We Love Lucy, Even in Color

We’re looking forward to tonight’s I Love Lucy Christmas special on CBS—so much so that we don’t even mind that it’s been colorized, a process we usually don’t have much use for.

For one thing, the colorizing technology has improved so much over the years, it makes hard to object terribly strenuously (though you’d still hear us howling if they were to colorize The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca or some other black-and-white cinematic masterpiece).

Today’s hour-long offering includes a 1956 Christmas episode that places colorized wraparound segments around a number of flashbacks of classic scenes (which for some reason are not colorized—why, we’ve no clue) and the familiar episode that finds the Ricardos and the Mertzes traveling to Rome, where Lucy and Ethel taking a run at stomping grapes at a winery (this episode, if we understand correctly, is colorized).

The colorized fun begins at 8 p.m. ET on CBS, and to whet your appetite, here’s a snippet from the Christmas episode.