The Dick Van Dyke Show was the most critically aclaimed show of the 1960's. It ran from October 1961 until September 1966 on CBS.
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An Article From Time Magazine
Good Scout
Friday, Jun. 14, 1963 Article
Television series, particularly situation comedies, are not intended for casual viewers. They require fidelity. If you're an absentee, you lose out.
Consider a casual viewer tuning in The Dick Van Dyke Show. He has heard that it's pretty funny. After all, it has just won three Emmy awards as the funniest, best-written and best-directed humor show on television. He knows from just general absorption that Van Dyke plays a gag writer married to a delicious-looking girl played by Mary Tyler Moore. Van Dyke and Moore are arriving at a literary cocktail party. "Do you want to duck out right now," says he to her, "and take in a movie?" The laughter that follows this line is deafening.
When they leave, Van Dyke says: "The next time we're invited to a liter ary dinner party, will you say to me, 'Let's stay home and can some plums'?" Wow. That line gets such a laugh that even the set falls on the floor. Van Dyke does it every time. Like the night he said, "Without my thumbs I couldn't type." Or that other time, when he told his wife: "If you keep looking that good in the morning, I may have to switch to an afternoon newspaper."
Jumping Juror. The laughter, since it comes mainly out of the can, may be irritating, but the characters are not-and therein hides the secret of a successful TV series. The regulars tune in not for the latest witticisms of Gag Writer Rob Petrie, but to watch Dick Van Dyke, a clean-cut fellow with a frog in his throat. He looks believable. He isn't aggressively glamorous or excessively cute. He is a pretty bright guy whose brain is sometimes a ball of thumbs, and he is married to an American icon: the steady, dependable, reliable, beautiful, clean-limbed little mother who has the sort of dewy wholesomeness that every twelve-year-old boy looks forward to in a wife.
The show has had its good moments. Van Dyke is a fine mimic and an even finer slapsticker. He is 37, but "I was born 30 years too late," he saysand indeed he does at times recall the Harold Lloyds and Stan Laurels that he much admires. Playing a jury foreman, he jumped out of the jury box to pick up the voluptuous defendant's handkerchief, reeled around awkwardly before the court and fell back into the jury box. It was one moment that a casual viewer could appreciate. Last week came another one, as he told his little boy in flashbacks the story of the hours before the child's birth. Semper paratus, he slept in his clothes, dashed around like a nut, and smashed up his car in the driveway. A laundry truck had to drive his wife to the hospital.
First After Lemmon. But the mass viewers care less for what he does than for the fact that he is doing it. Viewers like his apple-pie accent. They read TV Guide and the Sunday supplements, and they know he's an eagle scout. He has been married to his high school sweetheart for 15 years; they have four children and live quietly near Hollywood; they don't see much of show people. He teaches Sunday school at the Brentwood Presbyterian Church. He is loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. He is a friend to animals. He will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly. He smiles whenever he can. He never shirks or grumbles at hardships. He stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travels with a clean crowd. As Carl Reiner, the show's writer, puts it: "Dick is a very civilized neurotic. He's like me. We make very few waves."
Born in Missouri and raised in Illinois, Dick Van Dyke started out as half of a pantomime act. He worked around in TV and radio until he reached Broad way, most notably as the talent agent in Bye Bye Birdie. He did the film version of Birdie, and is now making Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews. For light movie comedy, he has become the man everyone wants when Jack Lemmon is unavailable. "I don't mind," he says cheerfully.
Another Article From Time Magazine
How to Succeed Though Married
Friday, Apr. 09, 1965 Article
If the TV screen is any reflection of the household it sits in, marriage is a fading institution. Bonanza's Ben Cartwright is a confirmed old widower and likely to remain so. The Fugitive's Richard Kimble is a wrongly convicted wife-murderer. Combat's Sergeant Chip Saunders is a single sort, and ail-American rubes like Marine Private Gomer Pyle and Small-Town Sheriff Andy Taylor ain't hitched either. Lucy is now a widow, and Constance MacKenzie's single status is the talk of Peyton Place, what with her having a teen-age daughter and all.
In fact, on the top 15 shows there are only two continuing marriages between central characters: Bewitched's Darrin and about-to-be-pregnant Samantha Stephens, and The Dick Van Dyke Show's Rob and Laura Petrie. Since Bewitched's Samantha cheats, by cleaning the house, keeping her husband and generally managing the drudgery of life through her powers of witchcraft, that leaves the title of TV's favorite average housewife to Laura Petrie by default, and it's a shame. As played by Actress Mary Tyler Moore, she could beat the pants off any dozen TV actresses.
Pert and brunette, Mary sends a grin across her face in waves, and her 120 Ibs. are settled into a luscious 36-24-36 configuration that has male viewers sitting upright in their reclining chairs. Yet hardly a real-life wife objects. Instead, they take notes. And when she began delighting TV Hubby Dick Van Dyke by wearing Capri slacks, it helped make Capri slacks the biggest trend in U.S. casual attire.
Never Above the Thigh. Of course, 27-year-old Mary is more than just a looker. She is toothily, totally wholesome, with an unexpected comedy accent on the ho, can convincingly range from point-winning wit to pratfalling clown. For her labors on the Van Dyke show she recently collected the Foreign Press Golden Globe Award as the best female television personality of this year. She got an Emmy last year for the same thing. The program has consistently been in the top 15 since 1962, ranks seventh so far this year. And Mary has just recently signed a seven-year, ten-movie contract with Universal Pictures.
Nine years ago Mary Tyler Moore was nothing, or more precisely, she was a two-inch pixy dancing in a Hotpoint stove ad. Then she got a job answering the phone for Richard Diamond, private eye. No one who saw her in the part will ever forget her, though he could not possibly remember her face. As sultry-voiced Sam, she was never seen above the thigh. And that shortskirted gam bit got her an audition for the part of Danny Thomas' daughter. She missed, but when Producer Thomas was looking for a wife for Van Dyke the next year, he remembered her. How come he hadn't chosen her the first time? "Because, my darling," explained Thomas, "with a nose like yours, nobody would believe you were my daughter."
Itsy-Poo. In private life, Mary is a quite believable housewife who can't stand housework at all, except for scrubbing floors ("You forget all your troubles and everything except getting that floor clean"),'hates most cooking (beyond fried eggs and melted-cheese sandwiches). And while she is an NBC executive's wife with an eight-year-old son, she says without qualification: "I am a career girl. I couldn't be happy living Laura's life. If I wasn't an actress, I'd have to be doing something else—I'd go to school or I'd be a nurse, but I'd do something."
She also tends to say studiedly saccharine things like "itsy-poo," but she is sophisticated enough to know just where she wants to go. After next year it's bye-bye Dick Van Dyke. "I would like to be the next Doris Day," she reveals intensely. That may sound like the itsy-pooiest, but it's an understandable yearn for America's favorite TV housewife.
Here is Morey Amsterdam's Obituary from The New York Times
Morey Amsterdam, Comedian And Joke Encyclopedia, Dies
By DAVID STOUT
Published: October 30, 1996
Morey Amsterdam, the wisecracking comedian who began telling jokes in vaudeville, thrived in the heyday of radio and lasted into the era of television on ''The Dick Van Dyke Show,'' died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was in his 80's.
Mr. Amsterdam suffered a heart attack at his home and died at Cedars Sinai Hospital, a hospital spokesman, Ron Wise, told The Associated Press.
There was some confusion about Mr. Amsterdam's age. The World Almanac lists his birth date as Dec. 14, 1914, which would make him 81. But Rose Marie, who played Sally Rogers on ''The Dick Van Dyke Show,'' said he was 87.
If the jokes he told were any indication, Mr. Amsterdam would have enjoyed the confusion.
Having found renewed success on the Van Dyke show, which ran on CBS from 1961 to 1966, Mr. Amsterdam reveled in his family's move to a fashionable section of Los Angeles after many years of living in Yonkers.
So exclusive was his Beverly Hills neighborhood, he said, that ''even the police have an unlisted telephone number.''
Mr. Amsterdam had a cornucopia of corn, an arsenal of jokes so bad that one could not help but laugh. (''Did you hear the one about the man who bought a car and wouldn't take it out of the showroom window because he'd never had such a good parking place?'')
The World Almanac lists Mr. Amsterdam's birthplace as Chicago, but other references say he was born in San Francisco, where his father was a violinist with the San Francisco Symphony.
Mr. Amsterdam entered the world of vaudeville as a teen-ager, playing straight man for a piano-playing brother. He told jokes, often performing with a cello, and wrote jokes for Will Rogers and Fanny Brice.
Playing in Chicago one night, he was introduced to one Al Brown, who loved his act. Mr. Amsterdam's future bookings were assured: Al Brown was really Al Capone.
Mr. Amsterdam became known as the ''Human Joke Machine,'' supposedly able to tell a joke on any subject at a moment's notice.
Testing him, a photographer once said, ''Camera.''
''I bought a camera the other day,'' Mr. Amsterdam replied, not missing a beat. ''I didn't know the front from the back, so now I have 14 pictures of my navel.''
If Mr. Amsterdam's humor seems low camp by today's standards, he was certainly no toady to sponsors. His brashness cost him several on his radio shows in the 1940's.
One sponsor, a used-car dealer, lasted one day. ''Get these cars while they're hot,'' Mr. Amsterdam told his listeners. ''And they probably are.''
His first appearance on television was on a 1948 comedy show, ''Stop Me If You've Heard This One.'' That year, he was host to his own variety show, which ran until 1950. Then he appeared on ''Broadway Open House,'' a precursor to ''The Tonight Show'' on NBC.
From 1957 to 1959, he was co-star of the television show ''Keep Talking.'' On the Van Dyke show, created by Carl Reiner, Mr. Amsterdam played Buddy Sorrell, part of a television writing team that included Mr. Van Dyke and Rose Marie.
In the 1970's, Mr. Amsterdam appeared on ''Hollywood Squares.'' He continued to play clubs in Las Vegas, Nev., and Atlantic City and made occasional appearances on behalf of charities.
Mr. Amsterdam's son, Gregory, said his father had just returned from a two-week cabaret tour of the East Coast. Perhaps that was fitting; Mr. Amsterdam once called Hollywood ''the kind of place where the skeletons in the closet are ashamed of the people who live in the house.''
He is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, Kay; his son, and a daughter, Cathy.
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