60 Year Anniversary of Celebrated I Love Lucy Show

This past Saturday, January 19th marked the 60th anniversary of the episode, "Lucy Goes to the Hospital." This was a groundbreaking moment in TV History that marked the highest Nielsen rating for any one show, with 98.6% of all households watching "I Love Lucy" that Monday evening. This episode featured the birth of Little Ricky, the fictional son of Rick and Lucy Ricardo. Most Lucy fans know that Keith Thibodeaux played Little Ricky throughout most of the I Love Lucy series. But Thibodeaux did not appear until Season 6 in 1956! The Baby that everyone saw on Lucy that night was James John Ganzer. Another little known fact is the full name of Little Ricky was Enrique Alberto Ricardo IV.

Not only was this a groundbreaking show in Nielsen ratings but also that Lucy gave birth in a TV Series during that era. Not only was Lucille Ball the first actress to be pregnant on television, something unheard of back then, as she had her real-life pregnancy written directly into the show.

Lucy actually gave birth to her second child, Desi Arnaz Jr. by a cesarean section just hours before CBS aired this episode. "It’s a very cool moment in television history to recognize because it gives one a sense of the significance of the show in American culture at that time, and because [a 98.6% Nielsen share] will almost certainly never happen again,” said Journey Gunderson, executive director at the Lucy Desi Center for Comedy.

"In today's fragmented world of hundreds of TV channels and dozens of mobile media viewing platforms, even the most popular TV broadcasts are seen by just a small fraction of the viewing audience," said Gregg Oppenheimer, son of I Love Lucy creator, Jess Oppenheimer. "It's awe-inspiring to think that my dad and his co-writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr. were able to write something that was experienced and enjoyed by practically everyone in the country at the same time."

Time truly stood still for this landmark episode. Not only did the episode's ratings completely eclipse those of the first-ever televised presidential inauguration the following day, Colonel McCormick, owner and publisher of the Chicago Times, even scheduled his inauguration-eve party for Dwight Eisenhower around the episode so that the gala would finish at 9pm - just in time to roll out a television and allow the dignitaries to watch the telecast.

In celebration of this anniversary, Gregg Oppenheimer, son of Jess Oppenheimer (co-creator, producer and writer for I Love Lucy) will be releasing his new audiobook, I Love Lucy: The Untold Story. The audiobook can be downloaded on iTunes, Amazon.com and Audible. This book is a fully cast radio play exploring the creation of I Love Lucy and includes funny anecdotes about what it was like to be on the set. Included in this audiobook is a bonus, 15-minute previously unreleased interview with Jess Oppenheimer in 1961. All proceeds on the sale go directly towards the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

Carol Burnett Speaks About Lucille Ball

In this interview outtake from PBS's Funny Ladies series, Carol Burnett describes meeting Lucille Ball for the first time and Ball’s generous offer to be of help during Burnett’s budding career. The two would become close friends and perform on each other’s shows. Burnett also shares her favorite anecdote about Lucy.

Watch The Friendship of Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball on PBS. See more from pbs.

‘I Love Lucy’: Early Footage of Lucy’s Real Kids

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were beloved the world over for their iconic sitcom, “I Love Lucy,” but the 1950s Hollywood power couple tried to shield their young children from the limelight.

“It’s interesting. They said, ‘We wanna make it, we don’t wanna ever put our kids in the show. That would be too horrible,’” Lucie Arnaz, the couple’s first child, said in a recent interview with ABC News. “They did that on purpose. I mean, and I think that’s great.”

For “Lucy” fans, that’s what may make clips like the one above all the more treasured. The 1954 newsreel (shown below) shows Arnaz and Ball introducing their two children, then just toddlers, before launching into a plea urging viewers to contribute to a campaign by the March of Dimes to raise money for the testing of a polio vaccine.

Later on in the newsreel Ball speaks of living in fear that her own children might someday contract polio, adopting a serious tone that marked a stark contrast to that of her clownish TV alter ego. (After the successful development of the polio vaccine, the March of Dimes, which celebrates its 75th anniversary next year, moved on to fund other advances in maternal and infant health. A major focus of the organization today is preventing premature birth.)

There was some overlap between fact and fiction when it came to Ball and Arnaz’s family. The “I Love Lucy” episode when Lucy gives birth to Little Ricky — later played by young drumming prodigy Keith Thibodeaux – aired on the same day that Lucille Ball had a Caesarian section to deliver Desi Arnaz Jr. It was all on purpose, Arnaz Jr. says.

“They shot the show four months earlier. And decided it was going to be a boy on television. But they knew that they could kind of plan when I was gonna be born, because the doctor said, ‘Well, we could do it the same day,’” he said. Though Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. didn’t appear on “I Love Lucy,” their parents often did bring them to the set.

“It was like growing up behind the scenes at Disneyland,” Arnaz Jr. remembered. “You got to see how all the magic was put together — the smoke and mirrors.” Arnaz Jr. even palled around with Thibodeaux, a.k.a. Little Ricky; the two children bonded over their mutual love of playing the drums.

“It was amazing. I became best friends with the kid who played me,” Arnaz Jr. Both Arnaz children grew up to be performers. Lucie Arnaz, 61, is a singer and actress with a long career spanning both the stage and screen. Desi Arnaz Jr., 59, portrayed his father in the 1992 film “The Mambo Kings,” played with his own band and now runs a ballet company with his wife.

Dann Cahn, I Love Lucy Editor, Dies

Using a newly developed editing machine that he dubbed the "three-headed monster," Dann Cahn pioneered multi-camera editing on sitcoms in the 1950s while helping to craft a classic, "I Love Lucy."

"Lucy" broke ground in television by employing three cameras instead of one for filming, a then-novel system that allowed an episode to be filmed as though it were a stage play, continuously and in sequence.

Cahn died on November 21st at age 89 of natural causes at his West Los Angeles home. Cahn was the last surviving member of the original creative team behind "I Love Lucy". Cahn, whose father was Philip Cahn, the cofounder of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, actually started out in the business as a child actor in the 1938 Jackie Cooper movie Newsboys’ Home, according to his Los Angeles Times obituary.

When we remember the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, we usually think of all the hilarious jams that Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) got herself into, and that exasperated look that her husband Ricky (Desi Arnaz) would get. But it wasn’t just the stars’ comedic virtuosity that made I love Lucy a classic. It was the first show to be filmed in front of a live audience in a Hollywood studio, rather than broadcast live from New York, as other early TV comedies did. But Lucy’s most revolutionary innovation was its use of multiple camera angles, which conveyed Ball’s frenetic style and humorous nuances in a way that a single viewpoint couldn’t.

But to get all that to work technically — and to do it rapidly enough that I Love Lucy could air 35 episodes in a season — was a daunting task. The first half-hour episode of I Love Lucy actually was shot with four cameras, according to Michael Karol’s Lucy A to Z: The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia. But after that, director William Asher and his team decided that three cameras — one for the full scene, a second for medium “over the shoulder” shots, and a third for close-ups — were enough.

Cahn’s favorite episode of I Love Lucy reportedly was an October 1956 segment in which Lucy is recruited as an assistant in a magic act (featuring Orson Welles as the magician) at Ricky’s nightclub. Cahn, who’d been an assistant editor on Welles’ 1948 film Macbeth, relished a chance to work again with the illustrious actor/director.

Cahn spent years searching for a print of an unreleased 1954 I Love Lucy movie produced by Desi Arnaz, which had been fashioned from three Lucy episodes and 12 minutes of additional footage shot by director Edward Sedgewick. MGM deep-sixed the project, fearing it would compete with another Ball-Arnaz film, The Long, Long Trailer. Eventually, though, Cahn found bits and pieces of the film in a studio vault and painstakingly reassembled it, and it finally was released as part of a Lucy DVD box set in 2007.

In addition to I Love Lucy, Cahn worked on a wide array of other productions, ranging from such classic TV series as The Beverly Hillbillies and The Untouchables to the exploitation auteur Russ Meyer’s 1970 flick Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which was written by another notable name in the movie biz — critic Roger Ebert.

Following is a video interview in which Cahn talks about the first completed (fourth aired) episode of I Love Lucy:

Lucy headed to Hulu for Streaming Over Internet

The classic "I Love Lucy" TV Show will be headed to Hulu and available for streaming over the internet and on connected devices. Newer series such as 'CSI: Miami' and 'Numbers' will also appear as well as classic 'Twilight Zone', all on the subscription Hulu Plus service.

The online streaming site has signed a non-exclusive deal with CBS that includes rights to stream 2,600 episodes of those and other shows from the network's production library starting in January. They will be available to paid subscribers of the Hulu Plus service.

Also included are episodes of more recent (but no longer airing) series such as Medium, CSI: Miami and Numb3rs, the companies said. Hulu already carries episodes of CW programming produced by CBS as part of a separate agreement.