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Betty White turns 90 and TV gets ready to party

Remember when Betty White wasn’t cool? Of course you don’t. Betty White has always been cool.

What amazes us is how much fun she’s still having as a real-life golden girl. A little less than two years ago, when the Facebook campaign to get White as host of Saturday Night Live started, fans were concerned that she wasn’t up to it. It would wear out the poor girl. As if the 88-year-old woman who took on Jimmy Fallon in beer pong would faint dead away in the middle of a 90-minute live show.

Then, as The Mary Sue said, “She was in basically every single sketch and went on to party ’til the rise of the morning sun and score the show some huge ratings.” Most impressive of all, she held her own with some very strong former SNL cast members including Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. She was raunchy – and damn funny. (Check out Heather Hogan’s review of the show if you’ve forgotten.)

Wisely, NBC didn’t need a FB campaign to persuade them to throw White a big 90th birthday party. The network has scheduled a two-hour Betty block from 8-10 p.m. on January 16, the night before White’s birthday. The first 90 minutes will be the special Betty White’s 90th Birthday: A Tribute to America’s Golden Girl, broadcast live from the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Among the guests on hand to praise Betty will be Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Burnett, Hugh Jackman, Ed Asner and Amy Poehler.

Then we’ll get a half-hour sneak peak of White’s new hidden-camera series, Off Their Rockers. The show, based on Belgium’s award-winning Benidorm Bastards, Off Their Rockers, sends senior citizens out to pull pranks on younger folks, hoping for hilarity. When announcing the show, White said, “People have been telling me that I’m ‘off my rocker for years – now I can prove it.”

Hot in Cleveland also has an episode planned to mark White’s BD milestone, so we’ll have plenty of chances to celebrate the great comedienne’s remarkable career.

I’m setting my DVR now. How about you — will you watch the birthday tribute to Betty White?

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