Inside Dick Van Dyke’s CBS special — and how set replicas had him ‘almost in tears’

nypost.com:

The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so ingrained into the fabric of early 1960s pop culture — and lovingly replicated to within inches of its original form.It joins a replica of the rooftops and chimneys from “Mary Poppins” and the flying car from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” in recalling Van Dyke’s multi-faceted career in the CBS special, airing Dec.

21 at 9 p.m.“The star of the show is Dick Van Dyke himself, the legend, but the co-star is the set,” said Craig Plestis, co-executive producer of “Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic.”Plestis, who developed Fox’s hit series “The Masked Singer,” worked with Van Dyke when he appeared on that show last February (as the Gnome). “I became friends with Mr.

Van Dyke and when it came down to what I could do differently here to make it really special … with my set designer we came up with this idea that when he walks onto the set everything around him would be something from his past, from one of his movies, TV shows … they would all come to life,” Plestis said.“He was floored and was literally almost in tears when he walked onto the set because it instantly reminded him of everything from ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ to ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ to ‘Mary Poppins.'”The centerpiece of the stage is the set from “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” The iconic series aired from 1961 to 1966 with co-stars Mary Tyler Moore, Rose Marie, Morey Amsterdam, series creator Carl Reiner and Richard Deacon.“What we did first on the stage itself was re-create an exact replica of ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ living room within an eighth of an inch [of the original],” Plestis said. “We re-created the artwork over the fireplace in the corner that probably no one will ever see, and the knobs on the fireplace.