Good Morning World

For anyone wondering what The Dick Van Dyke Show would have been like in color, here you go. Another reviewer said it was similar to Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that's a good analogy. The biggest difference is Seinfeld was tailored for network broadcast, while CYE found its niche on cable. Unfortunately for Good Morning World, there was no cable in 1968. Coupled with a second-tier group of actors and that TDVDS had expended the audience for the show's premise, Good Morning World was destined to fail.

Honestly, what's really surprising (and actually rather laudable) was how the writers for GMW managed to come up with new ideas for scripts (lame as they might have been) rather than taking the easy way out and just recycling old TDVDS ideas.

But, really, when watching GMW, you have to imagine the DVDS actors, plus the sets being in B&W, and you quickly realize that there's not a lot of difference between the two. The sad fact was that TDVDS' time had simply passed and no one was interested in a color version with different actors.

The veteran producers of Dick Van Dyke had a hand in doing this show. They did a great job. The entire cast of the show was really solid. If you want a prime example of how hot Goldie Hawn was as a young woman, this series really shows her off. This was before Laugh-In.

Billy De Wolf was an excellent Station Manager for this show. His mannerisms on this show were borrowed by Pat Paulsen when he was doing sketches on the Smothers Brothers Comedy hour. De Wolfs character is a classic.

Jodie Baker & Ronnie Schell really complemented each other well on the show as the morning DJ's who were always getting into trouble. I wish the ratings had kept this show on longer. It was the best sitcom on CBS during its short run.

CBS remembered it well as they took the format for this series, tweaked it, & brought it back as WKRP In Cincinnati. When you watch this, it is very obvious where the latter show had its roots. WKRP was a great show in its own right, & lasted longer, but without this show, there would have been no WKRP.

If you see this show anyplace, pick it up. Good Morning World is a 1960's classic. The introduction of each episode has a 1960's flair with the fast shower, shave, & freeway trip to work.

OK, the producers of this show wrote the Dick Van Dyke Show. Problem is they produced this show and didn't write for it. It's not funny. The characters are one dimensional. Carl Reiner wrote about the writing staff of a prime time comedy-variety show because that's what he knew. Apparently, nobody connected with this show had any experience working in radio (unlike WKRP, even though that experience was about 20 years out of date). The situations are dull and not believable. Amazon Prime is showing it now so we can all see how bad it was.

It seemed the show was mainly about Dave's and Larry's personal lives and hardly anything about their radio show or the station they worked at unlike WKRP years later.

GOOD MORNING WORLD is a mid-60s hybrid of the Occupational Sitcom and the Domestic Sitcom. They took as their format the classic "Dick Van Dyke Show" mix of 50% Rob Petrie's home life and 50% Rob Petrie's work as a TV gag writer.

In this case, the single protagonist becomes two men and the workplace shifts from TV to radio, but otherwise things are fairly familiar. Richard Deacon's fussy producer was replaced by Billy DeWolfe's fussy station manager.

The main change was that by going with two men, the show was able to do both happily married plots and bachelor dating plots. In the latter case, dating involved newcomer Goldie Hawn, doing an early version of the ditsy character she later developed for LAUGH-IN.

Like most sitcoms, individual episodes' plots are long-forgotten aside from an occasional story that stuck in the memory for some reason. In the case of GOOD MORNING WORLD, it was the "Nude Ranch" episode. The guys had been sent to do an overnight remote broadcast from a "dude ranch." But when they got there, they discovered to their horror they were at a NUDE ranch. This being the still-uptight age of sitcoms, the humor was limited to the guys' nervousness at being around nude people (who were of course mostly off-camera aside from some above-the-waist shots on a couple men). The guys do their first show and retreat to their room, dreading the fact they are to be guests of honor at dinner that night. They decide they have to appear.... The next scene shows them bare-chested as they sit in the still-empty dining room. They hear the sounds of the ranch guests approaching.... And see that everyone is fully dressed. The nudists explain "We always dress for dinner!" but thank the guys for their thoughtfulness in appearing nude. The guys admit they chickened out and stand up, revealing large towels firmly in place.