Colorized "I Love Lucy" 2013 CBS Xmas and May, 2015 Specials*

This is the color I've always imagined Lucy's hair to be:

 

At 8 PM on a Friday on CBS? I doubt very many. Plus, think of the show you're talking about. I watched Lucy everyday after school for years, and this was in the early '00s.

 

I had idealistic mental images of families gathering around the TV to watch it together.

 

Won the time slot and third watched show on Friday. Nice!

 

The ol' gal's still got it!

 

Top show of the night in the 18-49 demo, oddly enough.

 

When I saw Desi light up and smoke that cigarette on screen, I was [pleasantly] surprised someone hadn't digitally erased it - although I'm certain someone probably discussed the possibility.

 

http://www.hitfix.com/the-fien-print/tv-ratings-colorized-i-love-lucy-special-leads-cbs-on-friday

 

Maybe this will become a new Holiday tradition for CBS?

 

The orange was a little bit overboard, didn't she use henna?. The smoking caught me a bit off guard. Glad they didn't try to edit that out of the scene(s). Overall, I enjoyed the presentation. Was a little disappointed by the flashbacks being black and white.

Count me in. Mom/grandmother smoked cigarettes, grandfather cigars. Surprised I still have lungs.

 

Surprise surprise surpraahs. If they'd put digital beards on all the male actors the ratings would have been even higher. I joke not.

 

I did finally see the rebroadcast tonight and thought it looked like a total piece of crap. One giveaway of bad colorization is during the transitions, when the scene either dissolves to a new place or when it fades to black. The colorization guys never seen to be able to get this right. I could only take about 1 minute before I had to turn it off.

I think this is yet another example of Viacom being too cheap and tight-fisted to spend real money to do the job right. Take all the HD transfers of Lucy and spend $100K on each of them to really do beautiful, realistic color on every episode. It'd cost $18 million, assuming 179 episodes. They just won't spend the dough.

 

Or, just leave in in B/W, as it should be.

 

100K for each episode ? What....~ 25 minutes !

Somebody would be getting rich working on that !!!! Sheeesh.

 

Yeah, Vidiot, Sounds like you want a piece of that action.
Over hundred thousand dollars is way to much.
for 60 yr old yet popular show.
If they ever make colorized lucy set dvd set
it will remastered and colorized over seas.

I had no problem with Christmas special. It looked good to me.
The Italian movie was okay but was fun to see.
Lucy with grapes mess all over her in color.

 

I wasn't really impressed with the colorization work. Looked barely better than the stuff done in the 80s.

 

Thanks, Marc. I've been awaiting your opinions on this.

 

I thought the color quality was done pretty well except Desi's facial color looked a little unnatural.

 

It's essentially the same thing as animation. I'm totally guessing on the amount, but that's based on a conversation I had with a colorization producer about 5 years ago. It could well be cheaper now. It's all done overseas in the Philippines or Mumbai for the most part, very labor-intensive.

That's what I thought. But I'm pretty sure it was actual HD, vs. a standard-def copy up-rezzed to HD.

 

I want good black and white transfers but if the colorization helps them to sale then I don't care if both are offered. Now if the character of Fred Mertz is replaced with Hayden Christiansen then I will be up in arms.

 

JarJar Binks would be an interesting idea.

 

Or replace Jar Jar with Fred Mertz in Star Wars. Waaaaaaaa!

 

An instant improvement for sure!

 

Yeah, when my 16 year old son said "Her (Lucy's) hair is orange!", I told him that it was supposed to red, but the show was colorized.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I watched about 20 minutes of the show because I really wanted to enjoy it, but after the initial impact of color was gone, I lost interest. It's too bad because I used to love the show. B&W for me, I guess.

 

I'm sure there was an endless discussion as to what precise color Lucy's hair should be for the colorization project, and a lot of tests. My thinking is always that they should aim towards subtlety, not doing something blatant and over-the-top. The hair definitely had too much chroma in it, that's for sure.