About This Quiz
Do you remember Lucy's maiden name or the club where Ricky sang "Babalú?" If you call yourself an "I Love Lucy" fan, and you can't ace this quiz, you might have some 'splaining to do! For the record, her maiden name is McGillicuddy and he performed at the Tropicana Club.
"I Love Lucy" premiered during the dawn of the television era. When it first hit the small screen on October 15, 1951, only about one out of every 10 U.S. homes had a TV. By the time the show and its successor, "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," went off the air in 1960, 90 percent of American homes had at least one TV.
During its decade-long run, the series revolutionized television technology and production. Desi Arnaz developed a three-camera filming technique that had never been used before but continues to be the standard to this day. Lucy and Desi also formed Desilu Productions in 1950 which produced "I Love Lucy". When Lucy bought Desi out in 1962, she became the very first woman ever to head a major production company.
Finally, there's the extraordinary fact that a TV show featuring a beautiful young American woman in a "mixed marriage" ever made it onto TV at all. In the late '40s, Lucille Ball and Richard Denning played Liz and George Cooper on a radio series called "My Favorite Husband." When the networks wanted to move the show to television, Lucy wanted real-life husband Desi to co-star, but the network was adamant that viewers would never accept this cross-cultural pairing. Luckily, Ball got her way, and the show went on to become comedy gold, and to live on in syndication for decades.
Think you know everything there is to know about this classic sitcom? Take our quiz and prove it!
His fluent Spanish became a staple of the show's dialogue.
It was a way of making the show even more personal.
It's Philip Morris, this was before the surgeon general's warning was mandatory on cigarette packages. It's why so many episodes feature heavy smoking.
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Almost all of the shooting takes place in their apartment.
Desi, of course, was also her husband in real life.
He reportedly couldn't stand her voice so he always covered his ears.
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They feared his ethnicity would drive off viewers; they were wrong.
That's right, the show has been on TV continuously since the 1950s.
One hundred eighty-one shows ran from 1951 to 1957.
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Instead, it insisted on using more neutral terminology, such as "expecting."
It was 44 million people, more than 25 percent of the U.S. population in 1953. That was the vast majority of Americans who owned television sets.
The Desilu production was a major hit for the CBS network.
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Desi's touring schedule meant that he was often away from Lucy.
He sold his share of the production company to Lucy and went into the horse business.
In real life, the two met on a film set when Lucy was 28 years old.
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She resented being tied to a man who was two and a half decades older than her.
The relatively stable production team is one reason for the show's consistency. The prolific William Asher is one of them.
Add in the fact that it was filmed in front of a live studio audience, and the show was groundbreaking in its production.
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Lucy drunkenly slurs her words during one of the shows most famous bits.
The show ran for six season and each episode lasted a little more than 20 minutes.
It was discovered in 1990, reconstructed and then released in 2002.
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Before giving birth to Lucie in 1951, she suffered three miscarriages over the course of ten years. Desi and Lucy were over the moon about finally having a child together.
She was 40 and Desi was five years younger than her.
Their live show was critically acclaimed, essentially forcing the network to give their show a shot.
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It was No. 3 in its first season and it never finished a season rated lower than third.
She preferred Chesterfield but as a compromise, she placed her brand of choice in the Philip Morris box when it was on camera.
Eventually the fast pace of filming burned out much of the production team.
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In the late 1950s, $4 million was serious cash, even for stars like Lucy and Desi.
Desi Arnaz reportedly wanted the show to be in color, but in the 1950s the expense of color was still too high.
Her full name is Lucie Desiree Arnaz.
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