https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/dwayne-hickman-dead-many-loves-of-dobie-gillis-bob-cummings-show-1235071977/

On Sunday, January 9, 2022 at 2:00:06 PM UTC-5, That Derek wrote:
> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/dwayne-hickman-dead-many-loves-of-dobie-gillis-bob-cummings-show-1235071977/

When I was in 4th Grade in 1959/1960, "The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis" was the most popular show among my classmates. It was on Tuesday nights and each episode was the talk of the school on Wednesday mornings. It was the first TV sitcom with a very dysfunctional family, the Gillis family with the star of the show often in self-deprecating soliloquies. It was miles apart from "Leave It To Beaver" and "Father Knows Best". And then there was Dobie's buddy, beatnik Maynard G Krebs. When, my 4th Grade teacher overheard me say that I wanted to be a beatnik when I grew up, she gave me the stink eye. LOL. Unfortunately, for Hickman, he was typecast after Dobie, but he had a great role in "Cat Ballou".

Two things about "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" personally and profoundly affected me as no other sitcom, CBS or elsewhere, ever has:

1) It made a nerd in the 1st Grade recognize as Rodin my favorite sculptor, and The Thinker to this day my fave sculpture*; and

2) The first of the two Daily Doubles I happened upon during my stupendously inglorious and ignominious turn behind the center lectern in the first season of Trebek's era on Jeopardy! concerned the late Hickman's hip and cool and even surreal sitcom. Now, I've related the following herein before, but not for a good while.

It was late in the first round, and I can't just now even recall how much I wagered. The clue in TV COMEDY read, "This film star early in his career played Wilton Armitage on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."r

As every J! viewer knows, DDs allow the contestant--whether male, female or debatable--a LOT more time to think and then offer up some response...but us smart-aleck types usually opt for both a quick AND confident DD response in interrogatorily grammatical form of course, but definitely NOT voiced in the tone of a question!

But that schtick, alas, wouldn't work for me on this one, because when Trebek was done reading, I hadn't a clue! Now, I knew it wasn't Bob Denver, Steve Franken, or Frankie Faylin, and then even for a moment considered Tuesday Weld, but then got back on track by remembering it was an actor, not an actress. My mind was starting to panic when I somehow happened upon a name that clicked, and I thus then was nonetheless able to muster an assertive-not-querying tone when declaring to Trebek, "Who is Warren Beatty!"

But I met my Waterloo in Final.

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
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* When I saw at close range what I at first mistakenly thought was "the original" of The Thinker in Detroit in 1996, I was stunned that a Motown museum somehow had ended up with this Frenchman's masterwork. But some quick pre-Internet research revealed the surprising--to a hick like me, at least--fact that there IS no original of The Thinker. Rodin and his team made over a DOZRN of them, which are now scattered around the planet, including Detroit. That's because technically, The Thinker is not a sculpture, but rather a "bronze". Its "original", if you will, one might consider the long-since-destroyed molding apparatus in the Paris studio made them with the inverse master through a complex, many-step process.