Rare Color Shot: ‘The Honeymooners’, 1953

Although the CBS shows starring Jackie Gleason, and friends, ended in 1970, Joyce Randolph never played “Trixie” after the 1957 season which ended in June and included more of their sketches than almost any other year. In October 1958, Gleason debuted a half-hour version of The Jackie Gleason Show, with Buddy Hackett as a sidekick, but it was short-lived, cancelled in January 1959.
In 1961, Gleason began an ill-fated stint as host of a game show called ‘You’re in the Picture’, which lasted only one episode, and was so bad that it led to Gleason offering an on-air apology to his viewers the following week. Committed to filling a quota of episodes, Gleason renamed the series The Jackie Gleason Show and turned it into a short-lived talk show, featuring one-on-one informal interviews with Art Carney, Jayne Mansfield, Bobby Darin, and other friends and celebrities. In 1962, Gleason returned to the tried-and-true variety format with his ‘American Scene Magazine’ with the official title of ‘The Jackie Gleason Show’. In ’64, he moved the show to Miami and did Honeymooners sketches only when Art Carney was available. From ’57 till ’62, there were only two Honeymooners sketches in which Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph were replaced as Alice and Trixie by Sue Ane Langdon and Patricia Wilson, respectively, for two sketches. In January 1966, Meadows returned as Alice for a musical special, ‘The Honeymooners: The Adoption’, a re-enactment of a 1955 sketch of the same name. When the show returned in 1966, the ‘Honeymooners’ sketches (then in color for the first time) returned as a series of elaborate musicals. The sketches, which comprised ten of the first season’s thirty-two shows, followed a story arc that had the Kramdens and Nortons traveling across Europe after Ralph won a contest. “The Color Honeymooners”, as it has since become known, featured Sheila MacRae and Jane Kean in the roles of Alice and Trixie, respectively.

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