I LOVE LUCY
COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON
Five Disc Box Set
Distributor:
Paramount Certificate: Not Rated | 13
hours 7 minutes| Region 1 NTSC
Available to buy
Extras: Yes
ANYONE
IN IT WE KNOW?
Lucille
Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, William Frawley
WHAT’S
IT ABOUT THEN?
Lucille
Ball chaotic home and social
life brought to the small screen
in true sitcom legendary style,
Ball was a true sitcom pioneer
and this four series features
more of her in action with her
husband bandleader Ricky Ricardo
with the twist this season of
the duo moving their family from
New York
to
Hollywood
to boost Ricky’s film
career….
SO
IS IT ANY GOOD?
So
ingrained is Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy into the world consciousness
that is not always easy to comprehend how groundbreaking her and her
husband’s show was, whilst the situation is now an archetype seen in
every other show, back in the mid 50’s it was certainly novel, not
just that, 1950’s television before Lucy was very static, mostly live
and often boring, I Love Lucy managed to change all that with its
shooting on film and film techniques. You just gotta Love Lucy, a real
pioneer, by this fourth season the show was really at its zenith,
without question the most popular show on TV (the previous season had
featured a pregnant Lucy giving birth to baby Ricky and had been watched
by pretty much the entire nation).
Season
four though did spark some major changes for the series with Lucy and
Desi leaving New York for the sunnier climbs of Los Angeles and Desi’s
emerging film career and much of the first half of the thirty episodes
of this five disc set is concerned with leaving New York and setting up
home in Hollywood, one major plus of this allowed for a greater range of
big name Hollywood guest stars, this series features legends such as
Groucho Marx, William Holden, Rock Hudson, Richard Widmark, Van Johnson
and Harpo Marx to name a few and Lucy is often at her best and most
inventive interacting with these big names.
Paramount
are doing a fantastic job with there packaging of these Lucy series and
this new collection is quite simply essential for anyone who calls
themselves a classic TV fan.
ANY
SPECIAL FEATURES?
There
are some really choice extras on this set including a behind the scenes
audio featurette as well as five complete episodes of Lucy’s radio
comedy show My Favorite Husband; Various bloopers, restored music, the
original series openings and animated sequences, extensive production
notes and guest cast bios and Spanish subtitles and a Spanish audio
channel for most of the episodes. Good stuff.
