TELEVISION: Little Man’s Man

Even the kids in the audience can recognize the signs of affluence. After 3½ years of traveling on the slow budget of a sustaining show, CBS’s Captain Kangaroo (weekdays 8:15-9 a.m., Saturdays, 9:30-10:30 a.m., E.D.T.) has it made. Last month the good captain got his first new set, an ark called the S.S. Treasure House; last week captain and crew alike made an overland trip to tape their show at the Minneapolis Aquatennial. All the winds are fair, and by fall, Captain Kangaroo will have a full supply of sponsors for the first time.

In the past. Captain Kangaroo has cost CBS more than $1,500,000 a year; but the wigged, whiskered, grandfatherly old party with his big, pouchy pockets and perky hats is far and away the best in the often over-cute field of children’s TV. His real name is Bob Keeshan, and his secret is that he talks softly to the kids, tells them what makes the world tick, with the same fizzless, unexcited manner that NBC’s Dave Garroway uses on their parents. (In the same time slot. Kangaroo consistently matches or beats Garroway in the Nielsen ratings.)

The captain’s colleague, Mr. Green Jeans—played by Lumpy Brannum, onetime bass fiddler for Fred Waring—brings along a variety of live animals, explains their habits to the kids; lately he has turned up with a midget pony, a coati, a kinkajou, and a ten-week-old Himalayan sun bear. Another colleague, Cosmo (“Gus”) Allegretti, inhabits the skin of the durable Dancing Bear, is also the prime mover behind other sympathetic creatures—Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose and the somnolent Grandfather Clock. Without prompting devices. Actor Keeshan, 32, meanders around the set using man-to-man language that can make a four-year-old feel almost grown up. He handles his influence on open minds with care: “There’ll be no slapstick and no horror, no matter how innocently presented.”

Although it has taken sponsors a surprisingly long time to fall for Captain Kangaroo’s charm, CBS has recognized it, and sometimes rued it, right from the start. Two years ago, when the network announced that economic pressures might force the captain off the air, 10,000 parents protested. CBS suddenly decided that the show would stay, since it was “an excellent public service.” One CBS executive put it more bluntly: “We were terrified of the mothers.”