Dick Van Dyke will be 99 years old on December 13th…and the way he looks and moves, that might turn out to be "middle age" on him. To celebrate this milestone, the Catchy Comedy channel is running a binge of 84 of the 158 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show starting this Saturday at 12 PM with "Empress Carlotta's Necklace" and ending Monday at 5:30 AM with "You Oughta Be in Pictures." There's probably a very good reason why they aren't running 99 episodes the actual weekend of Dick's 99th birthday but I don't know what it is.
Many, many years ago when home video was mainly about VHS cassettes, a Los Angeles station did a marathon of all 158 episodes on some holiday weekend and I — lacking any vision of a future where I could buy them all on uncut, high quality image DVDs without commercials — decided to record them all. After all, it was my favorite TV show and when would I ever have another chance to get copies of every single episode?
I was not dumb enough to record them at Standard Speed, which gave you two hours on a cassette. That would have meant 40 cassettes and changing tapes every two hours. I was however dumb enough to record them at Extended Play Speed which gave you six hours on a cassette…so 27 tapes and changing them every six hours. I actually set alarms to wake me up in the middle of the night and arranged my days so I wouldn't be out when it was time to take out one tape and slide in another.
But I did it. Got all 158 of 'em on 27 tapes and I printed up labels for them. Okay, so they had mediocre video quality, commercial breaks and many bad edits to allow time for the commercials. The point was that I had all 158 episodes and could watch them any time I liked. And of course, I never got around to watching a single one of those tapes. The show was on often enough that I never felt the urge and so those VHS tapes still sit on a shelf in my closet…where they shall remain until I get around to tossing them out.
(There is, of course, no reason for me to watch them now and a decent chance that I couldn't if I wanted to. I haven't used my VHS tape deck in enough years to be certain it even works. I also have two other VHS machines and a couple of Betamaxes and my old Laserdisc player in the garage and I'm not sure which of them, if any, work.)
On a website many years ago — it might even have been CompuServe, that's how long ago it was — I wrote a line which was much quoted by others. It was that the entire premise of the evolving home video market was that someone somewhere was trying to see how many times they could get me to buy Goldfinger. I think I bought it on Beta, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray and I didn't just buy it once in each format. Sometimes, there were new, more complete versions with better imaging and special features.
The quip would have worked just as well with The Dick Van Dyke Show. I don't think there was ever a Laserdisc release and the Beta and VHS ones weren't of the whole run of the series. But I've purchased the complete run of The Dick Van Dyke Show three or four times on various formats…
…and I really didn't need to do that either because, first of all, it's now streaming — in some cases, 24/7 — on various streaming channels I can receive. At least one of those 24/7 channels on my Roku TV is video on demand, meaning that I can request a specific episode I want to watch again and ten seconds later, there's Rob Petrie on my screen, perhaps about to trip over the ottoman with the requested episode to follow. The whole run is also available on YouTube…
…and I don't even have to watch it via either of those platforms because I downloaded the whole run to my hard disk. Right this second, you can name an episode and I can find and be watching it in about twenty seconds on my computer. I have an interface so I can play my computer screen on my TV screen so if you were here with me, we could watch it together. So why haven't I thrown away those VHS tapes? Considering all the effort I put into filling them, I don't have the heart.
In case all I've written here has made you eager to see an episode, here's one of my favorites. From the beginning, Carl Reiner played Alan Brady either as an off-camera voice or if he was on camera, you saw the back of his head or his face was covered with a towel or a fake beard or something. They finally decided they needed him on-camera and this was the first time you saw his face…