User Reviews

• that final exchange between Rob and Laura got past the censors.

(After a passionate kiss on the giant, inflated raft): "Rob? How do we deflate this?"

"Hmm??" (Then, realizing she means the raft:) "Oh, yeah! Well, there should be a valve." (They start looking for the valve)

Wonderful stuff for the full 25 minutes, leading up to that - yes - VERY racy final colloquy!

My father once asked me where writers get ideas. So I rummaged through my dvds and showed him an episode of "The Andy Griffith Show" where a goat ate dynamite, then an episode of "F-Troop" . . . Where a goat ate dynamite.

This "Dick van Dyke Show" episode, where Laura opens a rubber raft in the house, is a direct steal of the plot of a "Fibber McGee and Molly" (radio) episode where Fibber buys a rubber raft and accidentally opens it in his house.

Of course, Fibber, as usual on that show, was the culprit. Here, a much more sinister twist was added to make it the result of a woman's curiosity. Only Mary Tyler Moore's brilliant reactions make this episode palatable to a modern viewer. After all, on the radio it wasn't Molly who did it but who,, as usual, gave the man a Casandra's warning. And frankly, on the radio it was tons funnier because it all took place in one's imagination.

Though nearly forgotten today, except by we in the cognoscenti, "Fibber McGee and Molly," along with Jack Benny's show and a few others, was one of the most popular shows broadcast in the radio era and it ran for nearly twenty years. How often it and other older shows were mined for their material by "Dick van Dyke" writers I can't say, not being an expert. Once through was enough for me. Except for Rob and Laura, the winsome couple in the lead, "The Dick van Dyke Show" has little to recommend it.

Unlike its source this sexist little episode shows how dumb women are. Ha-bloody-ha. It's one of the most popular episodes, yet it illustrates the nadir of originality.

Though speaking of the much funnier "Fibber McGee and Molly" (disclaimer: I was born on the TV age and came to old radio shows in my 30s), its most famous moments were the rare (yes, comparatively rare) times someone on that show opened the hall closet, to a veritable avalanche of sound effects. One of my favorite "DVD" (Dick van Dyke) episodes was the one where Laura slid out of the closet on a bed of walnuts. So their repeated thievery wasn't all negative.

At least this episode, as best I recall, wasn't weighted down with one the show's multitudinous boring flashbacks. That's a mercy.