I was channel surfing today and chanced upon the beginning of this episode. I hadn't seen even so much as 15 minutes of one of these shows since the 1970's, and was curious if it was as bad as remembered it. I was totally unprepared for what I saw today.
You see after a couple minutes of rather bland expository dialogue with Ms Ball, Gale Gordon, and Little Lucy and Little Desi, the whole episode becomes purely an extended chase sequence at LAX involving numerous airport ground vehicles, machines and baggage conveyors.
At first I just thought it was just typical 1960's juvenile, corny slapstick, and I felt a little impatient for the plot to advance. Then I realized: other than the fact that 2 bad men are chasing Lucy and Gale Gordon all over LAX due to the requisite MacGuffin, there is no plot to this episode.
The whole episode is a kind of meta-humor, humor about the nature of humor (which, paradoxically, is not itself always humorous). But this I must admit, while not causing me to actually laugh, I found strangely amusing...two aging comedic thespians dashing all about LAX, with some jerky radically under-cranked footage on the baggage conveyors that looks strangely like a subtly surreal kind of 21st century digital effect...and vaguely suggests the creepy stop-motion animated Lucy puppet in the credits sequence.
By the end, it reminded me somewhat of the Monty Python 'Confuse-A-Cat' sketch.
All this, when I had only expected typical unfunny 3-camera sound-stage sitcom stuff. Why, with all the location shooting, the budget must have been blown for the whole next season.
You see after a couple minutes of rather bland expository dialogue with Ms Ball, Gale Gordon, and Little Lucy and Little Desi, the whole episode becomes purely an extended chase sequence at LAX involving numerous airport ground vehicles, machines and baggage conveyors.
At first I just thought it was just typical 1960's juvenile, corny slapstick, and I felt a little impatient for the plot to advance. Then I realized: other than the fact that 2 bad men are chasing Lucy and Gale Gordon all over LAX due to the requisite MacGuffin, there is no plot to this episode.
The whole episode is a kind of meta-humor, humor about the nature of humor (which, paradoxically, is not itself always humorous). But this I must admit, while not causing me to actually laugh, I found strangely amusing...two aging comedic thespians dashing all about LAX, with some jerky radically under-cranked footage on the baggage conveyors that looks strangely like a subtly surreal kind of 21st century digital effect...and vaguely suggests the creepy stop-motion animated Lucy puppet in the credits sequence.
By the end, it reminded me somewhat of the Monty Python 'Confuse-A-Cat' sketch.
All this, when I had only expected typical unfunny 3-camera sound-stage sitcom stuff. Why, with all the location shooting, the budget must have been blown for the whole next season.