I Love Lucy Superstar Special
On Sunday night, CBS aired two colorized episodes of I Love Lucy: “L.A. at Last” and “Lucy and Superman.” While some episodes, such as the Christmas special, have been on DVD for a couple of years, this was the first time colorized episodes aired on TV.
We’ve all wondered what I Love Lucy would look like in color and hoped they would do it when the technology was good enough to do it well. Had they done this in the ’80s, it probably would have looked like the dresses in 1903’s The Great Train Robbery. Fortunately, they waited. Instead, colorized I Love Lucy looks like it was shot in Technicolor.
It’s a fun novelty, but I Love Lucy was never meant to look like The Wizard of Oz. The sensory overload of color detracts from the story line. It’s beautiful, but doesn’t look natural. On some level, it works because Lucy is larger than life. However, part of I Love Lucy’s charm is that it’s still somewhat plausible when CBS wasn’t throwing every popular celebrity from the 1950s in it.
I’m going to be honest this last concern may only be me, but another distracting element about colorized I Love Lucy is that the colorist may have decided that Lucy’s dress was blue, but was it really blue? We know what Lucy and Ricky looked like in color because color publicity shots exist, but they do not exist for every scene in every episode. What if it the dress was purple? We’re all sort of used to everyone in black and white TV land wearing some sort of gray. Throwing color onto it may make it less historically accurate than color TV from the 50s already is.
In the end, every episode of I Love Lucy should not be colorized. The occasional episode in color is fun, but colorizing the whole series would just make future generations forget that television in the ’50s was black and white and that color doesn’t necessarily make something better. It doesn’t make I Love Lucy worse. However, now that my curiosity has been satisfied, I’ll happily go back to enjoying I Love Lucy in its original form.
========================================================================================================
Allison Lips is the Founder of Wait! What’s a Dial?, a television blog that showcases the writing of millennials. Allison graduated from Rowan University in May 2013. She has a passion for TV history, especially late night and game shows. If she could go back in time, Steve Allen would still be hosting The Tonight Show. Follow her on Twitter @waitwaitsadial.
====================================================================================
Lucy’s polka dot dress was blue and the actual dress was on display at Universal studios Hollywood California years ago. CBS has a black and white to color chart so colors weren’t randomly added. One way to disprove this would be if I love lucy episode “lucy is encite” was colorized the dress or gown that lucy wore was brown and if it gets colorized and that dress/gown is a different color then that would say otherwise. Younger generations eventually won’t like black and white shows or films so color brings more viewers to like.
I didn’t know that the dress was on display. It does make sense that a color chart exists, but it’s still possible to get wrong or use artistic license. Younger viewers aversion to black and white TV shows isn’t going to help by colorizing them and erasing history. They’re only going to think TV was always in color and avoid those shows that weren’t colorized, but are equally good. I am all for restoring and erasing any spots, but colorizing old shows shouldn’t become anything more than a novelty.