The Dean Martin Show ran on NBC from 1965 to 1974, and sixty-one years after the premiere the question people still ask is who tragically passed away and who is somehow still here. This is the cast then and now in 2026, and the changes are shocking.

Dean Martin only took the job by handing the network a list of demands he was certain would be refused, one working day a week, no weekday rehearsals, every line printed on cue cards, and the standing right to refuse to sing. NBC agreed to all of it. The glass in his hand that America assumed was whiskey held apple juice, and the whole amiable drunk was a performance. He died on Christmas morning in 1995 at seventy-eight. Ken Lane, who sat at the piano and absorbed the jokes for seven seasons, followed him less than a year later. Les Brown of the Band of Renown, producer Greg Garrison, and the comic regulars of the later years, Dom DeLuise, Nipsey Russell, Rodney Dangerfield, Tom Bosley and Foster Brooks, are all gone as well, along with the two guests who walked through most often, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Junior.

The hardest loss was never on the call sheet. Dean Paul Martin, his eldest son with Jeanne, flew a fighter jet into a mountain in a snowstorm in 1987, and the man who had built a career on appearing not to care never really sang again. Daughters Gail and Deana Martin sang beside their father on that very stage, and Deana has spent years touring the family songbook.

You would never recognize some of them today. Leave the year you remember watching in the comments, and subscribe for a new one every week.