Instead, it was decided to bring back I Love Lucy's characters in a different format. The show was expanded to an hour and, like the cop and mystery shows of the late-1960s and '70s, was part of a larger, rotating series of shows which meant that the newly christened The Lucille Ball - Desi Arnaz Show would shoot just five shows per season. By its third year, the couple's marriage was on the skids, and after completing the "Lucy meets the Moustache" they filed for divorce and the program screeched to an abrupt halt. (The Lucy - Desi Comedy Hour was yet another name given the program when it aired in reruns, and for which it is best-known.)

CBS's release of The Lucille Ball - Desi Arnaz Show, under the somewhat misleading I Love Lucy: The Final Seasons: 7, 8 & 9 offers all 13 shows in excellent transfers and is supplemented with an overwhelming multitude of extra features.

As with the final season of I Love Lucy, Lucy (Ball) and Ricky Ricardo (Arnaz), along with their son "Little" Ricky (Keith Thibodeaux, billed here only as "Little Ricky," which must have disheartened Thibodeaux's agent), are comfortably ensconced in their spacious new home in Connecticut. Even their friends and former landlords the Mertzes, Fred (William Frawley) and Ethel (Vivian Vance), have moved nearby. An internationally known Cuban bandleader, Ricky hobnobs with showbiz celebrities, but Lucy's fannish obsession with Hollywood stars constantly gets her into trouble, as do her "crazy schemes" to break into show business.

In expanding the half-hour I Love Lucy to the hour-long Lucille Ball - Desi Arnaz Show, writers Bob Weiskopf, Bob Schiller, Bob Carroll, Jr., and Madelyn Davis had to find ways to stretch their scripts without these new shows appearing padded. Early episodes find clever ways around this problem, but later episodes are on autopilot, uncomfortably expanding material that would play okay in a half-hour time slot but which spreads thin at 50 minutes.

I Love Lucy changed forever (and not always for the better) the moment guest star William Holden set fire to the tip of Lucy Ricardo's false nose in a February 1955 show called "L.A. at Last." The classic episode stumbled upon a gold mine with Ball's hilariously authentic, celebrity-obsessed stargazer. The huge reaction to that show, plus the couple's position as television royalty, ensured from that point on a steady flow of Hollywood visitors. Indeed, long after I Love Lucy through The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy, Ball's shows became a revolving door for Big-Time stars.

On I Love Lucy guest stars were generally expected to make little more than extended cameos, a scene or two with Ball where they mostly reacted to Lucy's clumsy gushing, and pretty much got to be themselves. On The Lucille Ball - Desi Arnaz Show visiting stars are more fully integrated into the scripts.

The first show, guest-starring Ann Sothern (reprising her role from the series Private Secretary), Cesar Romero, and Rudy Vallee, likewise exhibits the Arnaz's desire to upgrade the show's production values and try new things. Restored to its original length (this first episode originally aired in an unusual 75-minute time slot but later shorn of 15 minutes for rebroadcast and syndication; it's complete here for the first time since its original airing), "Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana" is a full-blown mini-musical, with quite good original songs and second unit footage shot on location in Cuba. Adding to the charm is that the episode, set in 1940, tells the backstory of how Lucy and Ricky met, the kind of thing that became fertile ground for The Dick Van Dyke Show a few years later.

Another early show, "Lucy Hunts Uranium," exhibits another facet that separates The Lucille Ball - Desi Arnaz Show from its predecessor. Though the new series would still shoot in the traditional three-camera 35mm film format before a live audience, a production method I Love Lucy essentially invented, huge swaths of shows would be filmed on location in the one-camera format that was becoming increasingly popular in sitcoms and which would dominate television comedies of the 1960s. In "Lucy Hunts Uranium," the foursome and guest star Fred MacMurray become obsessed with finding the then-hot (in more ways than one) precious metal in the desert outside Las Vegas. This leads to a madcap race by the Ricardos, the Mertzes, and MacMurray back to town to file a claim, complete with elaborate stunts and sight gags that play like a warm-up to Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), with certain ideas repeated verbatim in that film. After a slow start, it evolves into one of the series' best shows.

Unfortunately, and perhaps as a result of the Arnaz's crumbling marriage, later episodes are much more conventional, less ambitious, and padded with overextended slapstick that leans heavily on the affable guest talent. In the course of its run Lucy and Ricky played host to Tallulah Bankhead, Betty Grable and Harry James, Fernando Lamas, Maurice Chevalier, the cast of Make Room for Daddy, Red Skelton, Paul Douglas, Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, Milton Berle, and Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams.

Typical of these shows is the penultimate episode, "The Ricardos Go to Japan," which guest stars Bob Cummings (who'd coincidentally play a similar role in the 1962 film My Geisha) functioning in that show much as William Holden and other stars had in I Love Lucy's Hollywood episodes. The comedy is routine, not bad but uninspired, with nothing to distinguish it from the half-hour series except its extreme length.

Video & Audio

The Lucille Ball - Desi Arnaz Show looks great, with near-flawless full-frame black and white transfers that are impressively sharp with little signs of wear. "Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana" reportedly was restored using a recently-discovered 35mm print, but it looks as good as everything else. The 13 shows are spread over four single-sided, double-layered discs, with 3-4 episodes per DVD.

Beyond all the reinstated footage, that show features its original titles and Arnaz's introduction and close. Subsequent episodes use The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour moniker, with voice over by an uncredited Marvin Miller. The shows are complete and not time-compressed.

Extra Features

The impressive line-up of supplements include extensive material on the "Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana" episode, with alternate versions of scenes used for the cut shown in reruns. "Flubs" notes little goofs that made it into the final cut of episodes and is a neat little feature.

Other highlights include three original Ford Motor commercials; and a 40-minute Desliu/Westinghouse Sponsor Presentation. The latter is fascinating. Ball and Arnaz, along with Frawley and Vance, play themselves but essentially stay in their TV characters, and the presentation is complete with canned laughter. They give a Westinghouse executive (in fact actor Ross Elliott) a helicopter tour of the former RKO Studios in Hollywood and Culver City (including great views of 40 Acres, the famous backlot), and later a walking tour of the stages. (Among the items Arnaz shows off is an original armature from Mighty Joe Young [!], which he mistakenly identifies as King Kong.)

Fans of the original I Love Lucy will be especially delighted to see on-set color footage surreptitiously shot on 16mm film by a member of the audience. From his vantage point we see the big, roving cameras and the like swirling around the sets representing Ricky's Tropicana Night Club and the Ricardo's apartment, all in full color. This is integrated with footage from the actual episode, and makes a fascinating historical document.

Each disc includes useful production notes full of interesting trivia, and brief but handy "guest cast" notes which admirably note the generally uncredited supporting guest actors like Nestor Paiva and Charles Lane. "Meet Special People" is a sweet tribute to more generally uncredited but longtime Desilu staffers like editor Dann Cahn and hairstylist Irma Kusely.

Also included are a promo for the series' rebroadcast in 1965, new animated titles for I Love Lucy when that series was rerun in the summer of 1957.

Parting Thoughts

The freshness of the earliest I Love Lucy episodes may be largely depleted, but The Lucille Ball - Desi Arnaz Show/I Love Lucy: The Final Seasons: 7, 8 & 9, properly viewed with long breaks between episodes, is still a lot of fun, and its earlier shows are both impressively ambitious and sometimes quite funny. CBS's handsome packaging and pocketful of extras make this really tempting to both ardent fans and those who never got around to these less widely-seen shows. Highly Recommended.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel.