Dick Van Dyke is still going at the age of 93, dancing up a storm in Mary Poppins Returns and appearing at the 2019 Golden Globes, but that might not have been the case if it wasn’t some lifesaving porpoises.

Once when surfing once Mr. Van Dyke fell asleep on his surfboard and woke up only floating far from shore.  “I woke up out of sight of land,” he told Craig Ferguson during a 2010 interview. “I started paddling with the swells and I started seeing fins swimming around me and I thought ‘I’m dead!’”

But, as we saw when Mr. Van Dyke danced with penguins in the original Mary Poppins, nonhuman creatures are his friend. “They turned out to be porpoises and they pushed me all the way to shore. I’m not kidding.”

Besides appearing in one of 2018’s hottest movies, he also made some headlines recently when it was reported that the tired jokes about Dick Van Dykes’s name came became too real. It seems cable company Comcast’s voice search wouldn’t let its users search for the actor deeming his name offensive. The “bug” has since been fixed and I assume all of their customers can now go back to enjoying his classic comedy antics.