User Reviews

...even the ten year olds! This episode has ten year old Danny - always the smart mouth - finding his ideas about salesmanship rejected by the adults in the room and is unhappy about it, considering himself to be a very smart guy. Then he gets a notice from the draft board. His mom tries to reason with the army -she even brings in his birth certificate. She is ignored. Danny thus must show up for his enlistment physical, even though he is 10, not 19 as the draft board says. He is rejected - not because it is obvious he is about ten years too young for this task - but because he is too short! That night he and Mom have a heart to heart and Danny says - to my surprise - that what he has learned during this draft board fiasco is that he is only ten years old and maybe adults do know more than him. I'll say now what I said in 1970 at age 12 - Huh??? You've just been exposed to the absolute peak of stupidity in being drafted at age ten, no ADULT bureaucrat willing to read a simple birth certificate, only looking at their procedures with blinders on, and then you are rejected for height, with no ADULT in charge admitting or even noticing that you are ten years old, and you think that the adult in the room - whoever that might be is probably smarter than you BECAUSE of this experience? I guess we'll have to wait six months for "All in the Family" to challenge the status quo, but then that was not what The Partridge Family was all about.

One thing I DID notice that I did not in 1970. Major corporations are now handled pretty much like the government is. Try to complain to one and all you get is corporate blather-speak. I don't think things were quite that way in 1970 - too many small businesses still around, even in big cities. So if I can't tell government from business in the realms of incompetence and total lack of concern for their impact on the public - maybe Bernie Sanders is right, maybe socialism is the answer. At least drug prices would come down out of the stratosphere. But I digress.

This episode did establish that Danny Bonaduce was a very good child actor.

With "See Here, Private Partridge" (a pun on the 1944 title "See Here, Private Hargrove"), it's interesting that between David Cassidy and Danny Bonaduce, it would be Danny getting a showcase episode first, resulting in his sudden breakout stardom, as well as one of the series' funniest outings. As The Partridge Family enter the studio to record their first album, Danny finds all of his ideas on salesmanship rejected by one and all, then receives a letter from the United States Army instructing him to report for basic training! (Reuben: "how are you at peeling potatoes?"). All of Shirley's efforts to convince personnel (watch for Jack Riley) that Danny is just a little boy fall on deaf ears ("to a mother, they're ALL just little boys!"). What the army wants, the army gets, and were it not for his height, Danny apparently would have made it! The album gets finished in time, with the featured song an early recording before David Cassidy, featuring Shirley's harmonizing- "I'm on the Road" (present on the debut LP issued in Nov 1970, THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY ALBUM, which charted at number 4), composed by the famed team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who had written "Shades of Gray" and "Love is Only Sleeping" for The Monkees.