For the definitive Fred MacMurray post, I have to recommend Moira’s marvelous interview with biographer Charles Tranberg on Wednesday.  Really — they just about covered it all, and wonderfully!  Being a total television kid, as a young’un I was no doubt more acquainted with MacMurray’s Steve Douglas on My Three Sons than his movie roles, though as a girl the series really held almost no allure for me.  I was from a family of three girls — not a boy around — and we had cats, not a dog named Tramp.  Not much common ground to build a fan relationship on, and in terms of movies I was more into monsters and creatures than anything Disney, but I recall reluctantly embracing the semi-science fiction-y Flubber mystique.  

It’s rather amazing that after his long and varied Hollywood career (which had settled into a better-than-B Western movie phase) Fred would be tapped by Walt Disney to headline a kooky little family comedy about a teenager who turns into a dog.  Had Walt been enamored by Fred in 1945′s Where Do We Go From Here?, where Fred played an Army-aspirant who enlists the help of a genie to help him join the forces, but instead sends him back to the Revolutionary war?  (And where one of his co-stars was his future wife June Haver?)  Or maybe it was Fred’s winning ways with an animal in Smoky, from 1946, where he teamed with a spirited pony, Anne Baxter and Bruce Cabot.  Perhaps it was Fred’s several family-oriented comedies like 1949′s Family Honeymoon, with Claudette Colbert as a widow with three children who marries bachelor botany prof MacMurray.  Are we getting warmer?  What about Father Was a Fullback, released the same year, with Fred as a football coach and beautiful Maureen O’Hara as his wife and mother of his three little daughters?  Sounds like it could be a Disney movie, pretty much.  Maybe it was his comedy chops from 1950′s Never a Dull Moment, with Irene Dunne (airing at 4am Saturday overnight), or had Walt been carrying a torch for Fred’s talents since seeing him in the terrifically funny 1947 comedy The Egg and I, with co-star Claudette Colbert, which introduced Ma and Pa Kettle to the American movie screen?  Several Morlocks have sworn to the comedic powers of 1945′s nutty romp Murder He Says, and Walt may have taken a shine to that one, too.

No matter where the inspiration originated, MacMurray threw off his spurs – or actually merely set them aside, as he kept on making Westerns for a while longer – and starred in 1959′s The Shaggy Dog for Disney.  Judging from the poster’s tagline — “A new kind of horror movie…Horribly Funny!” — it must have been fashioned, at least by Disney marketers, as a response to the then-popular I Was a Teenage Whatever monster movies popping up on screens for teens.  In 1960 Fred went decidedly adult in The Apartment, but Disney came calling once more and starred him in The Absent-Minded Professor in 1961 and then its sequel Son of Flubber two years later.  By then he was firmly entrenched in the public’s affection as Steve Douglas, the widower with multiple sons, in television’s My Three Sons which began airing in 1960.  The talented actor who had done everything from romance to noir to action to comedy and every permutation in-between now found himself holding down Thursday nights at 9:30pm on the ABC-TV network, with a The Real McCoys lead-in. 

The show would endure through time period changes and a switch to CBS in 1965 (who wanted to shoot the show in color when ABC wouldn’t), and was a cornerstone of both the network and the entire family sitcom genre over its nearly 400 episode run.  Fred MacMurray appeared in every one, the one true constant throughout the series (Moira’s post touched on the William Frawley/William Demarest character transition).  Of course, My Three Sons was not only incredibly lucrative for MacMurray, but he had a unique shooting schedule, at his request: six weeks of Monday – Friday production of all his scenes starting in May, then ten weeks off, then another five weeks which wound up his filming before December.  The rest of the cast would work around this interesting arrangement, and of course it was impossible to film in order or complete continuity.  Fred got plenty of time off though his co-stars worked a more conventional schedule.  No matter what this accommodation required, it was all worth it to continue the successful series as long as it remained popular.

In terms of MacMurray stories I have read and enjoyed, I particularly like the slightly kooky one where, during his time on My Three Sons, supposedly the intensely frugal MacMurray would be seen at lunch brown-bagging Easter-dyed hard-boiled eggs for weeks after the holiday.  I guess if he started filming in May and they were still showing up in his lunch at that point, he really was finishing them off, but good.

Here’s a promo from CBS for My Three Sons from later in the run, when Stanley Livingston had joined the cast as Ernie, probably the best-remembered son.

You can catch Fred in The Shaggy Dog tomorrow morning at 7:15am, followed by The Absent-Minded Professor at 9am and finally Son of Flubber starting at 10:45am.  Here’s a short clip from The Absent-Minded Professor featuring Fred and his movie landlady, played by Belle Montrose, as she tries to remind him that he’s supposed to be getting married that morning.  FYI, Belle Montrose was the mother of one of the greatest and most creative minds ever to come out of television, the witty and wise Steve Allen.