If there's anything more ill-advised than making live action versions of cartoons, it's making updates, ie "where are they now" type shows, particularly in the context of this made for TV movie. What they did was take a charming, somewhat idealistic show from the 60's and updated it to the lame-80's style replete with obnoxiously precocious kids, a calling card of 80's shows and films, and depressing realism in the form of a narcissistic mom who abandons her kids for a career, and a couple unable to conceive a child-speaking of which, the Beaver's kids, particularly the older one,ought to have made Wally and his wife thankful they had fertility issues.-
To sum up, they took a show whose unrealistic and realistic aspects were a lighthearted break from reality, and chased it with a movie that inverted those aspects into an obnoxious and depressing reality-
To sum up, they took a show whose unrealistic and realistic aspects were a lighthearted break from reality, and chased it with a movie that inverted those aspects into an obnoxious and depressing reality-