I love Lucy

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Television series
Original title I love Lucy
I Love Lucy title.svg
Country of production United States
original language English
Year (s) 1951-1957
length 24 minutes
Episodes 180 (along with the lost Christmas episode and the original pilot episode) in 6 seasons
genre Sitcom
idea Jess Oppenheimer,
Madelyn Davis,
Bob Carroll, Jr.
music Eliot Daniel,
Harold Adamson
First broadcast October 15, 1951 (USA) on CBS
occupation

Main actor:

supporting cast

I Love Lucy is an American sitcom from the 1950s published by CBS . The main roles were played by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz , the supporting roles were played by Vivian Vance and William Frawley . The series was produced by Desilu Productions , a company founded by Ball and Arnaz .

history

The series originated on a radio show called My Favorite Husband , in which Ball and Richard Denning spoke the main roles. The series was broadcast on the radio program by CBS and was based on the 1940 novel Mr. and Mrs. Cugat by Isabel Scott Rorick . The series ran from July 23, 1948 to March 31, 1951 and was about a housewife and her husband, a bank clerk. The writers and producers were Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and Jess Oppenheimer, who also later wrote I Love Lucy . Ball then wanted to do a television show in which her husband Desi Arnaz is a partner. The idea arose to publish a kind of My Favorite Husband as a television series. CBS originally wanted to cast Richard Denning in the role of the man, which Ball refused.

Some episodes of "I Love Lucy" were based on "My Favorite Husband".

From October 1953 to December 1955, the radio show My Favorite Husband also became a television series on CBS, with Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson in the lead roles. Remarkably, some episodes were shot in the Desilu studios, which were actually reserved for I Love Lucy .

Pilot episode

In 1951 a pilot episode was shot that was so successful that it became a normal episode, "The Audition". On this episode, Ricky explains to Lucy that he wants her to be a housewife who "makes his meal, brings his slippers, and looks after the kids" (which she didn't have at the time), and he doesn't want her to star . In Ricky's nightclub, Ricky is expecting a clown as a number for the evening show. During rehearsals on a bicycle, the latter is injured and is looked after by Lucy. This takes the initiative and wants to represent him. Ricky gets a little nervous after his singing number because the clown doesn't come. Instead, Lucy arrives disguised and plays the rehearsed sketch with Ricky. Of course, Ricky realizes it's Lucy, but tries not to show it. In the sketch Lucy says in a disguised voice in the role of the professor that she wants to join Ricky's band as a cellist; So Ricky asks her to play something, but she can't. Instead, Ricky offers her another instrument, a "saxavibratronophonovitch", a musical instrument that would mostly be used in the circus for numbers with sea lions. Then Ricky throws Lucy down a fish. The number becomes a success. In the evening Ricky does not get angry with Lucy, but repeats his demands for the role of housewife and mother. Lucy just said: "I want to talk to you about that." Ricky is pleased and brings up a child; Lucy then says that she made him her favorite cake. The episode ends with a kiss.

action

The main characters are the red-haired housewife Lucy Ricardo ( Lucille Ball ), née McGillicudy, and her husband of Cuban descent Ricky Ricardo ( Desi Arnaz ), who live in their apartment in New York. Ricky is a successful entertainer at the Tropicana nightclub (some episodes contain entire vocal numbers). When he became head of the club himself, he was renamed Babalu (in reference to Desi Arnaz's best-known song, which he also sings as Ricky Ricardo). He is also a conductor and conga player who u. a. important for the song Babalu . Lucy, on the other hand, is a simple woman who takes care of the household and, when her son Little Ricky ( Keith Thibodeaux ) was born (at the same time Arnaz and Ball actually had a child), also the child. In almost every episode she begs Ricky to be allowed to appear in the club once, which is refused every time by Ricky, because she has no talent and should stay at home as a housewife. However, there are episodes where she can appear and shows that she does have talent. When it's not singing, dancing or acting, Lucy tries other talents too, e.g. B. as a saxophone player, playwright or sculptor, but where she does not develop any talent.

As a housewife, Lucy always has a lot of time and comes up with the craziest ideas, mostly to show herself. Mostly she pulls her friends Fred ( William Frawley ) and Ethel ( Vivian Vance ) with her, who mostly have to suffer from the madness of the idea. Frequent running gag between Lucy and Ethel: "Ethel, I've got an idea", to which Ethel replies with a terrifying "No, you don't". Sometimes Lucy and Ethel do something together (work in a shop, find jobs while the men do housework at home, go to beauty school), but in the end they learn that it's all more difficult than they thought or absolutely unnecessary, what Fred and Ricky always explain to them.

Often she wants to buy something that Ricky tries to deny, mostly for reasons of cost or out of pointlessness. But she buys it anyway and tries to hide it from Ricky. Sometimes she manages to convince Ricky with the crying spasms that later became typical for her.

Lucy herself is a naive person and when she tries to learn something, e.g. B. French, she is sad that she only gets it for free because the teacher wants to perform in Ricky's club. She doesn't skip any experiments to get Ricky back sometimes, but always wants to make him happy, just like Ricky she does. Almost every episode has a happy ending .

Ricky's character is (as a Latino) very spirited and Lucy manages to infuriate him again and again, a whole episode was shot about it ( Ricky loses his temper ). But mostly Ricky is the winner, which causes Lucy to cry again. Whenever Ricky gets upset about something, whether it's in the private sphere, when Lucy does something wrong or in the work environment, he scolds in Spanish. This is not subtitled or otherwise translated, but the viewer understands what Ricky is getting at through the posture, gestures and facial expressions of Desi Arnaz.

Ricky speaks a strong Spanish accent, which is why it is difficult for those around him to understand his English at times, whereupon Lucy often jokes with him. Since the pilot episode ( The Audition , later shown as a standalone episode), Lucy has been mimicking the word Ricky pronounces incorrectly. In one episode he said: "It's not good to joke about my English", to which Lucy replies: "That was English?" In return, Ricky talked about Lucy's inability to speak Spanish in the episode in which the Ricardos and the Mertzes visiting Ricky's family in Havana , made fun. When Lucy mispronounces standard sentences like Buenos días or Muchas gracias , she says, “It's not nice to laugh at my Spanish.” Ricky replies, “But you've been laughing at my English for 15 years.” Lucy: “But Spanish is one Foreign language. "Ricky:" And English a foreign language for me. "Lucy:" The way you speak it, it is also a foreign language for me. "

Other characters that appear in every episode and that usually accompany Ricardos on their adventures are Fred and Ethel Mertz, Ricardo's older friends, neighbors and landlords. They often quarrel with each other and make nasty allusions about the other, but get along quickly afterwards. In the episode Pregnant Women Are Unpredictable , while dancing, they were about to start an argument when Lucy interrupts them and begs them not to start an argument, to which Ethel replies, "We don't fight, that's how we show each other that we love each other." Later, Fred became Manager of Ricky's club band.

According to the character biography, Fred fought in France in World War I and survived the Great Depression. Therefore he is very economical, sometimes even stingy, and loves money that he earns as a landlord. Often Ethel, Lucy and Ricky suffer from it, e.g. B. when he bought an ancient and rusty classic car as a Cadillac. When he loses $ 400 in one episode, it seems like he's in a trauma or a coma. He didn't eat and didn't move. When Ricky then announced that he would get the 400 dollars back, he “wakes up” from his coma and is happy. As Little Ricky was born and grew up, Fred became kinder and more heartfelt and less stingy.

Lucy and Ricky often try to play a prank on each other in order to achieve the respective goal of appearing on Lucy on Ricky's show, with Ricky: to prevent this. The pranks sometimes go from harmless jokes to extreme pranks that even scare one of the two. Fred and Ethel betray the prank sooner or later and the smeared person tries to take revenge with similar means. Good examples of this are the episodes Lucy Fakes Illness and Ricky's Life Story . In the first of the two, Ethel tells Ricky that Lucy might have psychosis if he doesn't let it occur. Lucy then played a mentally ill Ricky to make him feel sorry for her and let her perform. When Fred revealed to Ricky that it was just a pretense, Ricky hires a friend who plays a doctor and tells Lucy that she has a serious illness and may die soon, giving Lucy and Ethel a horror. In the end it will be cleared up and everything will be fine.

In the episode Ricky's Life Story , Lucy is annoyed that there is no photo of her in an article about Ricky in Life magazine and thinks it's because she isn't famous. Fred advises Ricky to let her perform to show her that showbizz is not just glamor, it also means hard work. When Lucy gives up exhausted while rehearsing a heavy dance, she agrees with Ricky, but by chance she gets a role as a lover on a balcony (she just had to sit and hold a rose in her mouth). However, Fred blabbered and she learned that the difficult dance was Ricky's intention. So she develops a plan: During the performance, when Ricky turns away from her while singing, she shows magic tricks behind his back, but in the end it goes wrong because Ricky notices it.

In the series' seasons, the Ricardos move into their own home in Connecticut , New England. From then on, there were almost no more episodes showing Ricky in his nightclub, this is only mentioned briefly by the actors. Later the Mertzes also move to them and start raising chickens with them.

Many of the jokes in the series are based on Ricky's Cuban accent, as he has a hard time pronouncing English sentences correctly. One of the most common sentences is "Lucy, you got something to 'splain" (actually to explain, you have to explain something) or the quickly spoken "dont" instead of don't. Other jokes are based on slapsticks or word jokes of the English language performed by the four characters.

Minor characters

Sometimes other regular figures appear as well.

  • Kathryn Card as Mrs. McGillicuddy, Lucy's mother. A very headstrong person at times. In one episode, she forces the bus driver to drive her straight to the Ricardo's house with the promise that she will never get on a New York bus. In her letters she sometimes forgets who she is writing to or what Lucy’s new surname is (she once wrote Richardsen or Markardo instead of Ricardo). She always calls Ricky Mickey.
  • Jerry Hausner as Jerry, Ricky's press agent. He always comes up with the most unusual publicity ideas. One of his ideas was to send a "private" postcard to the Tropicana Club attendees with a copy of Ricky's signature. When Lucy found such a card in Ricky's jacket, she became jealous and looked for the woman who was written to. It was there that she and Ethel learned that many women had received this card, so they realized that Ricky has no lover. But sometimes Jerry has also helped achieve success, e.g. B. to one of the best-dressed men in America.
  • Elizabeth Patterson as Mrs. Matilda Trumbull, another resident of the Mertzes house. When Little Ricky was born, she first pointed out the Mertzes and Ricardos to the rental agreement, according to which children are forbidden. She later fell in love with Little Ricky and became Little Ricky's babysitter, which the Ricardos keep asking her to do.
  • Frank Nelson originally played different roles, for example various moderators of radio game shows or controllers at the airport. He got a permanent role last season as the Ricardos' new neighbor, Ralph Ramsey. He also starred in the Lucy Desi comedy hour.
  • Mary Jane Croft also originally played different roles, for example as a passenger or Lucy's former classmate. Last season she got a permanent role as the Ricardos' new neighbor and wife of Ralph Ramsey, Betty.
  • Charles Lane played various supporting roles in various episodes, such as a passport issuer, a casting checker and many others. He also played a role in the "Lucy-Desi-Comedy hour" as a customs officer in Mexico.
  • Gale Gordon as Mr. Alvin Littlefield, Ricky's manager at The Tropicana nightclub. He appeared in two episodes, "Ricky Asks For A Raise," in which Ricky asks him for a raise, and in Lucy's Schedule , in which Ricky is applying for the position of club manager and trying his work schedule on Lucy. He is a man who values ​​punctuality and good food. He is happy about every guest who pays ("Paying Customers"). Gordon played a judge at the end of an episode in Lucy Desi Comedy Hour.
  • Natalie Schafer as Mrs. Phoebe Emerson. She teaches at her own beauty school, the Phoebe Emerson Charm School, and has subsequently explained to The Charm School to Lucy and Ethel how to keep yourself beautiful and attractive, but in the end it became too exaggerated clichéd beauty . It was the only episode with Schafer. A few years later, Natalie Schafer became known as Mrs. Lovey Howell on Gilligan's Island .

Many actors also played themselves, including Bob Hope , John Wayne , Hedda Hopper , Harpo Marx , Jimmy Demaret , Claude Akins , William Holden and George Reeves , who played himself and played his role as Superman.

The Lucy-Desi-Comedy Hour featured guest actors in every episode, most of whom played themselves, such as Hedda Hopper , Rudy Vallée , Maurice Chevalier , Fred MacMurray , Tallulah Bankhead , Fernando Lamas , Paul Douglas , Milton Berle and many more.

The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show

After the series was discontinued in 1957, it was replaced in 1958 by the show The Lucy-Desi-Comedy-Hour , also called The Lucille-Ball-Desi-Arnaz-Show . It lasted an hour, not half an hour like the series. Unlike I Love Lucy , which aired once a week, this series was scheduled to air once a month and contained a total of 13 episodes. The stories pick up where the series left off when the Ricardos and Mertzes moved into their own home in the Connecticut countryside . The plot of the individual episodes was also more complex and had more guest stars. Again, Frawley and Vance played as Fred and Ethel.

In the first episode, which began or ended with an introductory and final announcement and aired as The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show , a. Frank Nelson, Rudi Valley and Hedda Hopper as guests. The episode told how Lucy and Ricky met in Havana in 1940, which is why some actors from older I Love Lucy episodes were there.

The other episodes were published in 3 seasons as Lucy-Desi-Comedy-Hour . The last episode aired on April 1, 1960.

Other spin-offs

After Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960, the Lucy Desi Comedy Hour was also canceled. Ball, Arnaz, Frawley and Vance never played together again. This was followed by more or less successful series in which Ball impersonated her role as Lucy, such as Here's Lucy , The Lucy Show (broadcast in Germany as Oops Lucy ) or Life with Lucy . The series just mentioned have nothing or almost nothing to do with the original series and the original character Lucy, except for the name Lucy. However, Frawley and Vance sometimes appeared as guest stars. In The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy , Gale Gordon also starred alongside Ball, with whom he previously made the radio show My Favorite Husband .

In The Lucy Show the true children of Lucille Ball, played Lucille Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr.. who have favourited the role of Lucy's children.

Life with Lucy was the most unsuccessful format in which Lucille Ball played Lucy. The series was canceled after 14 episodes. It was Ball's last project in front of the camera.

Connections to pop culture

  • A 2006 episode of the Drake & Josh series in which Drake and Josh work on the assembly line of a sushi factory, a nod to the episode Job Switching in which Lucy and Ethel work on the assembly line in a chocolate factory (for the men who meanwhile keep the house care to prove that they can make money too). This episode is originally called I Love Sushi .
  • In one episode of Hannah Montana , Oliver handcuffed Miley and Lilly but lost the key and during the episode Oliver tried to find the key and finally separated the two at a concert while the two had to go through their lives chained . This is a version of the 1952 I Love Lucy episode, The Handcuffs , in which Lucy jokingly chained herself to Ricky with Fred's handcuffs (so he would do something to her), which she believed were trick cuffs. But it turned out that the handcuffs were real, that a key to which did not exist and that a blacksmith tried to separate the two during the entire episode, which he succeeded in doing on a TV show.
  • In the feature film Pleasantville - Too good to be true , in which the two main characters Jennifer and David are drawn into a typical 1950s series, a trailer for the television station "TV Time", a specialty channel for the 1950s, is initially set Series, shown. One of the main series whose logos are faded in is I Love Lucy .
  • In 1983 Weird Al Yankovic wrote the song Ricky . On the one hand, this is a parody of the Toni Basil version of the Racey song Kitty (published by Basil as Mickey ), on the other hand it contains humorous teasing and allusions to the series and its characters. At the end of the song you can hear the version of the theme music for the series (written by Eliot Daniel and Harold Adamson). The music video was shot in the style of the series, also in black and white, with Yankovic as Ricky and Tress MacNeille as Lucy. By the way, the video was Weird Al Yankovic's first music video.
  • In the episode This little Piggy goes to Hollywood of Muppet Babies , the series is briefly parodied as I Love Piggy with Miss Piggy as Piggy (Lucy), Kermit as Froggy (Ricky), Scooter as Scethel (Ethel) and Fozzy as Frod (Fred) . Kermit also sings a parody of Babalu there .
  • On February 22, 1987 Rudi Carrell showed in his daily show a restaurant ketch with Carrell as waiter, Horst Tappert as himself, or as a guest and Grit Böttcher as an observing guest. This was a translated and Germanized version of a scene from the episode LA, at last , which aired on February 7, 1955. The prominent guest was William Holden and Lucy was the observing guest. The actors' actions, the food ordered, the facial expressions etc. were taken over one-to-one and the dialogues translated or adapted.
  • In the 1990s, the series was parodied several times in black and white in the US comedy show In Living Colors . The parody was called I Love Laquita , with Jim Carrey playing Ricky Marcardo and Kim Wayans playing his wife Laquita, an African-American character who is based on Lucy's character, but who would prefer to be a female rapper. In the parody, Kelly Coffield played the role of Ethel.
  • As a result, beloved son ( son-in-law dearest ) of the sitcom The Golden Girls is preparing Blanche on a 12-hour I Love Lucy before marathon on TV. Later in this episode, Blanche watches the series with Rose and tries to explain the context and roles of I love Lucy .

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