Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

The wonder of 'The Wonder Years'

Baby boomers took over Hollywood in the 1980s. And boy, did they like making films and TV shows about themselves - The Big Chill, Family Ties, China Beach - packing them to the gills with hippie anthems.

Josh Saviano (left), Fred Savage, and Danica McKellar were chummy back during the show's run.
Josh Saviano (left), Fred Savage, and Danica McKellar were chummy back during the show's run.Read more

Baby boomers took over Hollywood in the 1980s. And boy, did they like making films and TV shows about themselves - The Big Chill, Family Ties, China Beach - packing them to the gills with hippie anthems.

The Wonder Years, a half-hour dramedy about the Arnolds, an average American family of five living in the 1960s, was no exception, opening with Joe Cocker's version of the Beatles classic "With a Little Help From My Friends" as its theme song.

Time Life has released a complete collection of the series, featuring all of its original music, in a 26-disc set packaged in a little replica school locker.

Somehow, the ABC series, which aired for six seasons from 1988 to 1993, transcended mere boomer-ishness and appealed even to my dread generation, Generation X.

We grew up with its young hero Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage), who was 12 when the show premiered. He may have been living in the 1960s, but his experiences were the same as ours.

"The show . . . was written in a way that was so specific about its characters," said Savage, who was 11 when he started on the series, "but it allowed the audience to see a piece of themselves in the show. . . . People were able to identify with the characters."

In a clever twist, each episode was framed by a confessional of sorts narrated by Kevin's older self (Daniel Stern), whose nostalgia was tempered by a certain melancholy.

We loved the Arnolds - including dad Jack (Dan Lauria), mom Norma (Alley Mills), Kevin's bully of an older brother Wayne (Jason Hervey), and their older sister Karen (Olivia d'Abo) - because they were normal, said executive producer Bob Brush.

Mind you, they weren't the ideal, happy shiny people who populated Leave It to Beaver. This was a realistic family with problems.

"It was the first real representation of suburban families, and it had the power and the depth of real people," Brush said in a phone chat.

It had a sitcom structure, running 22 to 25 minutes an episode, but it was unlike any sitcom on TV.

"Sitcom characters are exaggerated, they're meant to draw belly laughs," Brush said. "Wonder Years was really a drama about this period in life when innocence becomes experience."

Wonder Years excelled when it juxtaposed the world outside and inside the Arnold home. Episodes would be set during traumatic, epochal historic events - the various political assassinations, demonstrations, and riots that defined the era, not to mention the ongoing war in Vietnam.

Yet the storylines concerned the minutiae of the family's lives. The narrator may be aware of the larger events and may even interpret his life through them, but "the story he tells is about the concerns of a young kid," Brush said.

Savage concurred.

"In the episode that had the moon landing, the whole family was in the living room glued to the TV," he said. "Kevin was in the kitchen trying to call a girl."

Savage suffered through his real teens just as did his character, Kevin. For one thing, the pilot had Kevin experience his first kiss with girl-next-door Winnie (Danica McKellar).

"It was the first kiss for both of us in real life," said Savage, 38. And they had to do it in front of a crew and their parents. "I had butterflies, but it wasn't traumatic or anything."

Brush and Mills said Savage had no affectation on or off camera.

"He was the most naturally gifted young actor I had run into," Brush said. "He was the emotional barometer of the scene, and we kept a camera always on his face." Brush said he sometimes rewrote scenes based on Savage's performance.

"He was an old soul at 11," said Mills.

Old soul or not, he was a grade-school student.

Mills said Savage's adult costars felt an obligation to ensure he lived as normal a life as possible on a TV set.

"I got close to Fred and Jason [Hervey's] mothers, and we felt responsible to create an environment that was not just a job," she said. "This was their childhood, every day of their lives, for 26 weeks of the year."

Savage had already been acting for five years before Wonder Years, with critically lauded turns in The Princess Bride and Vice Versa.

Did he consider himself a pro by the time Wonder Years came along?

"I considered myself 11," he said.

Does he feel the same nostalgia as the show's narrator for his childhood on the show?

"What's really interesting, actually, is that now that I'm an adult, a husband, and a father, I watch the show and see it in a whole new light," he said.

"It's just such an incredibly rich, layered show."

DVD

The Wonder Years Experience: Signature Edition

Complete collection on 26 DVDs available directly from Time Life for $249.95.

Information: www.timelife.com

EndText

215-854-2736