George Burns and Gracie Allen Show: Rumba Lessons - Season 1, Episode 7 (1950)

DVD: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004ASDNNE/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=d...

http://thefilmarchive.org/

From October 1950 until March, 1953, the series aired on Thursday nights on CBS.(During its first two years on television, it aired every other Thursday night.) In March 1953, "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" joined I Love Lucy as part of the CBS Monday night prime-time line-up. As a result, the show entered the top 30 television programs in the Nielsen ratings ranking at #20. For the 1954-1955 season, it ranked #26 and for both the 1955-1956 and 1956-1957 seasons, it was #28. With "I Love Lucy" ending its six-year run on CBS in the spring of 1957, the television network wanted to renew the Burns and Allen series, but by this time, Gracie had grown tired of the grind. Nevertheless, George committed both of them for another year, which would be their eighth on television.

Gracie retired after the 1957--1958 season. Burns attempted to continue the show with the same supporting cast but without Gracie. The George Burns Show lasted only one season (1958--59); Burns realized that viewers kept expecting Gracie to enter the scene at any time.

After trying another sitcom, Wendy and Me, Burns turned to nightclub work as a solo performer, while Gracie enjoyed a comfortable retirement; she died of heart failure in 1964. Burns continued to work as a singing comedian and enjoyed an Oscar-winning movie resurgence at the age of 80 with The Sunshine Boys. Then director Carl Reiner asked him to play the title role in Larry Gelbart's comedy, Oh, God!, which was so successful it spawned two sequels. He also co-starred with Art Carney and Lee Strasberg as a businesslike bank robber in the Martin Brest senior-citizen caper comedy Going in Style.

George Burns died in 1996 at the age of 100.

The kinescope recordings of the live telecasts from the 1950--1952 seasons of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show have fallen into the public domain; they are available on "dollar DVD" collections and have rerun as part of America One's public domain sitcom rotation and on public television stations.

Rumba is a family of percussive rhythms, song and dance that originated in Cuba as a combination of the musical traditions of Africans brought to Cuba as slaves and Spanish colonizers. The name derives from the Cuban Spanish word rumbo which means "party" or "spree". It is secular, with no religious connections. Rhythmically, Afro-Cuban folkloric rumba is based on the five-stroke pattern called clave and the inherent structure it conveys. Carlos Vidal Bolado (better known simply as Carlos Vidal) was the first to commercially record authentic folkloric rumba (Ritmo Afro-Cubano SMC 2519-A and 2520-B, circa 1948).

The term spread in the 1930s and 1940s to the faster popular music of Cuba (the Peanut Vendor was a classic), where it was used as a catch-all term, rather as salsa today. Also, the term is used in the international Latin-American dance syllabus, where it is a misnomer: the music used for this slower dance is the bolero-son. Ballroom rumba, or rhumba, is basically son and not based on the authentic folkloric rumba. Similarly, the African style of pop music called African Rumba or soukous is also son-based.

The term is also used today for various styles of popular music from Spain, as part of the so-called Cantes de ida y vuelta, or music that developed between both sides of the atlantic. Flamenco rumba is a genre that is entirely different from Cuban rumba.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns_and_Allen

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[kogcc]

i love how in the olden days they wrote the commercials into the show. I've seen Jed Clampett learning how to smoke cigarettes, and even Fred Flintstone smoking Winstons.

[triezen007]

@dotcomguy79 yeah no kidding. It seemed like 1/3 of the skit was about carnation milk. I know more about carnation milk watching this than I do from seeing the commercials LOL.

[dotcomguy79]

boy they sure had to hawk the advertiser, didn't they?

[dandmonline]

I LOVE GEORGE BURNS AND GRACIE ALLEN!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Blueskywatcher]

Cute stuff.

[MandyRascal]

These are great! :D Also, by any chance do you have or know where I could locate a copy of the episode titled "George Gets Call from Unknown Victor"? It's from 1954.