is a strong character and many of the episodes highlight social issues. It’s well worth a look. There are only 27 episodes on Netflix. Corporate restructuring killed it.
The closest thing to a Superman #1 moment for me was twenty years ago when my uncle gave me a box of comics he had found. It was mostly books from the late 80s and 90s but it did included a nice copy of Amazing Spider-Man #102 (N'71), the 25 cents issue and the second appearance of Morbius the Living Vampire.
That's not bad at all!
The Baron > Philip PortelliDecember 1, 2025 at 6:11am
Replies
MY THREE SONS: [A]fter the sixth season of My Three Sons, departed eldest son Mike was never again mentioned by name.
I was watching My Three Sons around the same time I was watching The Beverly Hillbillies and Leave It to Beaver (all in reruns), and I lived in one of those markets which showed only the "post-Mike" episodes. (I think the first one in the package showed him and his bride driving away from Bryant Park in the opening minutes.) I became quite a fan of the show as the family movied to "California", Robbie got married, he and Katie had triplets, chip got married, and even Steve got remarried. Years later, when I was in college, I got the opportunity to watch the "Mike & Bub" episodes (which I knew about but had never seen). I remember in one of the later "California" episodes (and please don't ask me to recall which one specifically), Steve introduced himself to... someone (I don't remember), and he said that he had three sons. (I remember that specifically because it coused me to raise an eyebrow.) Perhaps Mike lives next door to Chuck Cunningham.
I watched My Three Sons from the beginning, but naturally, I didn't see every episode. The Good Mrs. Benson is just young enough to have missed the Bub and Mike years. (Like so many, she'd assumed that the sons had always been Robbie and Chip and Ernie, and knew nothing about Bub.) One of the Roku channels runs My Three Sons, and we caught it from the first episode. To my delight, the GMB loved the show, so we binge-watched all 380 episodes.
That gave me a chance to collect all of the in-story details about the Douglases. While continuity mistakes popped up now and then, largely, the time frames were consistent, and I was able to put together a family tree, including dates of birth for Steve, Bub,. and the boys; the year Steve married Louise; and so forth.
With regard to Bub and Mike, the show maintained a queer sort of continuity. In Bub's case, after William Frawley departed the show midway through the fifth season ("A Woman's Work", first aired 07 January 1965) and William Demarest joined as Uncle Charley in the next episode, Bub was referenced quite a bit throughout the remainder of that season. "The Glass Sneaker", 23 April 1965, would be the last time Bub was mentioned in any way, when Chip says that both his grandfather and his Uncle Charley used to be in show business.
Mike got a little better treatment. In the sixth season, the series switched networks, from ABC to CBS, and was broadcast in colour. As you mentioned, Jeff, the first episode of that season---"The First Marriage", 16 September 1965---was Tim Considine's last hurrah as eldest son Mike. The opening scene shows the Douglas family and friends filing out of the church after Mike and Sally's wedding. Mike has a private moment with Steve in which he and his father express touching sentiments. Then Mike and Sally climb into their car and drive out of the show. The next two episodes cover Steve's adoption of Ernie, so the show could maintain its title.
Mike gets quite a few mentions throughout the sixth season. (One of the more sentimental times occurs when Steve talks to newly adopted son Ernie about his joining the family, in "There's a What in the Attic?", 21 October 1965.) "Marriage and Stuff", 23 December 1965, is practically a time capsule, as Mike and Sally, and the fact that Ernie was adopted get mentioned frequently. Steve even has a brief telephone conversation with Mike---though we hear only Steve's side of it. In my earlier post, I was wrong about the last time Mike was referenced by name on the show. (I had the episode right, but was mistaken when it aired.) In the second episode of the seventh season---"Fly Away Home", 22 September 1966---Steve takes the sons back to his boyhood hometown. When Steve runs into his former girl friend, they catch each other up on their lives, and Steve states that Mike is married and lives "back east".
It was when the Douglases moved to Los Angeles at the beginning of the eighth season that the attitude of the show got strange. Bub had already been long forgotten, and now it was like Mike never existed. A significant sequence in that season-opener has Steve reminiscing about moments with his sons in Bryant Park (clips from the previous seasons), and while even Ernie gets a special memory, Mike is omitted.
Other occasions, when it would be practically obligatory to reference Mike, such as Robbie and Katie's wedding, or Steve and Barbara's wedding, there isn't a hint to Steve Douglas' oldest son. Not even when Robbie takes Katie on a visit to Bryant Park in the tenth-season episode "You Can't Go Home", 07 February 1970.
It's easy to assume that Mike was put on the bus to Mandyville, but as I said, the show got weird about it. Direct mentions of Mike were apparently verboten---but there were two occasions when the show obliquely confirmed that there was another, oldest, son. One I mentioned earlier, about Steve recalling how the births of his first two sons went fine, "but there was a problem with Chip." The other odd reference also occured in the ninth season. I can't recall the specific episode, but it was during the arc that followed Katie's pregnancy. Steve has a heart-to-heart with Robbie about what it's like to be the father of newborns, and he begins his talk with "When your mother was having the first of you boys . . . "
That's awkward phraseology. Steve was clearly referring to Mike---if Robbie had been "the first of you boys", Steve simply would've said, "When your mother was having you . . . " Yet, it's a strange way to refer to Robbie's older brother, too. In natural dialogue, Steve would've said, "When your mother was having MIke . . . "
So, for some peculiar reason, the show was trying to have it both ways: there was no older son, yet there was.
And, just in case you'd like to see it . . .
Of these shows, I watched them all when first broadcast.
Pretty sure I only saw a few episodes of Petticoat Junction. I saw quite a few of The Beverly Hillbillies. I saw a lot of My Three Sons when William Frawley and Tim Considine were on, but only a few of the Uncle Charley episodes (It's amazing how many old movies William Demerest was in). Prior to that I knew Tim Considine from the Spin and Marty episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club. I wasn’t ten yet. Considine played Spin. It was a stronger part, so I remembered him. It was on for three seasons, the second and third titled “Further Adventures of….” and “The New Adventures of….” The premise was:
Marty Markham, a rich orphan attends summer camp at a dude ranch where he becomes best friends with Spin Evans.
So basically, young boys riding horses and such.
Beverly Hillbillies was the one I knew. People occasionally watched it at my place and my maternal grandmother was a fan, particularly of Granny. I saw a few episodes of My Three Sons and I recall one of my sisters saying there had been another son, back when. I caught up a bit on a cross-section of episodes several years ago. My older sisters had watched Petticoat Junction, but they'd dropped it by the time I was aware of it and so, again, I had only a loose connection to the show. I only know a few reruns that I caught at some point, including the one with Granny. Green Acres was an occasional watch at my house. I was still quite young when the "rural purge" occured, so these shows are mostly faint memories (My Three Sons wasn't rural, I know). For some reason, the episode, "Whatever Happened to Baby Chip?" stuck in my head. I was not really too surprised, when I caught a cross-section of eps, to learn that it reused the basic premise of "The Coffee House Set," but with different poorly-understood pop trends. That earlier episode, however, did introduce me to the "dirty cords" trend of the 1930s, which Steven admits he had followed in his youth. Even people who study history sometimes miss things.
Curiously, I recently noticed that Adventures in Rainbow Country is available on streaming. It's a Canadian show that received one season in 1970-71. I do recall us watching that regularly. It's a rural show, and one of the few series expressly set in northern Ontario, where I grew up. For some reason it featured Lois "Moneypenny" Maxwell as the widowed mother. The focus, as I recall it, was on her two kids (the daughter was played by Susan Olsen, who was all over Canadian kids TV in the 60s/early 70s. The son was played by Stephen Cottier; it seems to be his only acting credit) and their Anishinaabe best friend, Pete, who had wild rural adventures together. Pete was played by Buckley Petawabano, who became a cinematographer. In 1975, he appeared in the obscure, FNMI-made Canadian film Cold Journey which, incredibly, dramatized some of the darker aspects of the residential school system a couple of decades before the mainstream public started discussing them.
It's the northern part of the Great Lakes Basin, so its "rural" is a tad removed from Hooterville. I may have to watch a few episodes, and I definitely want to see if I can find Cold Journey.
I watched a lot of The Beverly Hillbillies, a fair amount of Green Acres and little or none of Petticoat Junction, although I rememver the show existing.
I remember watching My Three Sons, but knew nothing of Bub until years later.
As I may have mentioned before, we didn't get color TV until the 1980's - the Old Man was convinced for a long time that they emitted dangerous radiation - so when I was a kid I was enitrely unaware of the "shows transitioning from b/w to color" phenomenon.
I also watched Beverly Hillbilliles and Green Acres, but very little Petticoat Junction. I don't remember enough of the circumstances to know why.
We are currently in the middle of season three of both The Beverly Hillbillies and Leave it to Beaver. Because I have already watched seasons 5-11 of The Beverly Hillbillies, I will run out of "Hillbillies" before I run out of "Beavers" (which ran for six seasons). I will have more to say about both of those shows after each show's respective fourth season. I have already decided to slot My Three Sons into The Beverly Hillbillies' slot after the Hillbillies' season four.
Like every new technology, at first color TVs were very expensive. For example, I never saw Star Trek TOS in color until I had my own apartment in 1970. I remember the scare about radiation but never took it seriously.
I may have mentioned that I recently watched all of Leave It To Beaver. I had watched it somewhat when It first telecast. None of the episodes rang a bell when I watched it all.
Last year (I think) I watched all of the Canadian show Anne with an E. It was based upon Anne of Green Gables. Anne is a strong character and many of the episodes highlight social issues. It’s well worth a look. There are only 27 episodes on Netflix. Corporate restructuring killed it.
The closest thing to a Superman #1 moment for me was twenty years ago when my uncle gave me a box of comics he had found. It was mostly books from the late 80s and 90s but it did included a nice copy of Amazing Spider-Man #102 (N'71), the 25 cents issue and the second appearance of Morbius the Living Vampire.
That's not bad at all!
Ah, "Moribus", the Living Vampire!
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