Captain Kangaroo is dead. Sob!

Can't believe he was just 76. I remember the carrot crazed rabbit and the falling ping pong balls.

Captain Kangaroo subtly taught children
Posted on Fri, Jan. 23, 2004
Captain Kangaroo Subtly Taught Children
FRAZIER MOORE
Associated Press

NEW YORK - When asked to compare "Sesame Street" with his own kids show, Bob Keeshan would praise the PBS series for its carefully formatted focus on building math and language skills.

"Captain Kangaroo," on the other hand, preferred an easygoing liberal-arts tack. As played by Keeshan, the kindly Captain each day invited children to browse through his Treasure House, which, in effect, was a museum full of toys, companions and amusing ideas. There, kids found knowledge for its own sake along with freeform lessons for coexisting in the world - and they never knew what hit them.

You didn't learn to count to 10 or contemplate which thing wasn't like the others with the Captain. The most didactic he would ever get was during the arts-and-crafts segment, guiding you through making something fun from Dad's shirt cardboard with your glue and rounded-tip scissors.

All this was a radical notion for TV. When "Captain Kangaroo" premiered in the mid-1950s - more than a decade before "Sesame Street" and years before "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" - children's programming mostly consisted of old cartoons with vaudevillian hosts.

Keeshan chose a more enlightened path.

The Captain and his friends, no matter how loopy they might act, seldom lost their dignity and always treated one another with respect.

The humor, which was plentiful, was unfailingly gentle. For instance, Mr. Moose, a puppet pal, loved the sight of bouncing Ping Pong balls - with which the Treasure House would be showered by the hundreds at the most inconvenient times.

Bunny Rabbit was always scheming to sneak carrots, even as he displayed a sight-gag retort to his heavy carrot intake: eyeglasses.

And Grandfather Clock, with whom the Captain would chat each day, had a habit of dozing off in mid-sentence.

Whatever urbaneness the Captain exhibited was nicely offset by his farmer friend Mr. Green Jeans, who regularly brought an animal of some kind - even if nothing more exotic than a puppy or a parrot - for the audience to meet.

At its height, "Captain Kangaroo" aired Monday through Saturday mornings on CBS, with no reruns (initially, of course, the show was live).

Eventually, the show was banished by the network to make room for a morning-news rival to NBC's lucrative "Today" show. But after decades of attempts up to the current "Early Show," CBS has made only slim inroads against NBC and ABC's "Good Morning America" (prompting some grudging observers to dub this persistent shortfall "the Captain's revenge").

Only 28 when he first transformed himself into the grandfatherly Captain, Keeshan was clearly a visionary of children's TV. And even after putting away the baggy jacket and jingly keys for the last time, he continued to voice the Captain's message of kindness and concern as an advocate for children's issues.

More than a kids show star, Keeshan grew into the role of Captain Kangaroo in more ways than he might ever have dreamed.