I would love to see those, they were invariably the best part of her show (unless she was doing a duet with, say, Lena Horne or Ethel Merman). Millions of Carol Burnett episodes have been released on video or DVD, but they’re all complete episodes, so you have to fast-forward through the unbearable charwoman or Eunice sketches to get to anything good.
Went with the Wind . . . The Doily Sisters . . . 43rd Street . . . A Swiped Life (“Do you have a 3 million watt bulb I could borrow?”) . . . Mildred Fierce (“Kids! What are you gonna do?”) . . . Torchy Song . . . Double Calamity (“We found your husband sticking out of a tuba at the Rose Bowl game with a mouth full of marbles and three bullets in his back. We think it’s an accident”) . . . Golda . . . Flora . . . Why the hell has no one released these on DVD?!
It’s a lot easier just to transfer a tape then to go through every episode and pull out excerpts. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone comes up with the idea of doing all the parodies, but that would probably not be for a few years yet.
And let’s face the facts, Eve, you probably do not resemble the typical viewer in this regard. Relatively few viewers are going to have a love of old movies that’s as great as your own.
I’ve never even been able to find full episodes on DVD though I haven’t exactly looked hard. I wish they could make Carol Burnett DVDs where they take out all the Tim Conway. Then I’d be pretty damn happy.
Sounds like a great idea Eve. Which skit had her playing an old time Hollywood Actress getting into the back of a station wagon? I think it might have been a parody of “Sunset Boulevard”.
I still love “Went with the Wind” and the curtain rod scene still gets mentioned and laughed at. I think that was my favorite scene in all the long run of her show.
That piece actually made TV Guide’s list of ‘100 Greatest TV Moments’ a few years back. Those sorts of lists are usually pretty goofy (de gustibus & all that), but it’s hard to argue with that one. I literally fell out of my chair laughing the first time I saw that bit. (No, I mean really literally. When I was able to breathe again after the “I just saw it in the window …” line, I found I was sitting on the floor, with only a vague memory of how I got there. Brilliant.)
My family watched Carol Burnett religiously, and I vividly remember her movie parodies. As a kid, my first exosure to old movies were these spoofs. I’d be watching the real film years later for the first time and suddenly realize I had already seen it on Carol Burnett’s show in the form of a parody.
Eve, am I remembering right? Didn’t the real Ruby Keeler step into the 43rd Street spoof and actually perform a dance number? She got an enormous hand, IIRC.
Nope, you have completely hallucinated that; if I recall, Bernadette Peters was the guest star that night (God, I’m old!).
I remember the Laura/Flora, Double Indemnity/Calamity and A Swiped/Stolen Life as being particularly funny . . . But that was 30 years ago, maybe they don’t release them because they’re not as good as we remember?
I also remember laughing a lot at that scene, although in retrospect I wonder why. I was a kid then and don’t think I’d seen Gone With The Wind, so I didn’t catch the reference, although seeing the curtain rod in the dress probably did it.
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