"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: THE END OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

[And yes, I'm not ashamed to have also used that heading!]

So there you have it - my day long marathon salute to 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' on it's 50th anniversary. Now it's time for me to collapse!



When I come out of my coma, I'm going to dive right back into blogging about 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'. But this time, I'll be sitting back and relaxing as I read all of the other entries from so many bloggers who took part in the blogathon hosted by Ivan at "Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear". I'm sure it was a big success, one that would put other blogathons to shame.

And just remember, folks....

It is better to ride one block in a Cadillac than it is to walk five miles......

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: ROB'S DAD #3 - J. PAT O'MALLEY

J. Pat O'Malley
as "Sam Petrie"

This is the third installment of our look at the three actors who played Rob Petrie's Dad.

With Tom Tully and Will Wright, at least both characters had different first names - Sam and Edward respectively - so that I had something to begin with when splainin away how Rob could call both of them Dad, and how Clara Petrie, played by Isabel Randolph, could be so accepting of both of them in her presence when she could only be married to one.

But what are we to make of the third man to call himself Rob's Dad, played by great character actor J. Pat O'Malley? He says his name is Sam, and in the episode "What's In A Middle Name?", he just can't shut up about the name.

And yet his physiognomy is so different from that of Tom Tully's that we can't use the splainin of plastic surgery. He doesn't look like a candidate to be a quantum leaper from the future, and there's no evidence of magical activity.

But we could go the way of science fiction for an answer......

In 'The Twilight Zone' episode "The Fugitive", J. Pat O'Malley played Old Ben, a shape-shifting alien from another planet which he fled after serving 1,000 years of a 5,000 reign as their monarch. Like the Time Lord known as the Doctor, he was bored and wanted to go off in search of adventure.


He was hding in plain sight as an old man, in a small town in the Mid-west. And there he befriended a little girl named Jenny when agents of his planet's Council arrived to bring him back to serve out his reign.

"The Fugitive" aired in March of 1962, while his first appearance on 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was set back in early 1955. (That's when all the in-laws gathered to lobby Rob and Laura with their personal choices for the unborn baby's name.) But 'The Twilight Zone' can defy Toobworld convention when it comes to the stories taking place around the same time in which they're broadcast. Many of them were set in the far future, and a few in the distant past. Some crossed over from one to the other!

Just because "The Fugitive" was broadcast in 1962, that doesn't mean it had to take place at that time. It could be set several decades in the future after Old Ben's impersonation of Sam Petrie. That would splain the aging difference between the two characters, Old Ben being exactly that - old.

But Old Ben - or whatever His Majesty's name really was - had the power to "morph" into anything else - a fly, a weird alien monster, or even into a clone of Jenny herself. So maybe the whitened hair and the mustache were just alterations to his general Earth-bound disguise.

(Whatever glamour device he was using to disguise himself, it didn't operate along the same lines as that seen in 'Quantum Leap'. With that show, the audience viewing back in the Trueniverse could always see Sam Beckett, no matter which life he was living out. They'd only see the glamour if Sam looked in the mirror. In this case, Old Ben was using a glamour on top of a glamour, but we could only see the one disguising his true form - that of a young humanoid king. Everybody else within the reality of Toobworld would have seen Tom Tully's version of Sam Petrie while he was so disguised.)

So why was he impersonating Sam Petrie? Beats me. Maybe Old Ben needed a place to hide out, so he left Sam Petrie unconscious in the car while he took his place in the family's discussion. When the coast was clear, he would have revived Sam, maybe downloaded the appropriate memories in his mind, and then - as he would say, - he skedaddled.

And why would he have returned again, making a big stink about burial plots? (As seen in "The Plots Thicken".)

We know Old Ben had a lot of strange alien devices at his disposal. We saw him use one to heal Jenny. Maybe he stashed them all in that burial plot near his favorite hole on the golf course and wanted to make sure at least somebody knew where to find them in case something happened to him.

Who knows what kind of reasoning goes through the mind of an alien?

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: ROB'S DAD #2 - WILL WRIGHT

Will Wright
as Edward Petrie

Here is part two of our look at the three actors who played Rob Petrie's Dad.....


Will Wright was the first one to play Mr. Petrie and the only one not to get a flashback episode.

I could see him being Rob's biological father, as they're both long and lanky and long in the face. And if he was the man who raised Rob up, I could see Rob's sense of humor developing a defense against his father's stern nature.

But Will Wright did not play the man who raised Rob. He was, however, his father. His biological father.

First off, let's clear up an error to be found in the IMDb.com and many other sources of information about the show. Will Wright was NOT Sam Petrie. Clara clearly addresses him as "Edward" when he goes overboard acting out the story of Tommy Turkey for Ritchie.

And it's never said that they are visiting Rob and Laura on Bonney Meadow Road as husband and wife. When either of them talks about the other, it's "your mother says" or "your father thinks", something along those lines.

Edward Petrie is the cousin of Sam Petrie, Clara's husband. I would have made the familial connection closer, as brothers, but the differences in their facial features are too severe to suggest that they're siblings.

It's the Toobworld theory that when Sam realized he couldn't father a child with Clara, he decided that he would seek outside assistance in getting her pregnant. And since he wanted his child to be of the Petrie bloodline, then he would ask another male in the family to help them out.

Once Clara agreed to this proposal, Sam turned to his cousin Edward for help.

Edward must have had only two conditions to the plan - he had to be allowed to share in the experience of raising the child, and that when the child was old enough, they should be told the truth of his parentage.

So eventually, Rob learned that his second cousin "Uncle" Edward was actually his biological father. And as he was asked by Edward that he should call him "Dad" as well.

And that's what Rob does in the episode.

This may have been an outcome unforeseen by Sam Petrie, and it caused a rift between him and his cousin. It must have come to pass that if Sam was going to visit with his son, Edward couldn't be there as well. Conversely, if Edward expressed an interest in seeing Rob, then Sam decided he would stay at home in Illinois.

No matter who went to visit Rob, Clara made sure that she would make the trip as well, because she loved her son and didn't want to miss out on any chance to see her grandson Ritchie. (As for Laura? Meh.)

So that's my theory to splain away that Rob could call both men Dad, and why neither one is seen when the other is around.

Still... we have to splain what the hell J. Pat O'Malley was doing there.....

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: ROB'S DAD #1 - TOM TULLY

Tom Tully
Rob's adopted father

This is part one of our look at Rob Petrie's dad, and the three actors who played him.....

Tom Tully may have been the last to be seen on our TV screens as Rob Petrie's father, but in the "Petrie Chronologie" (which I am compiling), he was actually first. He and his wife, Clara, arrived in Missouri from Illinois to visit Rob and Laura one month after they were married in 1951.

His Sam Petrie is the man who raised Rob Petrie as his son. He's the father who put Rob through school, saw him off to the depot when he joined the Army, and despite everyone trying to convince him that he was NOT funny, this Sam Petrie was the man who imbued a sense of humor into his son.

But he is NOT the man who fathered Rob.  He did, however, adopt him....

Dunh dunh dun DUNH!!!

Here's the Toobworld theory:

For years, Sam and Clara Petrie were unable to have children, and medical examinations determined that the problem must lie with Sam and not Clara.

Since he knew how much his wife wanted to have children, Sam suggested that they try alternate means to get her pregnant rather than turning to adoption.  The plan he came up with was to ask someone they both knew and trusted and liked to... carry out the task for them.

And so they chose Sam's cousin, Edward Petrie, to be the biological father of their child.

As it would turn out several years later, Sam was able to get his wife with child and Clara would give birth to Stacey Petrie.

This would make Rob and Stacey Petrie half brothers, whereas in the real world they are played by full brothers Dick and Jerry Van Dyke.

To be continued....

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: "MY THREE DADS"

I mentioned earlier in the day that there was one more recastaway discrepancy that had to be addressed on 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' - that of the three actors who played Rob's father.

Here are the three actors and the episodes in which they appeared, in chronological order:

Will Wright
"Empress Carlotta's Necklace" (1961) … "Sam" Petrie
[The quotation marks are mine. This entry from the IMDb.com is in error.]

J. Pat O'Malley
"What's in a Middle Name?" (1962) … Sam Petrie

"The Plots Thicken" (1964) … Sam Petrie

Tom Tully
"Pink Pills and Purple Parents" (1964) … Sam Petrie

"The Curse of the Petrie People" (1966) … Sam Petrie

Now, that is the order in which the episodes were broadcast. If we follow the timeline for the show's inner reality, it would look more like this:

Tom Tully
"Pink Pills and Purple Parents" (1964) … Sam Petrie

J. Pat O'Malley
"What's in a Middle Name?" (1962) … Sam Petrie

Will Wright
"Empress Carlotta's Necklace" (1961) … "Sam" Petrie

J. Pat O'Malley
"The Plots Thicken" (1964) … Sam Petrie

Tom Tully
"The Curse of the Petrie People" (1966) … Sam Petrie

"Pink Pills And Purple Parents" takes place about a month after Rob and Laura were married, while he was still stationed at Camp Crowder in Missouri. According to my timeline, that would have been 1951. "What's In A Middle Name?" happens after the in-laws learn of Laura's pregnancy with Ritchie. So I make that to be sometime late in 1954. (Like Larry Mathews, Ritchie was born in August of 1955.)

This triple recast of Petrie Senior can't be splained away with plastic surgery. Quantum leaping is really too far out there (even if I do use "guardian angels" to splain away all of Frank Adamo's roles on the show.) However, one of my splainins for one of these actors will have a sci-fi basis from another TV series of that time......

Maybe you can guess which Pere Petrie and which TV show?

We'll continue in a "moment" with the first splainin for "My Three Dads"......

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50 - BAM! POW! ZOOM! TO THE MOON, LAURA!

If we take these frame grabs from "Pink Pills And Purple Parents" out of context, we could mak a pretty good argument that this version of Rob Petrie must be from the Evil Mirror Universe!

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: THE RIFLEMAN

Once again, I'm in a bit of a delay getting the posts done in time for each hour. To hold you over, here's a Toobworld trifle.... with a rifle.

We know Rob Petrie exists in other TV dimensions. He's been seen in the Tooniverse, thanks to the animated 'Alan Brady Show' (and seen as a TV show in several episodes of 'Family Guy'), and with Mary Tyler Moore's TV special from 1969, we learned that in Skitlandia, the sketch comedy dimension, their son Ritchie grew up to be gay.

But how about the infamous Evil Mirror Universe?

If only we had such a pose of Dick Van Dyke as he looks today, we could have claimed that the photo was from the Zombie world as seen in 'The Walking Dead'.....

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50 - MAKE ROOM FOR KOLAC

Getting down to the wire, so I thought I'd write up a story about my favorite episode from 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' - "It May Look Like A Walnut!"......

There's a very good reason why Rob Petrie thought that the main character in the sci-fi horror movie "Invasion Of The Twiloites"* looked like Danny Thomas.

And, no. It's not because he was played by Danny Thomas. Well, yeah, he was as far as the real world is concerned, but I'm talking within the inner reality of Toobworld.

No, it's because the character was being played by an actor who looked like Danny Thomas.

With 20/20/20/20 hindsight, I think the main actor in the movie was Danny Williams, a night club comedian who would occasionally make forays into the magic world of the movies.

"Invasion Of The Twiloites" (for want of a better title, and quite frankly, I like it!) sounds like it was a cheaply produced movie that hit the movie theaters soon after "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" grabbed the public's attention. And the producers (probably located at Mammoth Studios as seen in 'The Beverly Hillbillies') thought that Danny Williams would help them with marquee value.

Or - more likely - he was the best they could get for what they were willing to pay.

Even if you don't think this theoretical connection to 'Make Room For Daddy' is viable, in the long run it doesn't really matter. The connection is already there between the two sitcoms, thanks to a crossover appearance by Buddy Sorrell:

October 21, 1963
BUDDY SORRELL WRITES FOR KATHY WILLIAMS
Kathy Williams appears on a talk show to tell insult jokes about her husband, night club comic Danny Williams. She hires Buddy Sorrell to write her jokes.
('Make Room For Daddy' - "The Woman Behind The Jokes")**

BCnU!

* Oh, why not? After all, the plot sounds like "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers".....

** That's an excerpt from "The Petrie Chronologie" which I wasn't able to complete before today's deadline came up.

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50 - A TOUCH OF GRACIELLA

In 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' episode "Who And Where Was Antonio Stradivarius, Rob was conked over the head with a real violin instead of the breakaway prop. He suffered a concussion and eventually fell under the delusion that he was Sgt. Antonio Stradivarius. He wound up in Red Hook, New Jersey, at a party where he met a flighty young loverly named Graciella.

For Graciella, it was love at first sight. She fell hard for "Tony" and when he disappeared from the party, she tracked him down to Bonney Meadow Road in New Rochelle. There she had her heart broken when she learned that her Antonio Stradivarius was really Rob Petrie and that he was already married to Laura.

As all of her friends found out about her humiliation, Graciella was too embarrassed to remain in Red Hook. She was too embarrassed to stay in the same sitcom! Her kinfolk told her "Move away from there!" So she loaded up her car and moved to Beverly... Hills, that is.

Graciella wasn't her real first name, you see. I think she was a free spirit, one of the last of the Beat Generation. It's my belief that she changed her name to Graciella to suit her personality, and that her real first name had been Grace.

And as for her last name? I'm going to claim it was Swenson.

Grace Swenson had family in California - her uncle Larry Chapman ran Mammoth Pictures which ended up being purchased by Mr. Drysdale for his bank's largest depositor, Jed Clampett. When she got to Hollywood, she visited Uncle Larry and he hired her on the spot to be his personal secretary. (Chapman always hired relatives - four of his nephews were producers.)

Since her last name was never mentioned in 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' episode, and her first name was never mentioned in the three episodes of 'The Beverly Hillbillies', Toobworld Central is combining the two characters to be Grace "Graciella" Swenson.

If you get a chance, watch the episode "Who And Where Was Antonio Stradivarius?" Sallie Janes, the young lady who played Graciella is so sweet and beguiling, and with such a great vocal delivery. It's a shame that the only other credits in her IMDb listing are 'Top Cat', 'Surfside 6', and a Bert Convy variety show.....

'The Dick Van Dyke Show' - "Who And Where Was Antonio Stradivarius?"

'The Beverly Hillbillies' - "Jed Becomes A Movie Mogul"

'The Beverly Hillbillies' - "Clampett City"

'The Beverly Hillbillies' - "Clampett City General Store"

BCnU!

"THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW" @ 50: FROM THE CHOIR INVISIBLE

ROB PETRIE:

"Where can we find somebody nastier to Mel than Buddy?"

SALLY ROGERS:

"How about Mel's wife?"

["Buddy, Can You Spare A Job?"]

I don't know when it actually began as a television trope, but a lot of sitcoms have characters that are never seen:

Carlton the Doorman ('Rhoda') - And gorilla masks don't count!

Dr. Lars Lindstrom ('The Mary Tyler Moore Show')

Vera Peterson ('Cheers')

Maris Crane ('Frasier')

Sam ('Richard Diamond')

Wilson of 'Home Improvement' straddled both worlds by only being partially seen in the show.

Maybe Mrs. Bloom of 'The Goldbergs' and Mr. Donaghy from Jackie Gleason's "Joe The Bartender" sketches were the first. And how come we never saw Mr. McMann of the McMann & Tate advertising agency in 'Bewitched'? (My guess? He was already dead, wearing the chains he had forged in life.)

'The Dick Van Dyke Show' also had its own invisible characters. For a while, Alan Brady topped the list but only for a season or so. (Anybody who's seen "Coast To Coast Big Mouth" knows that.) But he did start out as an unseen presence at the office, then he was heard on the TV and intercoms, and finally made his first appearance - J. Beresford Tipton style - in the episode "The Sleeping Brother".

Another invisible character on the show, and part of an honored tradition at that, is Marge. She was the receptionist for the floor on which the writers' room was located. Marge, like Sarah down in Mayberry, North Carolina, and Richard Diamond's secretary Sam, was never seen, always on the other side of the phone line. (But we do know that she was blonde.)

But the invisible character on 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' I'm going to discuss is Mrs. Mel Cooley.....

JACKIE BREWSTER:

"So how did he get such an important job?"

SALLY ROGERS:

"Easy. He married the boss' sister."

JACKIE BREWSTER:

"Ohhhh, he's a brudder-in-law....."

["Buddy, Can You Spare A Job?"]

According to Buddy, that's how Mel Cooley got the job as the producer of 'The Alan Brady Show' - by marrying Alan's sister.

Mrs. Cooley was mentioned frequently on the show, mostly due to that accusation of nepotism. But she was never seen in a single episode.

But - as some of you may have suspected by now - this televisiologist begs to differ.

I say we saw her in the episode "The Twizzle".

(You many want to avert your eyes, Ivan.....)

Sally Rogers dragged Rob and Laura as well as Buddy and Mel up to a Stamford, Ct. bowling alley to see her discovery of a young singing sensation and the latest dance craze he inspired. She gave them all little time to prepare, which is why Mel and Buddy arrived there stag. (Apparently Ritchie was already staying overnight next door at the Helpers' home.)

But at the end of the episode, they were all back at the bowling alley, dancing the Twizzle. This time, they must have planned the date in advance, so Buddy and Mel had time to bring their wives along as well.

Although it looked like Buddy was once again flying solo because his wife Pickles was nowhere to be seen, I prefer to think that the former showgirl was in the ladies' room, "powdering her nose".

And Mrs. Cooley?

She can be seen to the right of the screen, just behind Rob, in the striped shirt as she dances the Twizzle with her husband Mel.

Like I said, Mel must have had plenty of notice to take his wife out for the night. And he wasn't there to scout talent - Randy "Twizzle" Eisenbower already made his appearance on 'The Alan Brady Show'.

And she looked older than the kids in Randy's age group.

However, I'm sticking by my theory that she's Mrs. Mel Cooley nee Brady.

Every character in Toobworld who is mentioned but never seen must have a physical presence in that world. Isn't nice one of them finally defied the script?

BCnU!