Outside the Beltway

I Love Lucy – Cheap

Amazon is making the complete “I Love Lucy” television series — a whopping 5394 minutes of entertainment on 34 discs — available for one day only at $84.99.

James Joyner
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Glenn Reynolds alerts me that Amazon is making the complete “I Love Lucy” television series — a whopping 5394 minutes of entertainment on 34 discs — available for one day only at $84.99. That’s remarkably inexpensive.

Still, considering that I’ve seen most of these episodes and believe that DVDs will soon be rendered obsolete — if they haven’t been already — by instant downloading, I’ll pass.

He teases the announcement with “UNLIKE ANDY GRIFFITH, NOT RUINED BY POLITICS.”  He’d recently promo’d a similar Amazon offering for the iconic 1960s sitcom and get reader complaints that they could no longer watch the show because of actor Andy Griffith’s recent commercial touting ObamaCare and the virtues of socialized medicine.

Are there really people out there who can’t enjoy an actor’s work because he’s a member of the opposite political party? I could understand no longer being able to watch OJ Simpson in the “Naked Gun” movies or Woody Allen in anything given their personal lives.  But Griffith’s endorsement of a mainstream public policy issue that I happen to disagree with doesn’t fall into that camp any more than his pimping Ritz crackers.

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9 responses to “I Love Lucy – Cheap”

  1. Andyman Avatar
    Andyman

    You have to remember that 1) fans of the Andy Griffith show tend to have a lot of free time on their hands these days, and 2) how insular and self-reinforcing the Fox News echo chamber mentality is. When you spend eight to ten of your sixteen waking hours hearing about the Evil Government Socialism That’s Trying To Impose Sharia, it’s hard to switch gears for Nick at Nite.

    A lot has been written about how some of these kooks really see themselves as some sort of armchair warriors in the fight against whatever’s outraging Glenn Beck today. And he got rich by convincing people that it’s not *just* politics, it’s our Sacred Way of Life at stake. So it’s not surprising that innocuous aspects of pop culture which happen to remind them of the other side are ruined. If they weren’t, it’d be a sign that they weren’t taking the battle seriously enough.

  2. sam Avatar
    sam

    He teases the announcement with “UNLIKE ANDY GRIFFITH, NOT RUINED BY POLITICS.”

    Yeah, well, UNLIKE ANDY GRIFFITH, DEAD.

  3. john personna Avatar
    john personna

    I’m afraid your option will be $85 for the complete series, or $1/episode from a streamer.

  4. MarkedMan Avatar
    MarkedMan

    I agree with you about OJ and Woody Allen. Also in that category for me is Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. I saw an interview with Bill Murray that repulsed me so much I had trouble staying focused on him in Zombieland. Now that’s saying something.

  5. reid Avatar
    reid

    I agree about OJ, Gibson, and Cruise. I tend to avoid their movies. I’d forgotten about Woody Allen’s interesting life. Also: Roman Polanski. John Travolta, because anyone that’s big into Scientology is dead to me.

    I’m curious what Bill Murray might have said to offend you so, MM. I’ve always liked him.

    And I like Andy Griffith all the more after the ad he made, so pttth to Reynolds.

  6. dunce Avatar
    dunce

    What seems to be overlooked is that griffith is a multimillionaire who has no nada zip need for medicare yet he is being paid many thousands of dollars for these natiowide spots.Very likely by the taxpayer, but you can thank obama.

  7. Trumwill Avatar
    Trumwill

    I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for (legal) downloadable movies/shows to replace DVDs. The copyright issues alone are enough to hold that off for a while. While there are tangible reasons to have music in versatile-digital format because portability is huge, that’s less the case with movies and TV since we don’t watch them in our cars or on the run. So having a collection of CDs that you have to figure out how to carry about doesn’t really apply to DVDs. And so there’s less of a push to force the studios to release material in this format and because of DRM issues, they’re going to be reluctant to do so.

    Regarding politics, boycotting productions because its lead supports something as vanilla as the health care plan, given Hollywood’s liberal proclivities, means that there’s not much you’re going to be able to actually watch.

  8. sam Avatar
    sam

    “yet he is being paid many thousands of dollars for these natiowide spots.”

    How do you know that?

  9. Timothy Watson Avatar
    Timothy Watson

    @sam
    The same way they know that Obama has spent fifteen trillions dollars opposing the release of his birth certificate? 🙂

    I find it funny that conservatives will jump on an actor’s bandwagon just because they think they agree with him or her.

    Remember the character Jack Bauer? GOP darling, but they ignore the fact that Kiefer Sutherland’s (himself a hard-core liberal) grandfather, Tommy Douglas, was the architect of “socialized health care” in Canada.

    For another example, what’s the current status of Ellen Page in the conservative movement? They defended her when “Juno” came out, despite her being on record as being a pro-choice liberal at the time, and now they launch boycotts of her movies (Inception) when she started attacking George Bush and the right.

    And it doesn’t just apply to people, the American Family Association and Newsbusters had been going after Ford for years because Ford marketed itself to the gay community and the AFA et al. was crediting themselves with Ford’s sales decline due to the their boycott, but now that Ford is a conservative darling because they refused to take bail-out money, AFA is silent and Newsbusters talks about how great Ford is.

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