Rue McClanahan, one of the stars of the hit 1980s TV show The Golden Girls, has died at the age of 76. The actress had been in bad shape lately after suffering a small stroke earlier this year following a bypass surgery that she underwent, and it was a massive stroke early this morning that proved too much for her body to handle.

Rue was incredibly popular as Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls, which ran from 1985 to 1992 and still airs reruns every single day, but despite the fact that she might not have been in the spotlight as much as the other ladies, McClanahan certainly did so much more than that one show in her long career.

Another movement has begun, and it is a matter of life and death, people.

The fans have decided that Betty White, star of The Golden Girls and universally awesome grandmother to us all, needs to be allowed to host Saturday Night Live. The movement started on Facebook, where almost 200,000 fans have joined the Betty White to Host SNL page in an attempt to grab the attention of executives at NBC,and persuade them to bring her in immediately.

SNL still has a faithful fan-base, but has not been getting laughs like they used to. It could be the writers; it could be the current cast, but for some reason, that strong level of funny has been completely M.I.A. The studio hasn’t had the most support lately, either; after the Conan O’Brien/Tonight Show fiasco, this would also be a chance for them to win some fans back. Does this really require any amount of thought, NBC!?

Beatrice Arthur, who is best known for her work on the hit TV show The Golden Girls, has died at her home of cancer at the age of 86. This is the second Golden Girl that we’ve lost in a considerably short amount of time — Estelle Getty passed away back in July.

In her time as a Golden Girl, Arthur played the role of Dorothy, who was also the daughter of Getty’s character. The show ran an impressive 180 episodes long from 1985 to 1992. Arthur is also very well-known for her Maude character, which first showed up on All in the Family as Edith Bunker’s loud cousin. The character was so popular that a spin-off was created entitled Maude, which ran 141 episodes from 1972 to 1978.

At the start, Bea graced Broadway as an actress trained for the stage. She won a Tony for her part in Mame, a production also starring Angela Lansbury which was named Best Musical of 1966. She then appeared in a movie adaptation of the play, with Lucille Ball taking on the role that Lansbury played. She even appeared in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part 1.

I’m a big fan of The Golden Girls. Though I followed the series back in the 1980’s, I still enjoy watching episodes in syndication today and every so often I catch something I didn’t notice years ago. For instance, in the 1987 episode “Whose Face Is This Anyway?”, Rose (Betty White) mentions the 1974 Sean Connery science fiction film Zardoz.

In the episode, the vain Blanche (Rue McClanahan) attends her college sorority’s reunion thinking she’ll be the most beautiful one there. When she gets there, she feels that her natural beauty is nothing compared to the other women, who’ve all had plastic surgery. When she returns home, she tells her friends that when she got to the reunion, it was as if time stood still for 30 years and the other women looked like they’d hardly aged at all.

That’s when the airheaded Rose (played by Betty White) says these women sound a lot like the ones from the movie Zardoz. She asks Blanche, “Did any of them mention a leader named Zardoz?”