Well it's about friggin' time they started releasing The Dick Van Dyke Show on DVD. The first five volumes from Time-Life Video are supposed to be out any day now. Each features four complete episodes with what I'm told is superior video quality. If you have to pick one volume, go for Volume 2, which contains "Where Did I Come From?", "That's My Boy," "It May Look Like A Walnut," and "October Eve." Those are the ones wherein Ritchie is born, Ritchie comes home from the hospital, the closet is full of walnuts, and an embarrassing painting of Laura turns up in a Manhattan art gallery. They're about as good as sitcoms get.
My friend, sitcom expert Vince Waldron, wrote the liner notes and he tells me that the makers of the DVD DVDs managed to locate original network prints, which are each about four minutes longer than the cut-down versions we all know so well from syndication. That alone is reason enough for me to buy them. Vince, by the way, has a superb website called Classic Sitcoms, which has info and episode guides for a lot of my favorite shows. He is also the author of a book by the same name, as well as The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, and I recommend both highly. (I'm not supplying Amazon links to them. Go over to Vince's site and order them via his links so he gets the commissions.)