Some old shows don’t age well…but I’ve been on an “I Love Lucy” kick (which has been showing on channels here regularly, still, sometimes five-six episodes in a row) lately and it’s occurred to me that this show isn’t one of them.
Sure, not every episode has aged well, but I’m finding most of them still very funny and even downright hilarious. It was such a good show and even today, it’s held up well. I’ve watched the first or two seasons over the last week and yeah, it still makes me laugh. It still seems like it was way ahead of its time. I mean it’s referencing terms and stuff that just seem like it could have been a sitcom set in the 80s rather than the 50s.
I don’t know…maybe I’m off, but if a show can still make me laugh regularly even though it’s almost 70 years old, that’s a show that I feel is a timeless classic, though and though.
Lucy’s stuff in general has aged pretty well. I’ve got a DVD collection of The Lucy Show, and, especially the episodes after the format change, they hold up quite well.
(I think the biggest issue with the pre-format-change episodes is they seem to be trying to recreate I Love Lucy without Ricky, and it doesn’t work as well. Would have been nice to have Vivian Vance carry over to the new format, but…)
I’ve rewatched it again on DVD recently. The thing I like about the DVDs is that they also feature episodes of Lucy’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband” and you can see how the writers reused their scripts for ILL and readapted them to the new setting.
On the radio show, Lucy’s character is a suburban housewife married to a (non-Cuban) bank executive. They have a wise-cracking maid, and the husband’s boss (Gale Gordon, of course) and his wife Iris (Bea Benaderet) also get involved in their wacky adventures. It’s interesting to me to see how some of the maid’s lines and Iris’s both wind up going to Ethel.
Bea Benederet was an old sitcom hand. She was on the Burns and Allen show, played Cousin Pearl in the Beverly Hillbillies, and starred in her own show, Petticoat Junction. She also voiced the characters Granny and Witch Hazel in a few old Looney Tunes cartoons.
That reminds me of how many recycled plots there were on Bewitched, both from the black and white days and with the new Darin. What’s worse, though is how they would recycle full jokes–sometimes in the next episode.
I bring it up as one of the reasons why some other shows don’t age well. Crossing from radio to TV and two different shows is one thing, but the TV show didn’t treat it’s audience like they wouldn’t know old TV plots. And they did not repeat jokes wholesale, even when they were following a formula.
I Love Lucy will be the reason aliens seeks us out.
To destroy us. Gods, I hate that show! Wasn’t funny then, isn’t funny now, won’t be funny after Alien Armageddon.
As a kid I watched a ton of old syndicated tv shows. This was one of the few that I just never really liked at all. My older sisters loved it, so I’ve seen plenty of episodes.
Well, some people will see Casablanca for the first time and sneer at all the cliches. They don’t appreciate the fact that when the film was made, they weren’t cliches, they were fresh. The same thing with I Love Lucy. I get bored/impatient when I see an episode now, but that’s because I remember the episodes and what’s going to happen. But the first couple of times, they’re really entertaining.
I still love the chocolate factory scene or the one with Lucy and Harpo Marx.
A few weeks ago, DECADES ran a weekend binge of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I remember watching it as a tiny tyke, but really didn’t remember a whole lot about it other than the characters’ names. I thought I’d watch one or two to jog my memory. It really held up a lot better than I thought. The writing was pretty funny, and Frank Faylen as Dobie’s dad was scenery-chewing hilarious. I ended up watching quite a few episodes, and have been binging on more through YouTube.
One gag that went way over my head back then, and I almost didn’t pick up on it now: William Schallert had a recurring role as English teacher Mr. Pomfrit. That’s a homophone for “pommes frites,” or what we Americans call “French fries,” and the British call “chips.” So Schallert was actually playing… “Mr. Chips.”
Next weekend, DECADES is running a binge of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, but frankly, I have no problem skipping that one.
She was a real forerunner in TV, both in her willingness to do physical comedy (for a woman) and in how the episodes were shot using three cameras (which hadn’t been done with a sitcom before). None of it is new now, but it was innovative then.
And yeah, William Frawley was a first class prick.
I like OTR a lot, I’m currently working through the “Great Gildersleeve,” which didn’t transfer at all well to TV from radio. Unlike “My Favorite Husband” did.
A lot of it is that it’s just plain silly. And once you accept the situations, it’s fairly timeless. Husband vs Wife, male vs female, best friends fighting and so on. I love how Fred worries about finding a tenant for his nice NYC apartment building, like that would happen today. (Yes, I know the address used on the show places Fred’s building, actually it’s Ethel’s building, in the East River :))
On the flip side I know of a lot of people under 30 that love “All In The Family,” and that show is so topical, I often wonder how they can relate to it.
It’s timeless for me, too. I have all the DVDs. I don’t usually re-watch shows, so this is rare. I love anticipating certain scenes; when Lucy tells Ricky she’s pregnant at the Tropicana; rehearsing for when Lucy needs to go to the hospital, then it all going to Hell when she actually goes into labor; Ricky showing up at the hospital in his work clothes ; all of vitameatavegemin; etc.
; all of vitameatavegemin; etc.