For months now, we've been getting the occasional reader e-mail saying that fans of The Lucy Show that managed to talk to somebody at CBS DVD about it, were told to expect an upcoming home video release of the show. Some have even mentioned that, according the responses they got (usually by phone!), restoration and music licensing have been in the process of being worked on, and that we would see DVDs in the first part of next year. For example, our most recent note on the topic comes from reader William Bennett (Ben) Warfield, who provides us this rather exact timeframe info:
CBS telephoned me back yesterday and said they are looking at a late spring 2009 release date for the first (black and white) season of "The Lucy Show."
We've personally tried contacting CBS DVD to confirm this, as well as trying to ask around at their distributor, Paramount Home Entertainment. We had even reached out to I Love Lucy DVD Producer Gregg Oppenheimer, on the off chance that he might know something about Lucy Show releases. We realize that the last one is a bit of a stretch, though, since Gregg's involvement on I Love Lucy DVDs had mainly been due to his father's Producer and Writer work on the original series' broadcasts. However, Jess Oppenheimer was never involved on any other of Lucille Ball's later programs, so there's no real reason yet to expect Gregg to be involved with DVDs of those shows. As a result, we mainly concentrated on asking at the studio(s).
The result of our "pounding the pavement"? As you would expect, we've had a number of unreturned phone calls and e-mails, but we did manage to get someone from the studio on the phone here and there. However, nobody was willing to go on the record with the press at this time, to publicly confirm the second-quarter 2009 release that fans have apparently been informed of. We also asked our retail industry contacts, naturally, but they had no information about any possible release. However, they noted that a timeline of "late spring" logically means that retailers would not get their solicitations from the studio until sometime in the general "January/February" timeframe, which is still a ways off.
So as you can see, this word of an upcoming Lucy Show DVD release, although it feels pretty promising, officially remains at the "RUMOR" stage for now...at least as far as we're concerned. We're still waiting on one or two return calls that we had been promised, though, and if they bear any fruit then we'll post an update. In the meantime, we wanted to let all of you excited fans who've been e-mailing us know that we are indeed looking into it. And please, bear in mind that even if the info does turn out to be accurate, remember that it's still early planning information, and could be subject to change. We'll post more as further developments occur, so stay tuned!
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