TGM

This is pretty neat.

http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2013/0...eal-color.html

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OxsiItd1iN8?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

mortalplague

Oh that's awesome, thanks for posting!

Pizza

They didn't search everyone for cameras and have signs that stated no filming/recording in the studio?

CharlieK

Very cool.

Eric F

...and in the next scene..Ricky beats his wife...oh how we laughed!!!

Seriously, it's hard to believe how vivid the colors are. You'd never expect that.

Dr. DVD

I don't really recollect a scene in the series where Ricky openly beat her. I know he spanked her at the end of one, but that was just as childish punishment. I do seem to recall hearing that they had to do an ep. where Lucy had a shiner and explain it as an accident as Desi had allegedly hit her in real life.

fumanstan

Wow, really cool.

Crocker Jarmen

Right, The Honeymooner's had all the wife beating jokes and inneudendo (between Norton and Trixie too, not just Ralph and Alice). I was always annoyed at that one joke in The Simpsons, where Homer is watching I Love Lucy and laughing, saying "Hit her again, Rickie!", as the satire didn't jibe with how the show actually was.

RocShemp

That was really cool. That's for posting, TallGuyMe.

My Other Self

I recall Homer and Bart watching an episode in Season 11's Little Big Mom, but it was Fred Mertz who quipped "You hit her pretty hard there, Rick!". I always took that line to be more of a jab at their personal life towards the end, when it got to the point that their obvious disdain for each other came through on film (i.e. every episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour)

Damfino

thanks for the post and not just for the color footage, but for some reason I thought I Love Lucy was preserved only on kinescopes, and yet that black and white footage was excellent too. I haven't seen the show in ages, so I didn't realize how well the show had been preserved.

andicus

Great stuff, TallGuyMe!

Thanks for that.

rw2516

The show was shot on film from day one. One of the first, if not the first to do so. It was Desi's idea. He was thinking about syndication from the get go, he probably invented rerun syndication. Can't remember the details, but in negotiations with CBS, Desi and Lucy gave up their salaries for 100% ownership of the show and the prints. The show was in reruns by the third year or so. It was on twice a week on CBS. The new episodes in regular monday night timeslot, previous season rerun another night. Desilu studios produced many other shows including Star Trek making Lucy and Desi two of the richest and powerful people in Hollywood. Selling Desilu to Paramount made them uber rich.

TheKing

I Love Lucy was the first show to use actual film, as opposed to either being filmed live, or being preserved through the kinescope process. Before Lucy, the idea of a rerun didn't exist.

This was especially unique for Lucy, as they were also the first show to use the 3 camera format that became the standard for sitcoms. So not only do you have them using film, they had to use 3 times as much! Crazy. It's why most shows would use 16mm film, and of course why they all switched to video when it became feasible to do so.

Sadly, it's also why a show from the 50s can look so much better than ones from the 80s. Thankfully HD came along and forced TV comedy to be shot on film again (or HD video). But we'll always have that dark spot in the middle full of blurry washed out video crud.

Damfino

I didn't know that, thanks for the info and a muchas gracias to Desi Arnaz for having the foresight! Baba Lou!

Michael Corvin

Very cool. So the question begs, if an audience member can afford a color, portable video camera why was Lucy shot in B&W?

TGM

because all of the televisions at the time were B&W?

Jason

Because the audience member was shooting on color film?

bluetoast

Well like mentioned earlier, they were shooting on 3 cameras simultaneously. That's expensive. I'm assuming Lucy was shot on 35 mm (just looked it up, it was), whereas that audience footage was probably shot with 8 mm stock, most likely meant for home movies.

TGM

shooting in color and downgrading it to B&W not only would be expensive inherently, but also kind of stupid. The world had black and white TVs, so I suspect they filmed it in a way that it would look best ON B&W televisions, therefore shooting it in B&W. This guys color camera footage wasn't going to be broadcast anywhere except on a sheet in his parlor.

CharlieK

Ooooo, parlor. Fancy.

Eddie W

Nowadays we only have parlors for tattoos & ice cream.

I was watching some of the bonuses on the Dick Van Dyke Blu-Ray's & they had considered switching to color a few seasons in. But even a decade after Lucy it was still prohibitively expensive. It would have been ridiculous to shoot a TV show in color in 1951.

Charlie Goose

One of the California episodes had Lucy getting a sunburn on purpose because she was afraid Ricky would hit her.

JP5683

my cousin would love this... thanks for posting!

Michael Corvin

And? In the early 90s you had shows shot in 16:9 and cropped to 4:3 televisions. Would you say those producers were stupid?

I mean, if portable cameras had color, someone had to have the foresight to see color tvs on the horizon. Even if it was a one off to shoot a single episode in color, given the costs, I'd imagine someone would still want to try it on one of the biggest shows at the time. Then again, we live in a world of gimmick episodes these days. Times were simpler back then. If it ain't broke...