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As a teenager growing up in the early 1960's, I was a big fan of "The Dick Van Dyke Show". And this episode is the one I remember the best, after all these years. It is a flashback to when Ritchie was born and Rob becomes convinced that the hospital accidentally switched their baby for another one born at the same time of a family with a similar name. The climactic moment (which I will not reveal) was both one of the funniest things I ever saw on television in my life and an amazing demonstration of how American attitudes were changing. I have read that this is Dick Van Dyke's personal favorite episode, and I completely agree with him. Apparently, the live studio audience laughed so long and hard that the cameras had to stop until they calmed down and the actors could continue.

I would guess that today the shock of this moment is lost to a great extent, but for its time, it was an astonishing, courageous moment - and also side-splittingly funny.

This must be the only truly bad episode of "The Golden Girls". One star is one too many.

It was a completely artificial attempt to create a spin off, and it fails spectacularly. After a few minutes of enjoyment with the regular stars of the show, out of nowhere, a whole family of new characters pops in, and the rest of the show is about them. Dorothy and the others act react to them as old friends and acquaintances who we are supposed to know already. This is so abrupt and out of the blue that I thought I must have missed a previous episode. In which these characters were introduced.

Since these new characters are only mildly and occasionally amusing, they are completely out of place in what is usually a constantly entertaining and very funny show. Usually, a spin off uses characters developed and part of an already-existing show. In this case, none of the new characters had ever appeared in "The Golden Girls" before, so there was no way the audience was going to care about them or find them instantly interesting.

No surprise that the spin off never spun off.

For anyone interested in the history of animated cartoons, this is a fascinating glimpse of early Disney work. It is not a classic, but nevertheless full of clever and amusing moments. Given the fact that there was no sound track (though the version I saw had music and minimal sounds) and very few words written on screen, the story-telling is amazingly clear. The sight gags are delightful, some of them clearly inspired by (or stolen from) Chaplin and other silent-movie comic geniuses. But what Disney understood right from the beginning is how to use the medium of drawn animation to go far beyond what real-life comedians could do on screen. One example: when one character yells "HELP", the letters of the word kick Oswald to get his attention and point toward the damsel in distress to direct him. Even Chaplin couldn't have come up with a sight gag of that kind.