'I Love Lucy' carved out place in viewers' hearts
By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Staff Writer
When "I Love Lucy" premiered nationwide 50 years ago tonight, CBS executives feared they had green-lighted a surefire recipe for failure.
CBS photo archive via Associated Press
It wasn't the umpteenth-even-for-television's-wonder-years retelling of the comic misadventures of a perpetually wacky housewife and the button-down husband whose life she makes difficult that was keeping the suits up nights. Execs were more worried about Americans refusing to buy into a mixed marriage between a redheaded American girl and a Cuban bandleader. A marriage between redheaded American actress Lucille Ball and Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz that was actually very real.
Lucille Ball, left, appears in a scene from "I Love Lucy" with cast members Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance and William Frawley.
All that changed when the black-and-white sitcom high jinks of fictional neighbors Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, and Fred and Ethel Mertz premiered to immediate audience accolades, five straight years of stellar ratings (four in a row as the No. 1 television program in the nation), and sales of millions of that new home electronics accessory called the television.
In the process, the daffy tenement residents of 623 East 68th St., New York, N.Y., have become a pop culture institution. Never really far from our collective television hearts since the Monday October evening in 1951 we first welcomed them into our homes.
Checked your cultural landscape lately? "I Love Lucy" is everywhere.
A recent search of Amazon.com produced more than 37 book titles from "The I Love Lucy Cookbook" (Abbeville Press, $8.95) to "Meet The Mertzes" (Renaissance Books, $16.95). Another 37 titles of "I Love Lucy" video collections are also available on the Web retailer. "I Love Lucy" fanatics with a few dollars of disposable income can choose to bid on the more than 1,758 show-related collectibles listed on eBay, including a Vitameata-vegamin Bathroom Set for $18.50 and a Ricky Conga Doll for $150. Also on the Web, literally dozens of fan sites detailing every "I Love Lucy" episode and every behind-the-scenes shenanigan. There are even individual fan sites dedicated to the program's four leads. For a good time here, try a site simply named "Desi" (www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/7100/).
One of the best Web-based collections of all things "Lucy" belongs to cable network TV Land (www.tvland.com), which launches a weeklong marathon of 40 classic "I Love Lucy" episodes tonight, before airing every episode of the series' five seasons over the next few months.
Among the "I Love Lucy" factual tidbits you'll find on TV Land's site: The series' many network television firsts. These include being the first television comedy to eschew canned laughter in favor of taping in front of a live audience, the first sitcom to use a now-industry standard three camera setup for filming, and the first TV comedy to be recorded on film instead of videotape. In fact, "I Love Lucy's" preservation on film stock is one of the main reasons the show looks even more visually spiffy today than it did when new. Another reason why the show has never really gone off the air since day one.
"I Love Lucy" also unwittingly invented the rerun when Lucille Ball's real-life pregnancy in 1953 warranted rebroadcasting first- season episodes to compensate for Ball's reduced work schedule.
Perhaps best of all, the TV Land site preserves some of the most memorable quotes from the series (Ricky's "Luuuucy, I'm home" greeting and Lucy's "Ooh, if Ricky finds out about this he's gonna kill me" whine, among them), available on sound files. You'll even find the series' still wickedly danceable instrumental theme, and in stereo to boot.
Why we continue to love our "Lucy" is debatable.
It's well known among fans that despite the sunny attitudes and happy endings captured for the ages, all was not always satisfactory behind the scenes on the "I Love Lucy" set. Ball and Arnaz divorced mere months after the series ended in 1957, and Vivian Vance and William Frawley both testified to despising each other throughout the series 1950s run. No matter.
When all is said and done, the cult of "I Love Lucy" exists as a testament to the extraordinarily adept comic talents of its four leads, and, in particular, the astoundingly gifted Lucille Ball. Years from now when the world has forgotten "Will and Grace's" talented but vacuous modern-day Lucy wannabe Debra Messing, you can bet that some poor soul in one of the dozens of countries worldwide still airing "Lucy" reruns will still know how to whistle every bit of "Babalu."
"Lucy," we're sure, will always be home.
