“Little Ricky Learns to Play the Drums”

(S6;E2 ~ October 8, 1956) Directed by James V. Kern. Written by

Madelyn Martin, Bob Carroll, Jr., Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf. Filmed June 28, 1956 at Ren-Mar Studios.

Rating: 47.8/65 

Synopsis ~ Little Ricky’s non-stop drumming threatens the Ricardos’ and Mertzes’ friendship.

This was one of four episodes filmed at the end of season five, but held off to kick off season six.  Oddly, this episode was filmed after “Little Ricky Gets Stage Fright,” likely due to the schedules of Bob Hope and Orson Welles, who kick off the sixth season with guest appearances. 

This marks the final appearance of Elizabeth Patterson as Mrs. Matilda Trumbull. Starting in 1953, she played the character for ten episodes. The character was mentioned in future episodes as helping run the NYC apartment while the Mertzes are living in Connecticut. 

This is the second episode to feature Keith Thibodeaux as Little Ricky, but the first to really focus on the character. 

Keith Thibodeaux (above with Desi Sr., Desi Sr. and Dinah Shore) was born in Lafayette, Louisiana, on December 1, 1950. He was cast out of 200 other young hopefuls because of his resemblance to Desi and his remarkable talent on the drums. Lucille Ball asked Keith’s father if his son had studied acting. When she was told that he had not, Lucy impatiently asked, “Well, what does he do?”  

Fearing no one would be able to pronounce his last name, his professional name became Richard Keith, though it was never listed in the credits. In “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hours” he was credited as Little Ricky!  It is no wonder America had trouble differentiating between Desi Arnaz Jr. and Thibodeaux.

Thibodeaux played Little Ricky until 1960, when “The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour” went off the air and the Arnaz marriage ended. Keith grew very close to Desi Jr. and Lucie Arnaz, but relations with the family became strained when Keith’s father had a disagreement with Lucille Ball. After playing Little Ricky, he continued his career as a child actor, appearing on “The Andy Griffith Show” as Opie’s pal, Johnny Paul Jason. As a teenager, he gave up acting for rock music which led to problems with alcohol and drugs, much like so many other former child stars. He eventually found religion and became the drummer for a Christian band called David and the Giants.

Today Thibodeaux is the executive director of Ballet Magnificat!, a Christian dance company in Jackson, Mississippi. His wife Kathy is the artistic director and founder of the company. Ironically, Desi Arnaz Jr.’s wife Amy was also a dancer and troupe leader. The couple have a daughter named Tara. In 1994, he published his autobiography, Life After Lucy. In March 2015 he made a rare TV appearance on “The 700 Club.” He is the last surviving principal performer from “I Love Lucy.”

Thibodeaux was actually the eighth and last person to play Ricky Ricardo Jr.

• James John Ganzer was little Ricky as a newborn in “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” (S2;E16).
• Twins Richard and Ronald Lee Simmons played Little Ricky as a baby through the end of the season 2.
• Another set of twins, Joseph and Michael Mayer, played Little Ricky as a toddler through season 5.
• In “Ricky’s Old Girlfriend” (S3;E12) two more actors played the role in Lucy’s dream, one of them being Jerry Mathers of “Leave it to Beaver” fame. The other actor has not been identified.

The Ricardos and the Mertzes have tickets to the theatre Saturday night, so Ethel drops by to borrow Lucy’s black fox stole. The title of the play or musical is never specified.

Lucy would like to see her son grow up to be a doctor, while Ricky wouldn’t mind him becoming a drummer, like himself. 

One morning, they notice him tapping out a beat with a teaspoon on his cereal bowl. Breaking their word to each other not to influence him on a possible career path, Lucy buys him a doctor kit and Ricky buys him a snare drum.

LUCY: “Do you want him to be a wealthy, distinguished doctor or a crummy, out-of-work drummer?” 

But it is the drum that captures the boy’s attention, with the noise upsetting the entire apartment complex and causing a rift between the Ricardos and the Mertzes.  

The episode opens with one of Lucille Ball’s favorite gags: catching the toast in mid-air as it pops up from the toaster. 

This episode also features the ‘phantom breadbox’ with the door that opens by itself!  It opens as Ricky walks to the breakfast table. Lucy closes it without fuss when she goes to the fridge for the eggs. After this, the box hatch was sealed shut to prevent further surprise reveals! 

The stove in the Ricardo kitchen which was always electric. For this episode it is changed to a Roper Gas Range to accommodate Fred’s turning off the gas. A couple of episodes later it’s back to electric. 

More changes in the kitchen include new dishes, although they continue to use the creamer and sugar bowl from the old Franciscan Ivy dishware set. The new set is Brock Pottery in the Country Lane pattern with brown borders. Accordingly, they no longer use their Franciscan ivy pattern table cloth.  

Ricky orders the boy a drum and asks Fred to hide it, but Ethel discovers the package and innocently brings it upstairs. At first, Lucy thinks it is a hatbox. 

ETHEL: “A hat from Schirmer’s Music Company?” 

G. Schirmer, Inc. is a classical music publishing company based in New York City, founded in 1861. It is the oldest active music publisher in the United States. However, in real life they do not sell musical instruments, just sheet music.  

Lucy Ricardo first mentioned the Easter Parade in 1952′s “The Saxophone” (S2;E2) while searching the attic for her high school sax. 

The Easter Parade was not an actual formal parade, but rather an impromptu display of fashions, particularly ladies hats, on Easter Sunday on New York’s 5th Avenue. Starting as a spontaneous event in the 1870s, it became increasingly popular into the mid-20th century; in 1947 it was estimated to draw over a million people. Its popularity has declined significantly, drawing only 30,000 people in 2008. The event was memorialized in the 1948 musical film of the same name inspired by the Irving Berlin song, also titled “Easter Parade.” 

After her over-eager delivery, Fred calls Ethel “Miss United Parcel.” United Parcel Service (UPS) is a package delivery company founded in 1907 as The American Messenger Company, adopting its current name in 1919. Today they are famous for their brown delivery vans. 

Ricky calls Lucy’s incentive a “Junior Doctor Kildare Kit.”  Little did the writers known then that such a toy would actually be sold in 1963 – seven years later!  

Doctor Kildare is a fictional character originally created in the 1930s by  Frederick Faust under the pen name Max Brand. The Kildare character was featured in films, a radio series, a 1960s television series, a comic book and comic strip, and a short-lived second TV series in the 1970s. Although today the character is best remembered from the 1961 TV series starring Richard Chamberlain, this 1956 reference is about the films and radio series, which continued in syndication for several years after its final episode in 1951. The 1961 series aired on NBC concurrently with “The Lucy Show” on CBS.  In a 1966 episode, Lucy Carmichael  mistakes a movie studio doctor for Richard Chamberlain, an inside joke about his very popular role as Dr. Kildare. 

Lucy and Ricky allow their son to play the drum non-stop for four days in order not to ‘inny-bit’ him. Listen closely!  When Little Ricky first gets his drum, it sounds like a tom-tom drum but throughout the rest of the episode, the drum sounds like a snare. This is because the sound effect was recreated off-screen.

Besides showing how adorable Richard Keith is on camera, the episode features some of Lucy’s best comic timing as she makes breakfast to the repetitive beat of Little Ricky’s drum: 

<bang> 
<bang> 
<bang bang bang>

She squeezes the oranges, pours the juice, disposes of the rinds, and cracks the eggs – all to this rhythm. She even scrapes the burnt toast in rhythm!

Oops!  When disposing of the orange rinds in the trash bin, one of the rinds rolls onto the floor.  Knowing that the key to the comedy was the continued rhythm of her actions, Lucille Ball cannot take a moment to pick it up.  

LUCY: “How many eggs, dear?”
RICKY: “Two.”
LUCY: “Two.”
RICKY: “Two two two.”

When Lucy is rhythmically tossing the eggshells into the trash bin, one of the shells falls on the floor – but the orange rind is gone!  The scene was likely comprised of several takes to get the timing perfect.  The scene also uses close-ups of the oranges, eggs, and trash bin, which had to be filmed separately. 

Little Ricky’s rhythmic drumming is also affecting the Mertz household!  Notice that in the long shot of the living room Ethel’s wall-to-wall carpet stops at the imaginary ‘fourth wall’!  

Oops!  Fred’s copy of the New York Herald Tribune (a real newspaper) was  five months old at the time of the filming!  The headlines indicate that President Eisenhower had submitted his name for the New Hampshire primary for a second term. It also reports that French president Mollet urges a solution to the Algerian issue. Both these events happened during February 1956. 

When Lucy calls Fred later to complain about her lack of gas and electric, Fred is still trying to catch up on his reading with a November 1954 copy of Sports Illustrated. At the time of filming the issue was 19 months old!  On the front cover is San Francisco 49′ers Quarterback Y.A. Tittle. This was the magazine’s first issue with a professional football player on the cover.  In a January 1969 episode of “Here’s Lucy,” Kim Carter (Lucie Arnaz) takes one look at Craig (Desi Arnaz Jr.) in his high school football uniform and says her brother is the “Y.A. Tittle of the teenybopper set.”  The back cover of the magazine is an ad for the Pedwin Scatback, a wing-tip style dress shoe that sells for $9.95!  

Had this episode actually taken place on its air date – October 8, 1956 – Fred certainly would have been reading about the Yankees winning the World Series, with Don Larson pitching a perfect game. William Frawley was a die-hard Yankees fan and originally stipulated in his contract that he would not be required to work if the Yankees were in the World Series. 

Ear muffs are Fred’s “hot as blazes” solution to his godson’s noise pollution! Fred also blotted out the sour notes of Lucy’s make-shift orchestra in 1954′s “Lucy’s Club Dance” (S3;E25). 

On the Mertz coffee table are an array of magazines.  Among them is a copy of Look Magazine. On Christmas Day 1956, just two months after this episode aired, Lucy and Desi were the cover story of Look, along with (coincidentally) Keith Thibodeaux playing a conga drum!

There seems to be a jump cut after Ethel’s line “Parents get awful touchy when you talk about their children” and “I’m sure that if you’re nice and diplomatic, they’ll be reasonable.”  It is possible that there was more dialogue to the scene that had to be edited out for time.  Another jump cut is at the top of the next scene in the Ricardo apartment. 

Oops! When Fred and Ethel attempt to play down their annoyance at Little Ricky’s drumming, Lucy says “We’re glad it didn’t bother you” to which Ricky replies “Me too.”  Lucy probably should have said “I’m glad it didn’t bother you.” 

In at least two previous episodes, Lucy has burned the chicken she was preparing for dinner, here the gag is reversed and the chicken is raw thanks to landlord Fred turning off the gas. A close-up of the uncooked bird assures that the home viewers get the joke!   

The last time we were privy to the Ricardo’s privy was in “Bonus Bucks” (S3;E21) aired on March 8, 1954. Since then, the bathroom of apartment 3D has undergone some architectural changes!  Previously, the shower stall was separate from the tub (follow the musical notes) but now shower and tub have been combined.  At least the wallpaper is familiar!  

Lucille Ball would always remove her false eyelashes before doing any stunt involving water like getting sprayed by the shower head, but when she runs into the living room to play the “Nertz to the Mertz Mambo” (actually a frenzied “Babalu” without the lyrics) she instantly has eyelashes again!  TV magic! 

At this point the story seems to resemble the very first all-out feud between the Ricardos and the Mertzes, 1952′s “Breaking the Lease” (S1;E18), which also included Fred cutting off the water and the Ricardos creating a musical cacophony to disturb the Mertzes. 

During Ricky and Lucy’s Kitchen Kabaret, viewers can catch a glimpse of a box of Post Toasties on the counter. Toasties were Post’s version of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. When first marketed in 1904, Post Toasties were called Elijah’s Manna but religious groups balked at the use of Elijah as a cereal mascot and the name was changed to Toasties in 1908. They were discontinued in 2016. Curiously, in the episode the box is merely set dressing and not a prop. Although Little Ricky opens the episode eating cereal, Lucy says it is oatmeal. 

During their big fight, Ethel calls Ricky a “Havana Horace Heidt.” Horace Heidt (1901–86) was an American pianist, big band leader, and radio and television personality. His band, Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights, toured vaudeville and performed on radio and television throughout the 1930s and 40s. Coincidentally, Heidt was also the one responsible for discovering Keith Thibodeaux, giving him a job with his orchestra at the age of three.

Of course, the familiar fracas over breaking the lease is settled by episode’s end. Ethel promises to have ‘quieter fights’ in the future. 

LUCY: “We’re not going to have any more fights, Ethel.” 

True to her word, this was the last big fight between the Ricardos and the Mertzes on “I Love Lucy,” although they do briefly spat in “Lucy Does The Tango” (S6;E20). 

FAST FORWARD

Keith Thibodeaux made a walk-on appearance in a 1964 episode of “The Lucy Show.”

Keith’s appearance lasts about one second. At the train station, Lucy Carmichael passes a young boy who walks in with his mother. He has no dialogue.  

Lucy Carter’s son Craig (Desi Arnaz Jr.) was also a drummer. Here he learned to play the drums from percussion master Buddy Rich on a 1970 episode of “Here’s Lucy.”