Here's a video from 2004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1J9kfDCAmU
It's his 100th birthday today.
Here’s a great quote by him:
> In my 30’s, I exercised to look good. In my 50’s, to stay fit. In my 70’s, to stay ambulatory. In my 80’s, to avoid assisted living. Now in my 90’s, I’m just doing it out of pure defiance
Seemingly a universally liked man. So much so, that dolphins rescued him when he fell asleep on his surfboard aged 84.
The intelligence and benevolence of many marine mammals is vastly under appreciated.
Reportedly, dolphins are notorious rapists. So maybe there's more to this story...
Maybe intelligent species have a lot of variance? There are good and bad dolphins, like there are good and bad people.
> It clearly wasn’t ’that bad’ for most human history given how prevalent it was. But in the modern world we are trauma merchants.
What in the actual fuck kind of logic brought you here to that conclusion? I worry for you and whatever content you’ve consumed over the years that allowed you to build up this theory.
gettin some real shit hacker news commentors say energy with this one
They're certainly not backwards about coming forward with their tummy bananas...
When nature is on your side you now you have it good
There are few (maybe no) moments of Dick Van Dyke that aren’t a joy to watch. I grew up on reruns of the Dick Van Dyke Show and discovered Andy Kaufman thanks to Van Dyke’s short-lived variety show, Van Dyke and Company. Watching his dance moves (it’s a little amazing to realize how many dance numbers the Dick Van Dyke Show featured) is like watching an animated character dance, he was able to move his body in ways that suggest he has no bones. As a kid, I wanted to be Dick Van Dyke when I grew up and as an adult, I want to be Dick Van Dyke when I’m old.
> a joy to watch
The man is a brilliant comedian. He knew some of the greats; he is one of them.
The Comic (1969):
He’s also digital animator. The dude is unbelievable. What a creative mind
The whole "The Dick Van Dyke Show" is available for free on YouTube, I highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-HsXBPWH3Y&list=PLtbMv4lXX2...
Good starting points would be the Christmas Special (Alan Brady Presents), “It May Look Like a Walnut” and “That’s My Boy” (just off the top of my head). There are two episodes where we got to see Van Dyke’s Stan Laurel impersonation which was absolutely amazing. Given how much he drank and smoked back in the 60s and 70s it’s a miracle he’s still on earth, but he is definitely a treasure.
My understanding is that he was alarmingly drunk when they went to film his dance sequence with the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins.
Alarming in a "Mad Men" era of drinking...
Is it commercial free? Also available in Prime Video and Peacock Premium if you have those.
I had no idea he's an animator, that's so cool! In that video he says "Lightwave is so deep, I won't live long enough to see everything that's in it". I'm glad he's proven wrong there!
I know his son Barry. He said his first memory he has was his Dad doing real time drawings for people telling stories. He was behind the story teller on stage on giant pads of paper as a comedy bit at night clubs.
He also remembers having giant bags of toys dumped on the floor of the hotel rooms.
Many A-listers are polymaths. For example, Phil Hartman, used to be Phil Hartmann (extra "n"), and designed some of the most iconic album covers of the 1970s, and Steve Martin is one of the best banjo players out there. It used to be part of his standup bit.
Dick Van Dyke came from the tail end of Vaudeville, where performers had to have a whole variety of skills.
Remember: Every one of these folks that hits the limelight, beat out thousands of others.
We think our vocation is competitive? Showbiz says "Hold my beer."
> Steve Martin is one of the best banjo players out there
And he’s great with a lasso!
I love his albums with Edie Brickell, he’s good with Steep Canyon Rangers, and more recently have heard him shine with Alison Brown (banjo), Sierra Hull (mandolin), and others in his latest tour.
If you’re looking for the top banjo players technically, you might check out Béla Fleck, Jens Kruger, Noam Pikelny, Tony Trischka, Bill Keith, Don Reno, and Earl Scruggs. I’ve personally heard superhuman performances by Jens Kruger in-person and I grew up on Scruggs.
I have a fond memory of my dad taking me to see Roy Clark when I was a little guy.
Just looked it up and saw he did an album cover for Steely Dan. It reminded me that Chevy Chase was an early drummer for Steely Dan (well, before they became "Steely Dan")
The album: Aja -- a masterpiece.
Thanks for the correction -- I was hasty with my search and trusted the link that proclaimed that he did it.
Hedy Lamarr was a prolific inventor. Among other things, she developed a frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio transmission technique for torpedo guidance and donated the patent to the US Navy during WW2.
That's "Headley!" (Blazing Saddles reference).
And of course, there's Sir Doctor Brian May.
Many of the early electronic musicians were basically engineers (you had to be, to use some of those old synthesizers).
I believe that the frequency hopping technique is still used everywhere today, for things like wi-fi and Bluetooth.
For completeness: Billy Connolly was also a banjo player.
I believe that the banjo is common in Celtic bands. There's a pretty strong relationship between the music of Appalachia, and Gaelic music.
He even outlived Ligtwave!
THE Dick van Dyke, from Mary Poppins, Diagnosis: Murder, ans so many more?! I always thought it was just a coincidental same name as I never saw videos about this. Oh my! This guy is amazing
Very much so. Really decent chap, too.
Terrible cockney accent, though...
No one mentioned it to him during production, so he didn't know.
A few months ago I found The Dick Van Dyke Show free to watch on Youtube. I had seen a number of the episodes in passing over the years, but never really watched it. It's really quite a good show. Highly recommended, even if YouTube's viewing experience for TV series is sub-par.
Some of those older comedy shows had really good writing. The Bob Newhart shows were also excellent.
Bob Newhart was Mr. Rogers for adults. Good show!
He sang probably the greatest song in musical film — Hushabye Mountain in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfdRr7MWax4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeCBVerpYj8
If you have never seen this film, I don't care how old you are, you should watch it. It is overshadowed by Mary Poppins but it is a work of art — a funny, charming, astonishing visual feast of a film and he is magnificent in it. His performance as the jack-in-a-box alone is worth an Oscar:
> If you have never seen this film, I don't care how old you are, you should watch it.
I’m not sure about the all ages part. We watched it in first or second grade and I can still remember wondering how a movie with a flying car could be so boring.
That's on you.
I did the same when it came out, and was thrilled.
> That's on you.
And now that you've brought this to my attention, the weight of this responsibility - that I didn't like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in elementary school - weighs heavily on my heart. Thanks a lot.
I just saw a tweet saying his birth was closer to the death of Thomas Jefferson (1826) than it is to today. Wow.
It’s a fun fact that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same day, July 4 1826, 50 years to the day after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
Ironically enough, Adams’ last words were reportedly, “Jefferson lives”
For those who don't know the story: it's ironic because Jefferson died first.
The grandson of the 10th US president died this year. The US is barely three generations old. That guy could say his grandfather shook hands with Thomas Jefferson.
I think it was Bertram Russell who said he was raised by his grandfather, who knew Napoleon.
The modern world is a lot more crammed together than we think it is
If you have never played the backwards-lifetime game, you should.
Take your current age and work backwards that same number of days, months and years before your birth. Every year something else remarkable is added.
At my current backwards age, World War II is the best part of two decades away; the UK is still recovering from World War I. Rocket 88, the first rock and roll song, won't be written for nearly another three decades. Women still can't vote in the UK, the Wall Street Crash is several years away.
When my father (who knew one of the most important men in medical history in his younger days and who was working in medicine not long after the NHS was founded) died, his backwards age reached back before the germ theory of modern medicine.
Another interesting game is to use your "oocyte age" — about 32 weeks before your mother was born is roughly when the oocyte developed that led to your egg. In my case this too is before World War II started.
Oh I like the oocyte idea - it’s actually concrete
It reminds me as well that I am a wave - the cells that make up my body have all been formed from food I ate in the past decade or so - my skin my liver my heart my brain. None of it is what is was when I was 18. But I still think it is.
And that reaches back to my mothers own birth is amazing.
Yeah, he's very old for a person and the US is very young for a country.
A nice tribute at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/13/dick-van-dyke-c...
> The beloved actor credits his remarkable longevity to his positive outlook and never getting angry.
Makes sense. My grandpa is one year his junior and you would never see him react too strongly to anything, even though grandma (also still alive) always had an, ahem, fiery personality.
Also he refuses to sit and moves around all the time, venturing outside every day from their apartment four floors above ground without a lift.
Interestingly his own father didn't make it to his 60s, so there's certainly a lifestyle component to this.
Here's the mentioned segment from "Diagnosis: Murder": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WeZKOPcaeA
Wow I had no idea, what a cool guy! Loved Mary Poppins as a kid, his British accent though… xD
Bonus: here are two videos where he spoke at SIGGRAPH 2004
Part 1 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1J9kfDCAmU>
Part 2 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0IGjoo5gRg>
\m/ happy birthday Mr Van Dyke!
source: <https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/obe3v6/95_year_old_d...>
My clearest recollection (don't know the episode) is when he attends an event, probably in place of Alan Brady, that turns out to be a big fund-raiser. The Hostess addresses him as Mister Petrov. When asked for a donation, he is stupefied, and can only say "I have this blank check" ... no spoiler ...
The comedy show within a comedy show is a cool dramatic and operatic trick.
Magnificent delivery.
And then Commodore made the A3000 not high enough to take the Video Toaster. How to shoot yourself in the foot...
I've heard of him but have never seen any of his content, what should I watch?
it's quite possible you may unknowingly have seen him in Mary Poppins, where he plays _two_ roles, and I was mind blown when I noticed the second after 30 years or so.
Such a legend! I bet he still has his Amiga somewhere in his Hollywood hills mansion.
For Mary Poppins, Disney used the sodium vapour process to get monochromatic light into a narrow channel for matte from a light splitting prism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_vapor_process
It's charming. I'm sure digital post offers many advantages. Van Dyke might be one of a few who has done both.
a Corridor Crew YouTube video describing/recreating that sodium vapour process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
Kind of a tangent comment
Tangents are a sine of the times.
cos of this economy?
He was an animator and it's the interesting kind of factoids we read these comment sections for. We'll allow it.
You missed the pun
He sold his Amiga not too many years ago. It may have been on eBay.
Such a likeable person.
the dick van dyke show is an absolute masterpiece
Amazing that he was 80 in that clip
Respectable people
Props to ggm for finding a tech angle.
“How an elephant got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
[dead]
I am getting a paywall so I will skip this article.
The filming of the Jolly Holidays sequence is worth watching on its own as an example of his physical comedy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgBvbdZU7yo
He was also an alcoholic for many years. Must be made of pretty good stuff to survive this long.
Of all of my grandparents and great grandparents, they all lived really hard lives eating high fat diets, drinking and smoking, and lived into their 80s. Genetics is really the biggest determining factor outside of going completely off the rails with binge eating and drug use.
Now, that's not to say that healthy living is pointless. Their quality of life from late 60s on was not great: alcoholism, poverty, multiple heart attacks, emphasima, a stroke here and there, from which they eventually, sort of, not really recovered. They were deeply unhappy people who never really seemed to have time or care for their families. I definitely don't want to live like that. So treat yourself right, but not because you're trying to reach a certain age.
> Genetics is really the biggest determining factor outside of going completely off the rails with binge eating and drug use.
So true. I'm fortunate that both my parents have long-life family histories. Both families were old-fashioned Southern Baptists who didn't drink, smoke, dance or, apparently, believe in having fun of any kind :-). But that just kept them from messing up their good genetic luck. I'm an old-fashioned atheist but have chosen to never drink, smoke or do drugs just because I never saw a compelling reason to. Now I'm pushing 60 and have so far had zero serious health issues. Hoping to keep a good thing going.
There's not no reason to eat fatty foods (they're delicious) or do drugs (they're a lot of fun). Life is for living, too. But everything in moderation.
Beware survivor bias.
In a population of equally vulnerable genetics and stochastic outcomes, there will be families that all live long.
We are wired to attribute that to something.
> they all lived really hard lives eating high fat diets
ICYMI the low fat diet craze was built on lies and corruption, fat isn't bad for you. Sugar is.
I don't think it's that simple.