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(Image: CBS Television)

In 1997, Dick Van Dyke was paid around $200 for doing some CGI special effects on an episode of Diagnosis Murder.

Okay, they weren't on the level of creating alien spaceships, or huge city vistas or anything like that, but an episode of Diagnosis Murder called for a motorcycle stunt which the production crew thought was pretty much impossible to do, and couldn't afford to film.

He told the LA Times: "Well, I went out to the location and shot some background plates and then I came back and put a 3D computer-generated guy on a motorcycle doing the stunt and they used it on the show."

And here is the sequence.

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It says something for his enthusiasm and skill that something he did for fun that weekend back on a home computer rig in the late 1990s, slots in beautifully with the rest of the filmed bike stuff, and stands up rather well.

That said, he doesn't tend to make his skills public, and does the animating for his own pleasure more than anything else.

It turns out he was always secretly a fan of optical special effects, and even went as far as buying the same green screen equipment used to make the car fly in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to muck around with at home.

(Image: Rex)

When the Amiga Toaster system was released in the late 80s, which allowed you to render 3D computer animation with photographs to a video output from a home computer, he got completely addicted.

In fact it ate all his spare time: "If you had 15 frames to render it took all weekend," he said.

Lightwave 3D was originally software incorporated into that Amiga version, but was eventually launched as a standalone PC product in 1994 and Van Dyke got straight on it. He had particular fun animating caricatures of himself dancing and these ended up in The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited - a reunion show made in 2004.

He also got a nod for computer graphics in the credits at the end of the show, making him probably the most unlikely CGI artist with professional credits in the history of film and TV!

Here's some of that action:

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Although the 89-year-old hasn't publicly presented any work for a decade, the passion he spoke about tinkering with the kit he had back in 2004 at the Siggraph Lightwave stand was so adorably palpable it's incredibly unlikely he's given it a rest.

Here's the video he created to be presented there - it features a cartoon version of himself doing a dance, and then pretending to be drunk.

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He has said he would love to make his own CGI feature film.

We can only hope that dream comes to pass.

Think about it. He clearly knows what he's doing, and apart from anything else - a CGI animated film by the star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins - it would be ace, wouldn't it?