Differences Between The Comic Strip and The Sitcom
Dennis' best friend, Tommy Anderson and his female nemisis Margaret Wade, both played by Billy Booth and Jeannie Russell respectively, were chosen at the suggestion of Jay North to play both characters. The comic strip's recurring character Gina would not be introduced into the strip until several years after the TV series' production, and does not appear in the TV show at all. Joey was played by Gil Smith in eight episodes in the first season. Instead of Dennis' dog Ruff, there was a smaller terrier named Fremont, belonging to the Wilsons.
On the sitcom and in the comics, Dennis was basically a good well-intentioned boy who always was trying to help people, but wound up making situations worse-often at Mr. Wilson's expense. In early episodes of the first season, far more disasters happened as a result of his actions than in later episodes. The character of Dennis was slightly toned down by the sixth or seventh episode.
Read more about this topic: Dennis The Menace (1959 TV series)
Famous quotes containing the words differences, comic and/or strip:
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The deeply thoughtful and human consciousness of a Macbeth is not found in comedy. Comic action tends to be as Bergson described it, physical or purblind, instead of highly conscious. Similarly, the great comic actor specializes in the presentation of mental obtuseness.”
—William G. McCollom (b. 1911)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)