Lucille Ball would’ve turned 100 today, almost sixty years after I Love Lucy started cracking up TV viewers and never stopped. Read the full post.
Aug 6
2011
09:09 AM ET
Lucille Ball's 100th birthday: Blow out the candles with these classic clips
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I hope people will take a look at some lesser known Lucy series…The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy. Both are on DVD and are so funny…decades after the fact. Vivian Vance, Gale Gordon, Lucy’s own children, and various big-name at the time celebrities join in on the fun. No one does physical comedy like Lucille Ball (I rank John Ritter up there too) and she was in her 50′s & 60′s to boot!
I saw the Here’s Lucy shows of 1968, 1969 and 1970 when WTVD in Durham, NC aired it at 4:30 in the early ’80s. This was years before Oprah.
I love me some LUCY.
I am from the younger generation. I first watch I Love Lucy reruns in 1979 and 1980 on a Washington DC station that was in our cable system in North Carolina. All the shows are so funny and they are surprisingly fresh. The candy factory show, the Vitametavegamin show and a series of shows when they moved overseas as RIcky’s music career was accelerating are still the funniest. They tend to show the 1951, 1953, 1955, 1956 and 1957 shows the most. I have to check the year at the end of the show to figure out the show’s creative peaks. This comedy transcends generations. I watch a few shows from the marathon this weekend.
For me, the peak was the whole entire Hollywood trip and episodes there. From the car trip there to all of the many guest stars while they’re in Hollywood (my favourite being the “Hollywood at Last!” show with William Holden). Those took place in 1955, I believe. They went to Europe in 1956 and those were great as well. I tend to like the ones after the first season or so… after Little Ricky was born, for sure.
Has anyone ever noticed the blanket in Little Ricky’s crib? It’s of the stick figure Lucy and Ricky that they originally had for the bumpers with the commercials (I just discovered those during a marathon of uncut episodes)… anyway, you can see that embroidered with the heart around them on the blanket hanging in Little Ricky’s crib. I think it’s interesting to see it.
Even though LIfe With Lucy had dismal ratings on ABC in its short lived run 1986 and 1987, I still watched it. Her comedic timing was still sharp. Although it will never match the zenith levels of comedy of her ’50s hit I Love Lucy classic, I commend Lucille Ball for continuing to act in comedies in the late ’80s.
Unbelievable!! I hope to see her show through my TV software TVhook.
I’ve always been taught to not speak ill of the dead, but I’ll make an exception this one time. While Ms. Ball had one public face, the other side of that same face was… well, not very nice. I’m sure her public adored her, but to actually have worked under her iron fist was simply another matter. She was absolutely MEAN to a lot of her staff. I had the displeasure of working at Desilu studios back in the day, and while Mr. Arnaz was the type of guy you would be loyal to and practically want to do anything for him to make his business successful, his wife was the coldest most calculating SHREW I’d ever met up to that time! Mr. Arnaz did have a wandering eye for the ladies, and sad to say, I can’t rightly blame him. Lucy wound up with all the marbles as they say, and NOT because she was such the “SWEETHEART” the American Public thinks she was. Happy Birthday, Mrs. Arnaz! I hope it’s a tad warm where you are.
I will always love Lucy. I grew up watching “I Love Lucy,” and it’s still so funny. What a great actress she was! I also think it’s worth saying something about how great Vivian Vance was as Ethel. She was often put in the same physical comedy situations with Lucy and she was often equally funny.
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happy birthday lucy . you will all ways be funny forever.