Lucy Gets the Bird

S3;E12
~ December 7, 1964

Synopsis

When
Mr. Mooney’s home is being painted, he lets Lucy and Viv birdsit with
his prize cockatiel. When the bird flies away, they climb to the
roof to find him. When that fails, they try to replace it with a
similar bird, but Mr. Mooney is on to their scheme.

Regular
Cast

Lucille
Ball (Lucy Carmichael), Vivian Vance (Vivian Bagley), Gale Gordon
(Theodore J. Mooney), Jimmy
Garrett (Jerry Carmichael)

Ralph
Hart (Sherman Bagley) and Candy Moore (Chris Carmichael) do not
appear in this episode.

Guest
Cast

Tim
Herbert
(Sam) was born Herbert Timberg in 1914. In 1944 he appeared on
Broadway in the Jackie Gleason revue Follow
the Girls.
This is the first of his three appearances on “The Lucy Show.”
He also did one episode of “Here’s Lucy” in 1968.

John
J. ‘Red’ Fox
(Charlie) makes his second appearance on the series. He was
best known for playing policemen, which is what he did on five of his
eight appearances on “The Lucy Show” as well as three of his five
episodes of “Here’s Lucy.”

Ginny
Tyler
(Bird Voices) previously voiced Clementine the sheep in “Lucy Buys
a Sheep” (S1;E5). She
did the voice of the sheep in Disney’s 1964 hit Mary
Poppins.
She
started
out on radio before hosting a children’s TV show in Seattle. By the
late 1950s, she had moved to Hollywood and was narrating record
albums for Disney, including “Bambi” and “Babes in Toyland.”
She returned to do a 1974 episode of “Here’s Lucy.” Although
she died in 2012, her voice can still be heard in the chorus of birds
outside The Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

Mr.
Mooney’s cockatiel (and all the other budgies in the pet shop) are
played by live birds.

Sid
Gould
(Voice on the Telephone) made
more than 45 appearances on “The Lucy Show,” all as background
characters. He also did 40 episodes of “Here’s Lucy.” Gould
(born Sydney Greenfader) was Lucille Ball’s cousin by marriage to
Gary Morton. Gould was married to Vanda Barra, who also appeared on
“The Lucy Show” starting in 1967, as well as on “Here’s
Lucy.”

The
title puns on the slang expression “give/get the bird,” meaning
to make a rude gesture by raising
your middle
finger to
show that you are angry with someone.

In real life, Lucille Ball is said to have had a bird phobia. When she was four years old her father died of typhoid fever. That same day, a bird got trapped inside their home. Other recollections say that the wallpaper in her room was of a bird pattern.

The
episode opens with Lucy and Viv collecting trading stamps. Viv
wonders if they have enough to get to Hawaii. Lucy says they have
enough to get to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Trading
Stamps
were
small paper coupons
given
to customers by merchants in loyalty
marketing
programs.
When a customer accumulated a number of them, they could be
exchanged for premiums,
such as toys, personal items, housewares, furniture and appliances.
The stamps were generally pasted into a booklet by licking the back,
much like a postage stamp. Although they were first introduced in
1891, they were most popular in the USA between 1930 and 1980. Today
they have been replaced by digital customer loyalty cards. There were
several companies responsible for sponsoring trading stamps, the
most popular being Blue Chip, S&H Green Stamps, and Plaid Stamps.

Mr.
Mooney’s pet bird is a female cockatiel named Greenback for its
coloration. “Greenback”
is also a slang word for US paper currency due to its dark green color; an
ideal name for a miserly banker’s bird!

Mr.
Mooney has taught the bird to say “E
pluribus unum”
(latin for “out of many, one”), the de facto motto of the United
States of America, appearing on the presidential seal and on many
denominations of US currency. Lucy
teaches it to say,
“Give Lucy more money.”
Greenback
calls Mr. Mooney “Poppsy-Whoppsy.”

Lucy
finds a “Vote for Dewey” button under her couch and says
she needs to clean more often. Thomas
P. Dewey,
was a Republican who lost the US presidential election of 1948 to
Democrat Harry S. Truman. This episode was broadcast right after the
1964 election. Dewey was a Republican, while Lucille
Ball was
a liberal Democrat. This discovery also implies that Lucy may have
lived there (or owned the sofa) at least 16 years, ten years longer than she and Viv have
lived together.

When
Lucy is on the telephone man’s zip line, Greenback says “It’s
the only way to fly!”
This was the advertising slogan for Western Airlines, a US carrier
that was in operation from 1926 to 1987, before merging with Delta
Airlines. In 1965 R&B singer Jewel Akens (“The Birds and the
Bees”) released a song titled “It’s the Only Way to Fly.”

Mr.
Mooney says that leaving his precious Greenback with Lucy was like
leaving General Custer with Sitting Bull. George
Armstrong Custer (1839-76)
was a United
States cavalry commander
in the Civil
War and
the American
Indian Wars.
Sitting
Bull was
a Sioux chief who rallied his tribe to defeat Custer and his men at
the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876), known as “Custer’s Last
Stand.” Jerry celebrates Sitting Bull’s birthday in “Lucy and
the Good Skate” (S3;E1).

A
working phone on top of a telephone pole was also a running gag on
the TV series “Green Acres” (1965-71).

Sam
at the pet shop refers Mr. Mooney to pet psychiatrist Dr. Marshall
Belson PhD (parrots, horses and dogs). The doctor’s name is a
combination of the name of the two writers of this episode, Gary
Marshall (right) and
Jerry Belson (left).

Sam
tries to sell Lucy a mynah bird that says “rat fink.” “The Rat
Finks” was the name of Jerry and Sherman’s group at camp in “Lucy,
the Camp Cook” (S3;E6).

Viv
guesses that Greenback is “halfway to Capistrano.” This is a
reference to San Juan Mission in Capistrano, southern California. It
is there that the American
cliff swallow migrates
to every year from its winters in Argentina,
making the 6,000-mile trek in springtime. The Mission’s location near
two rivers made it an ideal location for the swallows to nest. The
expression “when
the swallows return to Capistrano”
has entered common usage.

Speaking of Hawaii and birds! (The red one is Lucy, naturally!)

Callbacks!

Little
Ricky had two parakeets Alice and Phil (“molting buzzards”
to Fred Mertz) in “Little Ricky Gets a Dog” (ILL S6;E14), who were named for husband and wife performers Alice Faye and Phil Harris. In
that episode, voice artist June Foray did the bark of Fred the dog,
much the same way Ginny Tyler voices the birds here.

Lucy
Ricardo contended with pigeons on the ledge outside her
apartment in “Lucy and Superman” (ILL S6;E13), one of the ten colorized episodes, and….

…500 baby chicks loose in her Connecticut living room in “Lucy
Raises Chickens” (ILL S6;E19).

Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz wanted to go to Hawaii on “I Love Lucy” (inset) but never got any further than the Ricardo living room!

While on the roof, Viv mentions that the last time she was up there was when the two put up the TV antenna in “Lucy Puts Up a TV Antenna” (S1;E9). This is one of the most direct callbacks to a previous episode thus far in the series. Lucy and Mr. Mooney were also on the home’s roof to break into Viv’s bedroom in “The Loophole in the Lease” (S2;E12).

Fast Forward!

In “Lucy is a Bird Sitter” a 1974 episode of “Here’s Lucy”
Lucy
Carter is enlisted by Harry (Gale Gordon) to care for a rare
Tongan Weewawk, a fictional creature made up by the writers. That
bird looks a lot like a common white pigeon, which makes finding him
difficult when he flies away.

On
a rare two-part episode of “Here’s Lucy” (1971) Lucy Carter and Vivian
Jones cruise to Hawaii. Hawaii was a favorite get-away destination
for the Arnaz family (inset).

Blooper
Alerts!

Logistics! Even
though it’s the same house as in “Lucy Puts Up a TV Antenna”
(S1;E9), in “Lucy Gets the Bird” the antenna is in a different
location, the background landscape has more buildings, and the design
of the roof is slightly different.

Too Close for Comfort? Close-ups
of Greenback sitting on the electrical wire reveal that the wire is
not metal, but rope. Stray threads of hemp can be seen.

Papermoon Loves Lucy