Lucy and the Great Airport Chase

Well the best thing I can say is the title of the episode is accurate. Is indeed a chase in an airport. I suspect that the popularity of the show "Get Smart" inspired this episode.

Lucy and Harry are chased by enemy spies through LAX after a mysterious man hands Lucy a little book containing a top secret formula.

The strangest thing about this episode is that Lucille Ball must have considered the whole thing a success because she went ahead and did multiple episodes in Season 2 using the single-camera format. It DOESN'T work! Lucy's comedy NEEDED an audience to be funny.

Everything here is flatter than a pancake. So much of the dialog is obviously dubbed, it takes you out of the action. The best thing I can say about it is that the rear-projection and fast-motion during certain scenes make it a little campy, but there's not even enough of that!

Grindhouse King Sid Haig appears as one of the enemy agents.

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.

The first episode of this series I've since it went off the air in 1974, which I watched religiously every week back then. I'd long-since forgotten the general nature of the series as well as individual plots & guest stars. In recent times, however, I've wanted to view this series again, especially as I came to re-discover its predecessor "The Lucy Show", which I found eminently enjoyable with sharp, witty lines & clever situations, a type of solid, sensible comedy which no longer exists. "The Great Airport Chase" is the 1st of the "Here's Lucy" series I've seen since the 70's, after recently having purchased a 7-episode dvd collection. Initially, I was disappointed with the episode when I saw it devolving into a hackneyed spy-caper premise. I was expecting a more stage-bound sitcom with sharp writing & funny, well-played-out comedy. This episode seemed too open-ended & aimless. Before long, though, I warmed to the scenario. Seeing shots of LAX International was quite interesting, looking almost rural & primitive in that now long-ago era, despite its, at the time, state-of-the-art modernity & reflection of the thrill & glamour of the jet-age, which also no longer exists, not to mention the now idyllic-seeming air travel days pre-9/1/1. The episode's free-form notwithstanding, along with almost no dialogue, the situations are, in fact, clever & amusing. There's a brief inclusion of poor background process-work as Lucy & her boss, Mr. Carter, while being chased by the bad guys, are driving erratically around the runway in a baggage-cart transport vehicle but it's amusing nonetheless. A later scene is done with speeded-up film, perhaps influenced by its time-slot competitor "Laugh-In", a groundbreaking comedy-variety show that revolutionized the filming techniques of many series in that era, primarily in tempo-quickening. In short, "Chase" is a non-traditional Lucy sitcom entry but one that's ultimately quite appealing. One may cringe a little at the stereotyped depiction of the bad guys, whose nationality is unspecified, but this can be overlooked when considering the times is which this episode was filmed. Overall, pretty good entry, at times harking back to the silent comedy era.