We Love Lucy - Part 1

Years ago, back in my childhood, I still liked TV.  But of course, since I was a child, I mainly watched children's television on the only network for kids - Nickelodeon.  And as the day got later and the kids shows ended, Nickelodeon transitioned into Nick at Nite, the place for TV hits.  While nowadays Nick at Nite airs shows that have only been off the air for a few years like George Lopez and My Wife and Kids, back in the 90's, Nick at Nite aired real classic television from the 50's, 60's, and 70's.  And while I enjoyed the other classic shows like The Munsters, Beverly Hillbillies, and Bewitched, my absolute favorite was I Love Lucy.  I was obsessed with this 1950's black and white show, to the extent that I had an I Love Lucy Board Game, I Love Lucy Monopoly, 2 I Love Lucy posters in my basement, and some I Love Lucy VHS tapes (back in the day when TV Shows on home media was rare).


And as it turned out, years before we ever met, Anna was a big I Love Lucy fan too.  We bonded over our love of the show (amongst other things) and for Anna's birthday in college, I got her the first season of I Love Lucy on DVD.  We'd watch it on occasion in college, and it was fun.  But being as we were in college, we were busy with schoolwork and other things, so we didn't fully get into it.

We stopped watching for a while, and didn't pick it up until a few years later, when we were bored, looking for something to watch, and decided to continue with I Love Lucy where we left off.  And similar to our experience with How I Met Your Mother, we got hooked.  We'd come home after work, and just pop in some I Love Lucy and just watch all night.  After we finished the first season, we decided to just go all out and by the complete series DVD set.  This set had it all: All 6 seasons of I Love Lucy, the 3 seasons the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour specials, and tons of special features such as the long lost I Love Lucy Movie, a colorized episode, and much more.  It took us about a year or so, but we finally finished watching it, and we truly had a great time.

Although we were hooked on I Love Lucy, it was very different to our addiction to How I Met Your Mother.  With HIMYM, we were mainly driven by the plot of the episodes, and we couldn't wait to see what would happen next and how all of the little details would fit together.  With I Love Lucy, there really wasn't much of an overlying plot.  While there was a little bit of continuity through the episodes (for some episodes they went to California, for some they were traveling through Europe, eventually they moved to the country), you could pretty much watch each episode on its own, and still fully understand what was happening.  What was fun about watching I Love Lucy, is that it we had already seen most of these episodes as children before, so they had a lot of nostalgia.  There were some episodes that were so classic that we looked forward to them, such as the classic Chocolate Factory episode:

And then there would be other episodes, that we forgot about at first, but then as we were watching, it would all come back to us, like this one (Ricky rehearses the song straight first with the professional singer, then at 2:19, Lucy takes over :

And still, there were other episodes that we had either never seen before, or had completely forgotten about, and it was a thrill to watch them for the first time.  But while we may have finished watching all the episodes of I Love Lucy, our Lucy obsession was far from over...

(Coming soon, We Love Lucy - Part 2)