My Roku TV gets a seemingly-infinite number of channels, an annoying percentage of which are running the same shows. There's one I like where, on-demand 24 hours a day, I can select any episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show to watch. This is in addition to the five or six other channels which will show me episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, though on those channels, I can't pick and choose which ones I want to watch and when. For some reason, no matter when I turn to one of them, they're usually airing "Who and Where Was Antonio Stradivarius?" — not one of my favorite episodes.
And it's also in addition to the several different complete sets of The Dick Van Dyke Show that I own on DVD. I am more likely to run out of food, water and/or oxygen than I am to not be able to watch reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Which is not a bad thing because that's almost a necessity in my life.
A lot of TV shows I watched way-back-when hold little interest for me today and some I look at and wonder, "Why in the name of Bob Denver did I ever like this?" But some hold up, the list including Sgt. Bilko, Car 54, The Bob Newhart Show and a few others. I tried watching a My Favorite Martian recently and it was exactly as I remembered except for the part where I enjoyed it. The Van Dyke shows, if anything, get better.
Lately, I've even been watching some of the ones I didn't care for and I find moments in them that are wonderful. (The ones I don't like mostly have to do with jealousy. A chorus girl kisses Rob causing Laura to fear the marriage is over…or an old boy friend of Laura's pops up and Rob thinks the marriage is over. That marriage seemed way too stable for it to get shaky over a problem so small that it could be introduced, played out and solved within 24 minutes.)
I especially like watching Dick Van Dyke doing…well, just about anything that involved him moving around. Lots of people on TV could be funny using their faces and/or mouths. Dick was also funny using the rest of himself.
Watching these shows today is a little different for me since I met Rose Marie in the later years of her life. I spent a good amount of time with that lady and even gave her a meaty voice role — and directed her! — on an episode of The Garfield Show. It turned out to be her last performance.
Rose was a fascinating and wonderful lady but decades after she'd done The Dick Van Dyke Show, she was still always complaining about how many episodes she wasn't on at all (more than I thought) and how little she had to do in some episodes she was on. The show had so many talented, funny people on it that it couldn't service them all each week. There are shows she's barely in and as I watch them now, I can't help but think, "Boy, she must have been really pissed the week they filmed this."
This is something I witnessed/learned being around older performers of that generation. Most of them wanted to work until their dying day and had trouble coping with the periods when there was no demand for their services. Once, I was dining at an outdoor restaurant with an older comedian who was still working but not nearly often enough to satisfy him. A young kid with a handheld camcorder came up and asked him to say a few words for the camera. I'm not sure the lad had recognized my dining companion. I think his parents standing nearby had done the recognizing and had sent the boy to get the equivalent of a video autograph.
My companion was not only delighted to comply, he let his lunch get cold while he delivered a ten-minute monologue and then asked the kid to interview him. I wound up jumping in with a few questions because the boy couldn't come up with any…which is what made me think he had no idea who the man he was videoing was. He finally staggered back to his folks with a 15-20 minute tour de force.
This yearning to perform was not generally because of a yearning or even a need to make money and it often wasn't just a matter of ego. It was usually a matter of wanting to be wanted; of not being allowed to do what you'd done all your life. Some performers settle comfortably into retirement or semi-retirement. Others yell at the TV and ask God and their agents, "How come they didn't have me in for that?"
One older actor I knew got angry at me every time he heard that I was directing a cartoon show and didn't hire him. It was as if a friend of his was throwing a party and deliberately hadn't invited him. Rose was even a bit annoyed with me that after that one episode of The Garfield Show she did, I never had another part I could have given her.
If you ever catch the end credits of one of those Garfield Show episodes, you'll notice that the names of the voice actors are impossible to read. They're on for way too long in way too small a font. I was powerless to stop this…as I explained to Rose when she phoned to complain to me that she couldn't see her name. I remember saying to her, "Hey, my name's on the same card as Voice Director and I can't read mine, either."
If she had seen her name, she would have seen it said "Rose Marie Guy" and would probably have been annoyed that it didn't properly identify her as the performer who was billed simply as "Rose Marie." But that was her legal name — the one the producers made the check out to — and they didn't see a memo I sent telling them the proper way to bill her.
She became Rose Marie Guy when he married a musician named Bobby Guy in 1946. He died in 1964 while she was working on The Dick Van Dyke Show and she was understandably devastated by the loss. In fact, she didn't feel she could go on working and she announced she was quitting. Others involved with the program — mostly director John Rich — convinced her that it would not only be bad for the show if she left but also bad for her. She stayed and was glad she did.
She worked almost her entire time on this planet — from when she was three and billed as "Baby Rose Marie" until the last decade or so of a life that lasted to age 94. Performing was as much a part of her existence as breathing and she didn't cope well with the periods between jobs. When I watch those shows now, I am amazed how good she was and how she scored with every single line they gave her. And I can kinda hear her bitching to Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard that they didn't give her more of them.