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CBS airs two colorized I Love Lucy eps tonight, including Superman!
Started by Sci-Fi Girl , May 17 2015 09:37 AM
I Love Lucy Classic TV Classics Superman George Reeves
New 'I Love Lucy Superstar Special' With 2 Colorized Classic Episodes to Air Sunday, May 17 on CBS
Newly Colorized Episodes of "L.A. at Last!" and "Lucy and Superman"
To Be Seamlessly Combined
Special Includes Additional Footage Not Broadcast in 60 Years
I LOVE LUCY SUPERSTAR SPECIAL, a new one-hour special featuring two colorized back-to-back classic episodes of the 1950s series, will be broadcast Sunday, May 17 (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
"L.A. at Last!" finds the Ricardos and Mertzes arriving in Hollywood, where Ricky is appearing in a new motion picture. Star-struck Lucy is anxious to meet some movie stars up-close, and decides to have lunch with the Mertzes at the famed Brown Derby Restaurant, where she meets film star William Holden and causes a major mess. Ricky innocently complicates matters when he meets Holden at the studio later, and invites him home for coffee.
In "Lucy and Superman," Lucy and longtime friend and rival Caroline Appleby want to schedule their child's birthday party on the same afternoon. Lucy finally "wins" the battle by promising that TV superhero Superman will appear at Little Ricky's party. However, things take a hilarious turn when the "Man of Steel" has a scheduling problem and Lucy decides to replace him.
Edited by Sci-Fi Girl, 17 May 2015 - 09:41 AM.
#2 RJDiogenes
RJDiogenes
Idealistic Cynic
Unsurprisingly, I disapprove strongly of colorization. Nice of them to air some classic TV on a network, but they should respect the material.
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#3 FarscapeOne
I have to agree. Particularly when it comes to horror movies.
Something about colorization of classic shows like that makes the magic of the show kind of disappear. Glad they never did that with original THE TWILIGHT ZONE or THE OUTER LIMITS.
#4 Christopher
FarscapeOne, on 17 May 2015 - 06:35 PM, said:
They did once, I think. I remember way back when, there was a movie-length special debuting three Twilight Zone episodes that had never been included in the syndication package before, including "Miniature," an hourlong (fourth-season) episode with Robert Duvall as a man who discovered and fell in love with a doll-sized woman inside an elaborate dollhouse in a museum. As I recall, the scenes inside the dollhouse were colorized, and it was advertised as kind of a big deal, because the technology was still pretty new. (Come to think of it, it was probably Ted Turner who had the broadcast rights to the series at that point, so it may have been done to promote his colorization process.)
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#5 gsmonks
gsmonks
Tree Psychiatrist
Rats. I deliberately avoided this, and now I'm wondering if any of you guys saw it.
I was 100% against colourised b & w until WWI In Colour came out. Because all the footage is silent, sound was digitised into the production as well. I'm a big fan of the late 19th century, early 20th, and this documentary transformed the way I saw and understood the period, made everything seem a lot more modern.
But- maybe this is a bad comparison?
You be the judge:
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It's not really the same thing, I suppose, but it reminds me of what I'd say when people would tell me how wonderful it was that they replaced the original special effects in Star Trek with brand-new special effects-- that it's just as wonderful as colorizing black-and-white movies and lip-synching dialogue into silent movies. Sometimes I wonder if I was kidding or not.
Gene Roddenberry said many times that he was doing the best he could in the special effects department with the budget he had to work with. There's a fan-updated version of The Doomsday Machine floating around YouTube with actual special effects instead of the embarrassingly bad papier machete cone used in the original. I preferred the updated version, hands-down.
I was vehemently against the updated STAR TREK episodes because I felt they would not be true to the series and just be ridiculous. However, the clip from "THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE" won me over to at least give the episodes a shot. I was quite pleasantly surprised by the results.
I really believe with what they did, had Roddenberry and everyone had the technology then, those episodes would look very much like the remastered ones on dvd. That remastering crew deserves a lot of credit and kudos, in my opinion.
That is one of the extremely rare situations where I love the remake as much as the original.
#9 G-man
Is there a problem?
I dunno, it's kind of hit or miss with me.
I still find the original interior of the Doomsday Machine's maw to be far more frightening and effective in the original version than in any of the remastered versions I have seen. Unfortunately, all the remastered versions opted to tweak the "wind-sock" design as opposed to referring back to the original specified design.
By the same token, I also prefer the original effects of "The Immunity Syndrome".
The show was made at a certain time and place, and it is fascinating for me to see what they could accomplish with what they had at that time. Yeah, with some shows (e.g. Doctor Who, Blakes 7) what they had left a lot to be desired, but Star Trek wasn't one of them.
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#10 Christopher
While the TOS-R effects aren't perfect, there are some that are just really cool. I particularly like the ones that replace recycled stock shots from the original with something new and different -- like the wide variety of planets they put in place of the 2-3 different planet models that kept getting reused through different-colored filters in TOS. Or the new ship and starbase designs that replaced stock footage in episodes like "The Ultimate Computer," or the designs for ships we never got to see at all like the Antares in "Charlie X." The best was the gorgeous new digital painting for Flint's mansion in "Requiem for Methuselah," which worked so much better than the reuse of the Rigel fortress painting from "The Cage."
#11 G-man
As I had said, it's hit or miss.
Yes, it's nice they could insert effects shots that, for budgetary reasons, the original series had to forego; but for me, the wide variety of planets and exotic space shots they had inserted were distracting because they drew attention to themselves by their ... prettiness and level of detail.
#12 gsmonks
Speaking for myself, as far as I'm concerned the original Trek may as well be colourised today because we had a black & white set back in the 60's. I only saw the series in black and white. Same with the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Lost In Space. Although they were advertised as being "in living colour", we saw 'em all in black and white. Same goes for The Invaders and everything else.
We didn't get a colour set for a long time because the early colour was so freaking bad. I remember babysitting for our neighbours back in the 60's, and they had one of those sets with the three colour dials you had to set. You could never get it right, and it was different for each channel. My Jurassic memory is saying Sony Trinitron . . . anyway, everything looked better in black and white in those days.
My personal favorite shots were the great new angles showing off the Enterprise in all her beauty.
#14 RJDiogenes
It doesn't matter if something can be made more technically advanced by the fashions of today-- that doesn't make it better. Early photographers and moviemakers used black-and-white film because they had to-- today photographers and moviemakers use black-and-white film for the sake of artistry. Charlie Chaplin made silent movies because he had no choice-- but dubbing dialogue into a Charlie Chaplin film would not improve it. Ray Harryhausen animated his creatures by hand because he had no computers available-- but no computer can match the artistry of Ray Harryhausen. Studios only make these so-called upgrades because there is a segment of the audience who refuses to watch black-and-white movies or who think that human-made special effects are cheesy. Who else but an accountant would think that realism improves art? These things should be left alone and appreciated as they are.
#15 Omega
Maktel shcree lotak meta setak Oz!
Art can transcend the limitations of the medium, for sure. Some art is defined by those limitations. (Twitter?) And art is subjective, so what is art and what is not varies from viewer to viewer. So where one viewer might see an update as violation of art, another might see it as overcoming limitations and improving it.
TL;DR YMMV
Edited by Omega, 19 May 2015 - 08:37 PM.
RJDiogenes, on 19 May 2015 - 06:02 PM, said:
Ha-ha! Careful! You're going to turn into a curmudgeon! And a Luddite! The wheels of "progress" stop for no one.
Omega, on 19 May 2015 - 08:36 PM, said:
I wouldn't say limitations, so much as definitions. Haiku and Limericks have very strict definitions to their composition. But a Haiku is not improved by turning it into a Limerick.
gsmonks, on 19 May 2015 - 11:44 PM, said:
Heh. I've always been a curmudgeon-- I learned that from reading Harlan Ellison. But definitely not a Luddite. These days I scan all my artwork and do all the heavy lifting in Photoshop. And I even dabble in CGI. I love new things. But I also love old things, and I don't think people should be so cavalier about the genius to be found in the past. MC Escher did pretty well without 3D modeling-- in fact, he kind of superseded it.
I'm the same way. My house is a mixture of the old and the very new. I've got the latest recording technology, but my pie-anna was made in 1886, I have a green pressed-glass fruit bowl made in 1898, I've got lots of 19th century brass instruments, I rescued a huge old beast of a Hammond church organ, which dominates my livingroom, I have lots of antiques (washboard, ice box, clay pottery ware, mechanical hand-crank meat slicer, dome clocks with spinning mechanisms, sextants, Roman coins, you name it) and endless other odds 'n' sods. I get boxes of candles from thrift stores and garage sales for heap-cheap, so I rarely switch on an electric light- only when I actually have to see something.
The old stuff had quality, it was built to last, and much of it, if taken care of, will last centuries.
What says it all for me is something that happened at the neighbour's a few years back. My neighbour's son and a family friend were struggling with a chainsaw, trying to get it going. They whiled the morning away, yanking, sputtering, cursing, making the odd cloud of smoke. I finally got tired of listening to them suffer, got my granddad's old wood-frame bucksaw, which I have hanging on my livingroom wall, went outside, and in less time than it takes to talk about it, lopped the dead 6" branch off the tree they were trying to trim and tossed it in the back of their pickup.
Gas 'n' oil mix used? Zero.
Noise? Minimal.
Time? Less, actually.
The look on their faces? Priceless!
True. But the new limerick may also be of artistic merit, and that merit may be greater to some beholders than that of the original work. I suppose "improved" is a vague term when talking about things the quality of which is impossible to objectively quantify.
gsmonks, on 21 May 2015 - 12:23 AM, said:
Sometimes I wonder how much of that is survivor bias. Maybe 95% of it was crap, just like today, but all that has been trashed in the intervening decades. If it's lasted a hundred years, it's clearly indestructible! Of course, from our standpoint it makes no difference.
Love it. Of course, I'd have just gotten out my plug-in chainsaw and 80' extension cord. I don't understand why people with postage-stamp yards get gas yard tools! Hugely more trouble and cost, for no gain at all...
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