Friday, December 19, 2008

"I Love Lucy" in Color!

I just had to share this neat vid from YouTube, which is home movie footage taken by an audience member at a 1951 taping of I Love Lucy! It's amazing!




For the whole story of behind the footage, visit its YouTube page!

4 comments:

Jane said...

This is fantastic. Great find Lisa! Ricky looks like he's about 18 years old in this clip.

LAGal said...

Wow! Wow! Wow! Great footage. Desi Arnaz never got the credit he deserved. Considering he wasn't an actor he had superb comic timing. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

I totally agree with Jane and Judith, these clips are great. Just one question -- if an audience member was responsible for the footage, did he/she (probably he) bring in a large professional film camera? Obviously there were no camcorders in the 50s. Given my very basic knowledge of my Dad's cinemegraphic period, these clips look too good for that time, so I wonder what camera was this audience member using? Also, why are there jumps from black & white to color. I agree the content is great but tonight I'm feeling obsessed with the technical. What do you guys think?

Lisa said...

According to the YouTube poster, the audience person had a regular 8mm home movie camera, just like our Moms and Dads when they took home movies of us all! Snuck it in, obviously! And the person who posted it juxtaposed the episodic footage with the home movie footage so that we could see the sequence in the episode and what the home movie-taker took of it.

It's like the people who snuck cameras into Broadway shows and now sneak vidcameras in, and I say hurrah, because otherwise this kind of amazing footage never gets taken! You can find lots of fascinating Broadway footage on YouTube -- many obsessed fans of, say, "Wicked" took movies from their seats and posted them.

But the Lucy stuff is extra-amazing, isn't it?