Ear­li­er this week, we fea­tured the 99-year-old Dick Van Dyke’s per­for­mance in Cold­play’s new music video, full of visu­al ref­er­ences to the sit­com that made him a house­hold name in the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties. And a house­hold name he remains these six decades lat­er, though one does won­der how many of those who appre­ci­ate his extreme longevi­ty — both cul­tur­al and bio­log­i­cal — have ever seen an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. I myself only caught the occa­sion­al late-night rerun in child­hood, but how­ev­er much he indulged his char­ac­ter­is­tic goofi­ness, the thir­ty-some­thing Van Dyke in the role of com­e­dy writer Rob Petrie always struck me as the very image of mature adult­hood.

Whether or not you saw it in the first place, you can now watch The Dick Van Dyke Show’s five sea­sons free on Youtube, start­ing with the first here. They’ve come avail­able at a chan­nel called Film­Rise Tele­vi­sion, on whose col­lec­tion of playlists you’ll also find such pil­lars of mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion as Drag­net, The Lone Ranger, Bonan­za, and That Girl.

Hard though it may be to under­stand for any­one who came of age under the fire­hose of on-demand con­tent these reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled enter­tain­ments became ver­i­ta­ble cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions when they orig­i­nal­ly aired on major net­works in the fifties and six­ties, with an influ­ence that extend­ed far beyond their already con­sid­er­able view­er­ship.

The mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion grew up regard­ing shows of this kind as hokey but suf­fi­cient­ly amus­ing diver­sions when noth­ing more irrev­er­ent or post­mod­ern hap­pened to be on. At worst, they felt like infe­ri­or pre­de­ces­sors of the then-cur­rent sit­coms and dra­mas we were watch­ing in prime time. But then began the long “gold­en age” of pres­tige tele­vi­sion, with its new lev­els of aes­thet­ic and nar­ra­tive com­plex­i­ty, which changed our very con­cep­tion of tele­vi­sion.

Today, watch­ing The Dick Van Dyke Show or any of the oth­er hits with which it shared the scarce air­waves feels almost exot­ic, like trav­el­ing to the past: a for­eign coun­try, as L. P. Hart­ley famous­ly put it, where they do things dif­fer­ent­ly — and a few of whose cit­i­zens are, for­tu­nate­ly, still around to enter­tain us.

Relat­ed con­tent:

99-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Sings & Dances in a Touch­ing New Cold­play Video, Direct­ed by Spike Jonze

RIP Nor­man Lear: Watch Full Episodes of His Dar­ing 70s Sit­coms, Includ­ing All in the Fam­i­ly, Maude, The Jef­fer­sons, and More

757 Episodes of the Clas­sic TV Game Show What’s My Line?: Watch Eleanor Roo­sevelt, Louis Arm­strong, Sal­vador Dali & More

Dick Van Dyke Still Danc­ing at 96!

Revis­it Turn-On, the Inno­v­a­tive TV Show That Got Can­celed Right in the Mid­dle of Its First Episode (1969)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

In April, 1983, 50 mil­lion tele­vi­sion view­ers watched the illu­sion­ist David Cop­per­field make the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty dis­ap­pear, straight into thin air. If you’re north of 50, you per­haps remem­ber the spec­ta­cle. How did he do it? 40 years lat­er, the YouTube chan­nel Mind Blown Mag­ic Illu­sion demys­ti­fies the large-scale mag­ic trick, explain­ing how Cop­per­field dis­tract­ed the audi­ence, rotat­ed the stage, and shift­ed Lady Lib­er­ty out of view. That’s appar­ent­ly the gist of the illu­sion. How­ev­er, in the com­ments sec­tion on YouTube, one com­menter adds a lit­tle more impor­tant detail:

You missed the most impor­tant mis­di­rec­tion. He had a heli­copter with a bright spot­light shin­ing on the stat­ue for a con­sid­er­able length of time dur­ing which he apol­o­gized to the audi­ence and said they were hav­ing “tech­ni­cal prob­lems.” Even­tu­al­ly the cur­tain came across and the stage began to revolve imper­cep­ti­bly slow­ly. How­ev­er the heli­copter moved in sync with the stage. The beam of light appeared to be sta­tion­ary in rela­tion to the stage. When the cur­tain was lift­ed they saw the heli­copter in the same place but with no stat­ue. The beam of light also helped black out the back­ground. Oth­er­wise the audi­ence would have seen a dif­fer­ent sky­line. Pure genius!

For Open Cul­ture read­ers, it’s worth men­tion­ing that the leg­endary film­mak­er Frank Capra (It’s a Won­der­ful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Wash­ing­ton, It Hap­pened One Night) played an unlike­ly role in the pro­duc­tion. In an inter­view with Judd Apa­tow, Cop­per­field recalls how he enlist­ed Capra to help write the script for the episode:

So then I said [to myself] “Now the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty is going to dis­ap­pear, but I’ve got to make this have more mean­ing.” So I went to vis­it Frank Capra, one of my idols, and did a kind of Judd Apa­tow inter­view with him. I said, “I’d like the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty to dis­ap­pear, but I want to do it as a les­son in free­dom, how valu­able free­dom is and what the world would be like with­out lib­er­ty.” And Frank Capra looked at me and said, “David, I love your idea, but here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to try and it’s not going to work; it’s not going to dis­ap­pear.” And I said, “Mr. Capra, I can’t do that.” You know? [laughs] And I got to watch Frank Capra, in his eight­ies, in action.

You can watch some of the orig­i­nal 1983 footage below. Enjoy!

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