I Love Lucy : The Lost Toons

I Love Lucy - the name brings back all kinds of fond memories - remember the Vitameatavegamin episode or how about Lucy and Ethel's escapades at the candy factory. Or how about those funny animations at the beginning of the show.

What!!!

You're probably saying I'm crazy. Then ,of course, most people are familiar with the satin heart and the scripted titles in front. What you may not know is that the show started out quite differently from it's present-day version.

Animated Lucy When the show first aired in the early 50's, viewers were treated to an animated stick-figure Lucy and Ricky courtesy of the shows sponsor, Phillip Morris Cigarette. Keep in mind, things were different back then. Since the cancer-causing company sponsored the show, they got to plug their names everywhere and anywhere they pleased. So as soon as the stick figures came on, an overhead said, ""Phillip Morris, America's finest cigarette presents, The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show - I Love Lucy". Following this, the two stick figures would proceed to do little activities like running around, twirling or bouncing off giant packs of Phillips-Morris cigarettes while the announcer explained the joys of smoking Phillip-Morrises'. Each episode opening they would do something different providing for a unique viewing experience each time. And this wasn't the only time you'd see the two of them animated because they also introduced commercials within the show as cartoon characters.

Animated Lucy So why the departure of these delightful openings. Well, back in 1957, when CBS started showing reruns of the earlier shows on Saturday nights, Phillips Morris was no longer sponsoring the show. This meant that CBS was forced to come up with an opening that wouldn't promote any particular company, hence the current satin heart. And since the cigarette ads are so prominently mixed in with the animation, it's impossible to edit them to conform to current standards. So that's that - like many show openings from the 50's, the I Love Lucy openings will likely never be shown again.

Now the big question is who actually animated these little segments. Well, thanks to Ron Kurer of the Toon Tracker we now know the answer. Apparently, the work was done by Hanna-Barbara's unit during their tenure at MGM, when they were producing all those Tom and Jerry's. Gene Hazelton was responsible for most of the animation. A question that remains unanswered though is why wasn't a revised version of the animated characters considered for the new introduction?

But the question you're probably all wondering right now is where can you find these openings. Well, they're out there on lots of different compilations of the show and on various Lucy tribute tapes. One in particular is the I LOVE LUCY LASER DISC from Criterion Television Classics. It includes uncut versions of two episodes with the cartoon opening credits and the animated commercials:

It's distributed by : The Voyager Company

If you can't find it at their website, here's the laserdisc info:

Manufactured by DADC

First Printing 1991

Catalog # CTC1000L

ISBN: 55940-218-0

If you want to find out more about the animated Lucy openings and other TV shows of this era with animated titles, head on over to The Toon Tracker Animated Lucy Page.

This article would not have been possible without the help of the many Lucy fan's on the Internet including Jonathan, Ron Kurer, Ted Nesi, Nancy Schnepp, and Breck Richardson among others.

 

Originally appeared as part of Animation and Cartoon Heaven