Entertainment Weekly says CBS is quickly scheduling the following for tomorrow night…

The Dick Van Dyke Show — Now in Living Color! A Special Tribute to Carl Reiner will air Friday, July 3, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Reiner served as creator, writer, and costar on the beloved sitcom, which aired for five seasons, from 1961 to 1966. A CBS news release confirms that Reiner personally supervised the colorization of the episodes.

In "Coast to Coast Big Mouth," Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) blurts out a secret on a nationally televised quiz show, revealing that comedian Alan Brady (Reiner) wears a toupee. As for "October Eve," it centers on a painting of Laura that returns to haunt her when, despite her having posed fully clothed, the artist, Sergei Carpetna (Reiner), takes the liberty of "undraping" her. (In addition to being a favorite of Reiner's, "October Eve" was the only episode in which he portrayed someone other than Alan Brady.)

We who know The Dick Van Dyke Show backwards, forwards and inside-out know that last sentence is fake news. In the episode, "I'm No Henry Walden," he portrayed someone other than Alan Brady. He played the budding English anti-existentialist Yale Sampson…

By the way: The lady chatting with "Yale Sampson" is Betty Lou Gerson who, a few years before this show, had supplied the voice of the evil Cruella DeVil in Mr. Disney's 101 Dalmatians.

The other night on my webcast, Leonard Maltin and I got to talking about movies we liked but which are difficult to see. He mentioned the 1940 version of Swiss Family Robinson produced by RKO and starring Thomas Mitchell, Edna Best, Freddie Bartholomew and Tim Holt, with narration by an uncredited Orson Welles. As Leonard explained it, when the Disney folks made their 1960 version of Swiss Family Robinson, they purchased the RKO version and removed it from circulation.

Leonard is right, as he always is, but it had apparently slipped back into circulation. Reader-of-this-site Steve Feustel wrote me to say that the 1940 version and the 1960 one are both streaming these days on Disney+. (I don't have that channel by the way. I decided not to spring for it until I get through all the currently-unwatched Disney DVDs I have in this house. Which I just might do by the time the virus is gone but not much before.)

In the meantime, reader-of-this-site Daniel Frank informs me that The Art of Love, which is the film I mentioned, is coming out on DVD and Blu-ray in September from Kino Lorber. I am cautiously recommending this film because I last (and first) saw it when it was released in 1965 which is, after all, 55 years ago. I liked it a lot then. I might not now.

It has a good cast: James Garner, Dick Van Dyke, Elke Sommer, Angie Dickinson, Carl Reiner, Ethel Merman, Roger C. Carmel and Jay Novello. It was written by Mr. Reiner and directed by Norman Jewison and was for some reason advertised as "Ross Hunter's The Art of Love." That was back when producers sometimes got possessory credits.

If you want to trust the tastes of me when I was thirteen years old — and I sure wouldn't — you can advance order a copy of the DVD here and the Blu-ray here. Or you can wait 'til I get a copy, watch it again and tell you whether it's as good as I thought it was then. I'm a little cautious because when a few years ago I told Dick Van Dyke that I really liked it, he gave me a startled look and said, "Really?"

An "at home" number performed by my pal Jason Graae, who can be heard on a ridiculous number of original cast albums of musicals…

Here's an interesting fact check.  It's not about a speech some politician gave or an article by some pundit.  What's being fact-checked here is Hamilton.  That's right: The musical.

The Fixer Uppers is the name of a Laurel and Hardy film that's not on this great new release called Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations. Here's the simplest review I can give it: If you're a fan of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, you will want this. You will want it a lot. It's two of their feature films (some would say their two best) plus many of their short comedies, all miraculously restored. You probably have seen these films but you've never seen them look or sound this good.

That alone would be enough to warrant buying these on DVD or, as I did, Blu-ray. But the set also comes with extras galore, including 2,500 rare photos and documents, several commentary tracks, trailers, interviews with folks who worked with Stan and Ollie, plus various odds 'n' ends. In truth, I have not made it through the almost-nine hours of material on this set but I've already gotten more than my money's worth.

I talked about this last night on the webcast with Leonard Maltin, who loves this set as much as I do. We're close to the same age. We first experienced Laurel and Hardy mostly on TV, which meant watching bad prints with many splices, missing scenes, garbled sound tracks, commercial interruptions, etc. Those of us who loved old movies back then put up a lot of that, plus the fact that we could only see the films we craved when some TV station deigned to show them. And you had to watch them when they ran them, not when it was convenient for you.  You couldn't even go to the bathroom unless you could get there and back during a commercial break.

I was not the only Laurel and Hardy lover who had the following fantasy: A room in my home with a screen, a projector and shelves with one print of every Laurel and Hardy film. At the time, that fantasy involved 16mm films, which were hard to find and maintain, and I was sometimes clumsy threading them into a projector. You could have spent years and way more money that any of us had and not make that fantasy come true…and the prints probably wouldn't have been that wonderful if we could even have found them.

We did not dream of home video and digital restoration. You have no idea how it pleases me to see these films looking this good.

I have one teensy-tiny microscopic quibble with one thing about this set and I'll address it in another message here shortly. It in no way should prevent you from buying this magnificent creation which I expect to be raving about even more as I savor the rest of the nine hours. At a time when the news is usually bleak and in some ways getting bleaker, it's nice to have something that makes me so happy. Thank you to the Fixer-Uppers who fixed-up that which was in need of fixing-up.

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.

• I keep seeing people saying, "I can't breathe with one of those masks on." For some reason, I haven't seen anyone reply, "Well, maybe you haven't found the right one, pal."

• The story keeps shifting but right now it seems to be that Trump got a written brief about the Russian bounties but didn't read it and you can't blame him because no one reads everything. So say a lot of people who would have demanded Obama resign immediately if he'd done that.

Carl Reiner was the friendliest, most talented person in show business. Or if he wasn't, he was tied with a couple of other contenders for the title. He was a guy I admired not just for his fine work as a writer, producer, director and performer but for just the way he was as a person. Every time I was around him, he was an absolute delight…funny, engaging, willing to talk with anyone about anything. He was just what you'd want an idol to be.

He was a role model for how to be truly successful and sane in show business. He didn't care about stardom…just doing good work. When he created a sitcom to star himself and they told him they wanted someone else to star in it, he said, "Fine. I'll just write and produce it." And we got The Dick Van Dyke Show and he got all the rewards and accolades and offers. When he interviewed Mel Brooks as The Two-Thousand Year Old Man, Carl knew that he was the straight man and he should act like a straight man and not, as most comics would do in that situation, say or do something to remind the audience, "Hey, I can be funny, too!"

And he was a role model for how to get old without getting inactive and useless. He mastered the Internet and wrote books and he was on Twitter often with witty and wise observations about current events. When I heard this morning that he'd died at the age of 98, my first thought was, "Aw…Carl won't get to see Donald Trump go totally down in flames."

He was involved in a lot of stuff I love like the various Sid Caesar shows, the Van Dyke program, the records with Mel, some great movies (I just happened to watch The Thrill of it All the other night)…he was one of the best talk show guests ever…he was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and so what if he didn't like it very much? He was in it.

I just liked Carl Reiner. I liked not just what he did but who he was. My condolences to Rob and Mel and all of us.

The last of the great variety show comedians, Alan Brady, has died at the age of 98. Like most of then, Brady was rumored to not be the nicest man off-stage and there are tales of him verbally abusing his longtime producer Mel Cooley and of having an ego that dwarfed his talents in size and scope. Some even said he wasn't the comedic genius he claimed to be; that it was his fine writing staff that made him the star he was for so many years.

Perhaps. But let us not forget that he made an awful lot of people laugh over the years. So what if he wasn't the friendliest, most talented person in show business?

He's got another one…

George Conway, one of the anti-Trump Republicans behind the Lincoln Project, says this…

This Russian-bounty story is as huge a presidential scandal as there can be. It's an order of magnitude more outrageous than what he got impeached for, even though the Ukraine scandal was plainly criminal from the beginning. And it's clearly not going away.

He's right. It's like Fate (call it God if you like) is telling us, "You've really, really got to get rid of this Trump guy" so every week, it gives us a new outrage which on its own would be reason enough…a pandemic, a horrific abuse of power, a racist appeal, riots that bring out the worst in him, a financial scandal…now this. Jonathan Chait ticks off all the different ways the White House is defending itself and, like most White House defenses, they confess as much as they try to explain.

• I may start betting money on which outspoken person who says the virus is a hoax and we should stop wearing masks and reopen everything will be the next to come down with COVID-19. It's like every day lately…