Thursday marked 75 years since I Love Lucy premiered on CBS. To mark the anniversary, Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, took to Instagram to share a short promo the network aired before the premiere, a black-and-white clip few fans have ever seen.
As Parade recounts, CBS used the promo to introduce its new cast to America ahead of the first episode, “The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub,” which aired on October 15, 1951. Ball and Arnaz look into the camera and announce in unison, “Hey, we’re on TV now!” Ball points viewers toward the show and adds of Arnaz, “he’s my husband,” and Arnaz jokes that playing her husband is “Typecastin’ that’s what I calls it.” Vivian Vance and William Frawley, the show’s Ethel and Fred Mertz, get their introductions too.
Arnaz also paid tribute on Facebook, where she pointed to the show’s writers as the reason the series has lasted, sharing a Television Academy Foundation interview with the writing team and toasting Bob Carroll Jr., Madelyn Pugh, Martin Davis and Jess Oppenheimer alongside her parents. “I raise my glass to that fantastic team,” she wrote. “I could not be more proud to be a part of this family.”
The anniversary brought the show’s history a new home as well. Parade reports the National Comedy Center has acquired previously unseen production materials from the series, including behind-the-scenes photographs, 35mm film prints and original scripts once owned by Ball and Arnaz. In the early pilot script among them, the series was titled The Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Show, and its central couple were Lucy and Larry Lopez.
The staying power underneath the nostalgia is the real story. At Arnaz’s insistence, in an era when most television was performed live and thrown away, the series was shot on 35mm film in front of a studio audience with three cameras, a method that let it be rerun forever. It finished first in the ratings in four of its six seasons, produced 180 episodes, and when Lucy gave birth to Little Ricky in January 1953, some 44 million viewers tuned in, more than watched the presidential inauguration the next day.
The show has never really left. As TDN reported last month, every episode of I Love Lucy is streaming free on Pluto TV, and 75 years on, the chocolate factory line is still moving faster than anyone can wrap.