If anyone doubted how beloved Carl Reiner was, they could confirm it by looking almost anywhere on the Internet yesterday. Everyone had a story of how they'd met him and/or loved him. Everyone who'd met him was posting a photo of them together…though I withheld mine. (I'll post it one of these days.) An awful lot of people posted clips or stills from "Coast-to-Coast Bigmouth," the episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Laura goes on a game show and…oh, hell. You know what happened. And how funny it was.
Last night on my chat with Leonard Maltin, we talked a lot about Carl and especially his movie career. Leonard liked Oh, God best of all. I spoke for Where's Poppa? We both agreed on how great it was just to be around Mr. Reiner.
My pal Paul Harris used to have a radio show and Carl — arguably the best "talk show" guest ever — was on many times. Paul has been nice enough to post eight of those conversations on his blog. They're all worth your time and they'll all show those of you who never got to talk to Carl Reiner what it was like to talk to Carl Reiner. You would have loved it.