Seeing the costume sketches and the dresses in color are really glorious. Lucille could showcase a wardrobe as the stylist was able to capitalize on that talent! However, the coloring of the film takes the costumes to a new level. She looked great in black and white. But she looks fabulous in color!
Both Lucy and Desi were trailblazers in television. If they were not, I Love Lucy would not have existed. It’s really great to see these characters come to life in color, and how beautiful Lucille Ball truly was.
I have on DVD the entire collection of I Love Lucy, the 13 episodes of the Lucy Desi comedy hour and the three movies they were in together. As they become available in color I purchase them. For the purists who are offended by the colorization of these classic shows, don't watch them. The black and white originals are still available and always will be. One of the commentators said that In color they take an almost 3D quality and he's right. Keep up the great work guys and thank you for posting this educational gem!!!
As was only mildly referenced, the sets and the clothing, were all in color like the world around us. Colors were selected for how they would appear when filmed in black and white. As for the person stating that we all act like TV only started in 1950, it was still in its infancy. Though demonstrated prior to WWII, TV broadcasting began to really crank up about 1947. I Love Lucy was so popular, the water district in Manhattan could tell you almost to the second when commercial breaks occurred: water demand spiked as people used the toilet. I Love Lucy debuted very early in game: 10-15-1951. Lucy is a comedic genius, but Desi Arnaz is the genius that created the shows durability. See most television shows were televised live back then. But there are times zones to contend with. Practical video tape recording would not debut for broadcasters until 1956. So when a show aired at 9:00 PM Eastern Time, the network pointed a film camera at a television and filmed the show, called a kinescope. They quickly processed the film, and with a telecine device projected the film so that a TV camera would catch it. That was fed live to West Coast for air at 9:00 PM. They live airing looked as good as it could. The west coast feed, not so much. Live shows are also filmed in front of an audience with multiple cameras, allowing the director to direct the cameramen to catch the desired shots, switching live electronically between them. (Watch Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.”) Desi knew the show needed the energy and laughter from a live audience. He also wanted the same quality for all broadcasts, so he elected for 35 mm film. He also wanted multiple cameras. Not so fast. Because of the known standard technique lighting a set for monochrome film, Desi was told it’s impossible to light a scene for multiple camera angles. Undeterred, he ended up speaking with the retired, well respected lighting director Karl Freund. He told Desi the same as everyone else: impossible. Desi probably shrugged when he said, “Well, if you don’t think you can do it….” Freund came on board and did it spectacularly. The multicam technique of shooting in front of a live audience endures to this day. Now it’s filmed live. You have 3 or 4 roles of synchronized film, no live cutting between cameras. Desi created a “multicam” film editing system using the standard Moviola the industry used for editing film. The concept has endured ever since, even with computerized editing. When Lucy and Desi conceived Desi Jr., the show was in full swing and it was generally agreed they couldn’t shoot a season hiding her behind furniture, so they wanted to incorporate it into the plot. Sponsor Philip Morris tobacco adamantly refused. In the end Desi telegrammed the head of CBS, Bill Paley, stating to the effect of, “you’ve contracted us to produce for you the biggest hit on television, but CBS and Philip Morris won’t let us do it. So we will turn production and responsibility for the show’s success over to them.” Parley’s telegrammed response, “Don’t fuck with the Cuban.” The could not say “pregnant” on TV at the time (what nation of prudes). The episode in which she told Ricky she was pregnant is entitled, “Lucy is Enciente,” which is French for pregnant. Little Ricky was born during Season 2 Episode 16, “Lucy Goes To The Hospital” on January 9, 1953, the same night Lucy gave birth to real son Desi Arnaz, Jr. via cesarean section. 44 million people tuned in. Desi needed to only read the script once to know his lines. The show is historic, a treasure, and sitcom TV owes so much to the genius of Desi Arnaz. If you get the chance, watch the episode in which Ricky tells Little Ricky the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” in Spanish. Just watch it.
I have loved Lucy from a kid. Watching it b&w is great however the more I watch them I wonder the color of her clothes. Like watching the Brown Derby episode to see the color of her dress & matching accessories it was Terrific and I was so excited to see what Lucy & Ethel’s wardrobe looked liked. I’m waiting to see the episode of Friendship. I loved seeing the orchestra I’m 65 and I’m still in love with I Love Lucy❤️ Oh the Martians is my favorite! lol I can see the mistakes and how it was stilled filmed. It’s makes it more of a classic. Thank you so very very much for colorizing. I appreciate all the work and attention to detail. 😘
This is great !! For me, it's like seeing it for the first time. Thank you for introducing her to a whole new generation in a way and vision that they can understand. I love it, and Lucy
I was a black and white “I Love Lucy” purist yet also intensely curious to know the real colors of their clothes, hair, interiors, everything. The mint green shirts of the band was the most jarring reveal to me.
So fascinating, kudos and respect to all the people involved in this process. I grew up watching I Love Lucy when it first aired, and as a kid I was transfixed on Lucy's hair, so hearing the tech guys talk about the challenges of colorizing it made me verklempt. Thanks for this great story about the best TV show of all time.
I have only,, said with 100 percent certainty, watched every single episode of one television in my entire life.. I Love Lucy. I currently own 2 box sets. Because it was on a great deal and I just couldn't tell myself no. Again. Lol 😂❤️❤️❤️
that one young man who said if it hadt been for Lucille Ball's passing and the airing of the Christmas episode that he might not have ever seen in the series otherwise, I was watching and enjoyng I love Lucy about 15 years before she died at a young age as well as other shows like The Dick Van Dyke SHow, gilligans Island, Batmna, Lost in Space, Leave it to Beaver, etc.
Desi proposed filming in color multiple times, including the hour-long episodes. But CBS was not a pioneer in color - they were upset that the FCC adopted rival NBC’s color standard.
I have watched every episode, many times, whether black and white or color b ecause it is a great show and I ❤ LUCY. I am an almost 69yr old senior citizen. Years ago my mom and I attended the birthday celebration festival weekend in Jamestown NY. It was so amazing and wonderful we stayed an extra day. At that time Ric Wyman and his staff were absolutely wonderful and so down to earth. Everyone made us feel so very welcome . Extremely wonderful memories of a superfantastic mother-daughter weekend and extra day. I hope someday to return. Mom will be looking down from Heaven with dad. He was always so wonderful if we wanted to go on a mother daughter weekend somewhere. Once in a while we would do family vacations. His favorite was a vacation to the Amish country. Always more wonderful memories. I hope today's children value their time spent with familes and enjoy life. God's Blessings to all in today's crazy world.👍🙏🤗
😊 with all the negative issues in society today the i love lucy with the Mertzs are great memories that is needed and i laugh and enjoy thier telants makes my day
OMG, this movie majic just brought Lucy to LIFE. I wish all episodes could be in colour in a complete BOX SET SERIES . I'd so by it. I adore Lucy and Ethel ..
Colorization will revitalize the series for newer generations. It adds depth to every scene. This definitely proves it. The same for the Andy Griffith show as well.
I had imagined every single item in a different color than it actually was. Seeing Lucy's gorgeous dresses in color is a real treat. What I'm dying to know is what color were the three Don Loper dresses brought out for Lucy before she decided on the 'simple black dress.' '
Watch the video here on RU-vid called "I Love Lucy Best Moments in Color: Part 3" and then go to the 4:00 minute mark, and you can see those dresses in color.
She still looked beautiful in the color green she ultimately ended up with. But yeah, she always had to look less great than Lucy, but I don’t think she cared. She made a lot of money doing what she loved and we all loved her as much as Lucy. The show worked so perfectly because of the on- screen chemistry between them all. Imagine the show without Ethel. I doubt it would have been such a success.
so glad they finally did this!!1 wow! what a world of difference! Fantastic job they did! Wow if they were alive today to see their shows brought to vibrant color life!
Pertaining to the Christmas tree, today the style is all White or Off-White lights. As a child in the 70's the colored oval Christmas tree lights were in vogue.
The colorization was done beautifully...when I saw it, it made me emotional. I Love Lucy is one of my favorite shows. I have been watching it since I was a kid (I am almost 40 now:). In, 2007 when the DVD complete series came out in the big heart shaped box-I wanted it buy it so bad, but it was over $120!! I got a work study job while attending college, and with my first paycheck, I purchased the DVD set, which I still have. Since I watched the show so much, my mom would always say-"I should change your name to Lucy." Now I have children of my own, and nieces and nephews, they also watch the show. My nephew will be 3, and when he comes over, we sit down and watch it together. :)
I love that it’s colourised so well Lucille ball is a technicolor dream her costumes gorgeous I’m loving both black and white and now the colour , great job
The fact of the matter is that, had the technology of color was available for television since its inception, all these I Love Lucy shows would have been broadcast in color. Whereas The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, though the technology for color broadcasting was available, were never intended to be in color. Movies are a totally different thing, and that's where I draw the line. I'm glad Angus mentioned Sunset Boulevard and Psycho as an example. I recall being absolutely incensed when Ted Turner started colonizing films that were shot in B&W, and with terrible technology, too. Then again, we are talking Ted Turner, who's a businessman with zero interest in respecting art, and a man who has a total lack of taste. The work of bringing I Love Lucy to color is absolutely stunning. I am blown away by the quality.
i read somewhere that alfred hitchcock made psycho in black and white because he wanted to make it as inexpensive as possible as he was inspired by how most badly made B/W B movies did well at the box office and wondered what a well done B/W B movie would do at the box office. he even had his TV crew from alfred Hitchcock Presents work on the film. Speaking of Alfred Hitchcock presents, I think the intros and outros were colourised for the 80s series “new alfred hitchcock presents” by color systems technologies and american film technologies.
@@james68908 never heard that. However, in hindsight it makes perfect sense. Vertigo, now among the top 10 movies ever made, did terrible at the box office so a budget for Psycho was probably reduced exponentially. Hitchcock was forced to re-edit Vertigo which made a very psychologically complicated movie even more difficult to understand. The critics trashed it and the public didn't understand it. I rank it # 1 in my extensive collection.
@@akrenwinkle 🤣🤣🤣 she was definitely hot when she was young. I had many hand meetings thinking about Barbarella when I was a teen. That whole fantasy ceased to exist when I found out what a traitor she was to soldiers captured by the vietcong. And yes, colorizing movies that were never intended to be in color is not only in bad taste but profoundly disrespectful to the master cinematographers of light and shadows.
I've enjoyed "I Love Lucy" in color. Since the colorization, I have wondered if Desilu or succeeding owners had ever considered re-shooting an "I Love Lucy" episode in color while the cast was still alive.
Lucy herself did. She mentioned in an interview, which I saw a few years ago here on youtube, that by the time of the later seasons of ILL, she was wanting to make at least a few color episodes, which she believed would help DesiLu Productions command higher prices from syndicated reruns, but she could not get CBS to do it. I think she said that the contract DesiLu had with CBS did not give her enough power to force the issue. Her task was more difficult precisely because she was on the CBS network, which was very slow to embrace color, in part because the NTSC color system had beat out CBS’ own color technology with the FCC, and NTSC color was invented at RCA which owned NBC, their biggest competitor. However, Lucy was nothing if not shrewd. She’d been in the business long enough at that point to know that DesiLu would be able to make more money from syndicated reruns if the reruns were in color, so when it came time to negotiate terms for her next show, ‘The Lucy Show’, she insisted on color from the very start and she got it. However, during the first season all of the original airings were in b&w. Lucy still wasn’t powerful enough to force CBS to embrace color any faster than they were already doing, but she made sure every episode of her show would be in color for the syndication market, which Ball said paid off big time and helped accelerate the transition to color on all the networks.
That's not completely accurate. The first season of THE LUCY SHOW was filmed in black and white. Beginning with the second season, the show was shot in color, to make it a more viable product for syndication. However, the second and third seasons were still broadcast in black and white, even though they were filmed in color. It wasn't until the 4th season premiered in the fall of 1965 that CBS began broadcasting the show in color. (This was the season with the big format change, in which Lucy Carmichael moved to California and began working for Mr. Mooney.)
@@bruceswiszcz5610 I had to go back and look it up because I remembered it differently from the Lucille Ball interview I saw many years ago. You are correct. I thought she’d said that TLC was produced in color from the very first episode, but apparently not. Feeding into my misconception is probably also the fact that Lucy was right; I can’t remember ever seeing a black-and-white episode of TLC, and that is no doubt because those episodes seldom aired in reruns, and I was just a baby in the show!s original run. Syndicators apparently were only interested in the color episodes.
From my understanding, I Love Lucy WAS originally going to be filmed in color, but Lucy and Desi decided against it, because the costs, at the time, were so high.
interesting fact as well, the i love lucy episode "Ricky's Contract" was according to a CBS press release from August 14, 1954, going to be broadcast in color, but ultimately plans to film it in color were abandoned.
My daughters are 13 and 10 years old and they "love" watching Lucy. They don't mind the black and white at all but always curious how it would look with color.
Color WAS available for Television in 1950. It was available in the late 1940’s HOWEVER, the FCC wanted a Standard System that would work with the existing B&W system and nobody could agree on one and even when they had one filming and broadcasting in color was Expensive and most markets were still paying for their existing B&W equipment so, color was not commonplace until the 1970’s
Please colorize the ''Grace Foster ran away with the milkman" episode. The episode is called 'Gossip.' Also, 'The Operetta.' I'd love to see those colorized, too. Thank you ❤❤❤
CBS hasn't done these specials in three years. WHY? They should also pair the two Lucy show Christmas episodes from 1962 and 1965. Why haven't they done this too?
I don’t usually like colorization because it’s done so poorly. This on the other hand is so well done I love it! Although like most I prefer the black anvd white, these colorizations done by CBS are top- notch. ❤ Can someone please answer for me whether or not they are still showing the colorized Christmas episode with a newly colorized episode every year? Can you purchase or stream the colorized episodes? Is the plan to colorize all the episodes? I appreciate any info provided ❤️
What they don’t mentioned and if you watch old television films promo on how early television black and white were shot they mention of having to use very bright lights and bright certain colors makeup and clothing so the black and white film could record on film correctly with our standing out in the light
I remember seeing a show about the old black and white silent pictures, and how in order for peoples faces to show up properly on film, the actors had to wear this hideous clown like makeup. the stills looked more like they were shooting a Horror movie, rather then a comedy or love story... 🤣
I think it’s pretty offensive that they colorized these. Their attitude of hey, we’re not changing Sunset Boulevard is problematic. They are changing something that is an artistic vision. Desi and Lucy hired Karl Freund, an Academy Award winning cinematographer who was an expert in Black and White photography. The lighting was designed for black and white film. The show was made and intended to be seen in black and white. And frankly, I think the colorization looks terrible. The problem with colorization is that the number of colors are limited by the effort it takes to designate and animate them. Maybe some day they can use AI to make a convincing colorization.
As I watched this - I feel like this is something kind of sick - it's artificializing a real process and detracting from its authenticity. No wonder India has changed - they're sending all these kinds of jobs to it - the painstaking grunt work of filling in all the color.
I have all the colorized episodes of I Love Lucy, so thank you, CBS and West Wing Studios. As for the criticism of the “purists,” I say, we see in COLOR, not in B&W! I only wish there were more colorized episodes to come.
Normally, I'm VERY anti colourisation (ESP for films, and CONTRARY to the many dummies who think B&W was used on a particular film because it was 'cheaper' to use, than colour stock, that's NOTHING to do with it). TV's a slightly different case, as there were no colour sets/cameras (on a scale to make it financially viable) 'til the mid-late 60's in many countries, some shows seem to be 'begging' to be in colour, and I'd put I Love Lucy at the apex. Not just because of Ms Ball's well-known, and often-times joked about red hair colour, but because things (like Ricky's club, the Tropicana), and the trips to Europe and California would look sensational. Last year, I got that dvd with those (BEAUTIFULLY!) colourised episodes, and the disc also contains much background - on the history of colourisation (it's fascinating, but, like many who hated the process back in the 80s, that was analogue colorisation, and it was VERY limited -I think it was less than 20 colours (in TOTAL) which were available to use, and if that's not bad enough, a videographic artist trying to work with it and do something...’not awful’-looking, quickly found out that it was virtually impossible to - as an example - make the skin-tone one colour, and - if it was a dressed-up woman - give her lipstick. The end-result was the skin AND lips were the SAME colour (often-times a sickly orange-ish hue. Same thing for black actors; their skin had a sickly orange-ish haze, as well). I just want to mention one important thing about B&W films, and one aspect which many don't realise, understand - esp if you're not familiar with, or (for some strange reason), dislike watching in B&W, and that's the subconscious effect it has on viewers. When we watch things in colour - no matter how 'out of (this -'current') world', they STILL seem real. Today, with appx 98-99% of everything see being made in colour, it seems (in hindsight) 'those poor people, who didn't yet have colour film', aren't able to grasp how colour was understood by viewers. Many times, they felt looking at a (pre-recorded) colour broadcast WAS 'real(ity)'. Yes, even though the transmitted image was tiny, and far less sharp and vivid than today, many times, viewers thought they were looking at was akin to someone on FaceTime. They'd even say how 'real' it looked, and it's THAT 'realness' that's played with, in such filmsmasmThe Wizard of Oz. Just think; when people think of Adolf Hitler, they see in their mind a man in B&W - VERY rarely, colour, and the reason is he was mostly filmed and photographed in B&W. Trying to picture him in natural colour. It's not as easy as it is picturing your parents, or friends, but, if you can, he becomes a LOT more scary. He IS real, now. Not so with B&W. Even watching film noir (sigh...I love em), stories which take place in real locations (The Maltese Falcon's San Francisco), the B&W gives it an 'other-worldliness'-quality, as if the San Francisco Sam Spade's in is from a different 'dimemsion', almost. A simple example to understand this is The Wizard of Oz. As (almost everyone) who's seen the film knows, everything which happens to Dorothy in Kansas is (using reverse logic) filmed in B&W., But, when she's knocked on the head, and opens the front door, after the tornado, she'sr in a beautiful - other-worldly - place; Munchkin land. By filming in colour, it makes everything when Ch then happens - no matter how fantastic -'SEEM VERY real. I know many people who've only seen the film once, or twice thinks the ENTIRE film's in colour (I remember I did). I'm one of the many who grew up watching I Love Lucy in syndication,ad nauseum. She and Ricky, Ethel, and Fred were sometimes with me more often than 'real' family was. The disc also talks about - and with (I forgot his name. Forgive me) a guy who's the 'super' I Love Lucy fan, and it's largely due to his encyclopedic knowledge and collection - including many colour photographs taken on-set, that the ACCURATE colours are recreated. For me, I can say purchasing that disc was REALLY a surprise , because I thought I'd watch one or two episodss, and then forget about the disc. No. It was like watching something 'new', because the colours are SO beautifully done, and it makes the episodes seem as if it were filmed recently. There's a little bit about the 'lost' christmas episode, and it's discovery/initial broadcast really kicked off CBS to fund the colourisation. What amazing is they tell you that they didn't have any information to guide them, so the colours were - to borrow a phrase - 'dealer's choice" The broadcast result was ok, in as much as you were just excited to SEE the 'lost' episode, the colourisation was an added 'bonus', and I doubt many recalled how it appeared like a wash of 'crayon-like' the colour was. You next see 'version 2' of this, which (I haven't watched the disc in quite a few months), I can't remember why the 'improved' (analogue colour) was shown. Finally, you see the episode done using digital,colourisation, and with the added bonus of having an 'expert' in all things I Love Lucy, they even got the colours used in the gifts under the christmas tree correct, as well as those in the little paintings above the Ricardo's fireplace correct, as well. I'll shut up, but, I REALLY hope they'll eventually finish colourising the entire series.
I like the newer colorizing but I must say that it seems like we’re getting the colors we would have seen if we’d been in the studio audience, which I think would not necessarily be the same colors the producers, set designers and costume designers would have chosen to use if the show had always been in color.
