Lucy, the Superwoman

S4;E26
~ March 21, 1966

Synopsis

When
a heavy computer falls on Mr. Mooney’s foot, Lucy has a rush of adrenaline to lift it up. From then on, she has super-strength and wreaks havoc with her
new-found power. Lucy the superwoman is then brought into a lab to be examined by
scientists.

Directed by Maury Thompson ~ Written by Elroy Schwartz

Regular
Cast

Lucille
Ball (Lucy Carmichael), Gale Gordon (Theodore J.
Mooney), Mary Jane Croft (Mary Jane Lewis)

Guest
Cast

Robert
F. Simon (Dr.
Robert F. Simon) had
a ten year run on Broadway (1942-52), in which he cut his teeth as
actor and stage manager in everything from drama to musical comedy.
He served as understudy to Lee
J. Cobb
as
Willy Loman in Arthur
Miller’s
Death
of a Salesman.
He was seen with Lucille Ball in the 1960 film The
Facts of Life
and in a 1963 episode of “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Parley
Baer
(Dr. Davis) previously
played MGM’s Mr. Reilly in “Ricky
Needs an Agent” (ILL S4;E29)
and
the furniture salesman Mr. Perry in “Lucy
Gets Chummy with the Neighbors” (ILL S6;E18).
This is the fourth of his five appearances on “The Lucy Show.” He
also made two appearances on “Here’s Lucy.” He is perhaps best
known for his recurring roles as Mayor Stoner on “The Andy Griffith
Show” and Doc Appleby in “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

Herb
Vigran
(Mr. Vigran) played
Jule, Ricky Ricardo’s music agent on two episodes of “I Love
Lucy” in addition to playing movie publicist Hal Sparks in “Lucy
is Envious” (ILL S3;23).
He was seen in the Lucy-Desi film The
Long, Long Trailer.
He played the role of the baseball umpire (and eye doctor) in two
previous
episodes.
He will be seen in just one more episode of “The Lucy Show.”

Jack Perkins (Terrible Tony, a Wrestler) was a stuntman and actor often cast for his ability to play drunk. He also has quite a few credits as a brawler and a bartender. This is his last episode of “The Lucy Show.”

Lucy claims to have seen Terrible Tony on television.

Joel
Marston
(George Denton, Reporter for the Daily Gazette, above left) previously
appeared as the supermarket clerk in “Lucy
and Joan” (S4;E4).
Marston was an internationally known dog breeder and proprietor of
Starcrest Kennels in California. This is his final appearance on the
series. He retired to Jacksonville, Florida, where he became a water
aerobics instructor.

Eddie,
the Daily Gazette photographer, is uncredited.

Robert
S. Carson (Coach
from the US Women’s Olympic Team) played
bank employee Mr. Potter in “Lucy Saves Milton Berle” (S4;E13)
and “Lucy
at Marineland” (S4;E1).
He
was a busy Canadian-born character actor making the fifth of his six
appearances on the series. He also made five appearances on “Here’s
Lucy.”

Natalie
Masters
(Woman from Whamo Breakfast Cereals, below) was seen as a saleswoman in
“Lucy Bags a Bargain” (S4;E17). She played
private eye “Candy Matson” on the radio series of the same name,
which ran on NBC from 1949 to 1951. This is her last appearance on
“The Lucy Show.”

John
Perri (Man
from Full-of-Pep Vitamins, above center) was previously seen as a supermarket
checker in “Lucy and Joan” (S4;E4). He was
seen on Broadway in The
Boy Friend (1954),
the musical that introduced Julie Andrews. This is his final
appearance on “The Lucy Show.”

Joyce
Perry
(Lab Secretary) makes the first of two appearances on the series.
She was also a screen writer, receiving Emmy nominations for “Days
of Our Lives” and winning a WGA (Writers Guild of America) Award in
1975 for “Search for Tomorrow.”

Sid
Gould
(Sid, Computer Deliveryman) 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.

Bennett
Green (Computer
Deliveryman #2) was Desi Arnaz’s stand-in during “I Love Lucy.”
He does frequent background work on “The Lucy Show.”

Gould
and Green have no lines as the Deliverymen. The two also played
Deliverymen in “Lucy the Robot” (S4;E23) delivering the very
large box containing Lucy as Major Fun Fun.

Alberto Morin (Bank Employee, uncredited) was born in Puerto Rico, and appeared in some of Hollywood’s most cherished films: Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1943), and Key Largo (1948). He was Carlos, one of Ricky’s “Cuban Pals” (ILL S1;E28) and the Robert DuBois in “The French Revue” (ILL S3;E7). His many background appearances on “The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy” were all uncredited.

Hazel Pierce (Bank Employee, uncredited) was Lucille Ball’s camera and lighting stand-in throughout “I Love Lucy.” She made frequent on-camera appearances on the show. She was also an uncredited extra in the film Forever Darling (1956).

One other uncredited performer plays a bank employee who comes to Mr.
Mooney’s aid when the computer falls on his foot.

This
is the final episode of season 4. Overall, season 4 rated #3 (a 27.7
share) in the Nielsen Ratings, the highest rating of the series thus
far. The official DVDs of season 4 (with bonus material) were first
released on April 26, 2011.

This
is the first of three episodes written by Elroy Schwartz. He
was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1923 and was the brother of
Sherwood Schwartz. As such, he wrote several episodes of his
brother’s most popular series: “Gilligan’s Island” and “The
Brady Bunch.”

Indeed, the premise of this episode was taken from a script of “Gilligan’s Island”! On the series, the castaways discover cans of vegetables that turn out to be radioactive. Gilligan eats the spinach (the same vegetable that gave Popeye strength) and develops super-human strength. It was aired six months after this episode of “The Lucy Show” – September 26, 1966 – also on CBS.

The idea of a sudden onset of super-human strength (aka ‘Hysterical Strength’) was a familiar trope on television, but based on real-life anecdotes, mostly about parents lifting cars to rescue their children. Comic book artist Jack Kirby claims he saw a woman lift a car off her baby, which inspired him to create the Incredible Hulk, whose first appearance was in 1962.

On
the same evening this episode first aired (March 21, 1966), ABC
broadcast the last new episode of “Ben Casey” starring Vince
Edwards. Edwards did a cameo in “Lucy Goes to a Hollywood
Premiere” (S4;E20, above). “Ben Casey” was filmed at Desilu Studios. The series finale was directed by Marc Daniels, who had directed 39 episodes of “I Love Lucy” from 1951-53.

“The
Lucy Show”
was replaced for the summer (July-September 1966) by the
fourth season of “Vacation
Playhouse,”
an anthology series of
unsold TV comedy pilots.
One was titled “Where There’s Smokey” starring Gale Gordon as a
Fire Chief. The pilot was completed in 1959 but not aired until
August 1, 1966. When the pilot wasn’t picked up, Gordon took the
role of Mr. Heckendorn, the landlord on “Make Room for Daddy,”
also filmed at Desilu. On August 29, 1966, “Vacation Playhouse”
aired “The Two of Us” starring “Lucy Show” cast members Mary
Jane Croft (Mary Jane) and Barry Livingston (Arnold Mooney).

When
Mr. Mooney is getting a computer in his office, Lucy wants to ask it
for dating tips. Mr. Mooney replies that it is a computer, not “Dear
Abby.” Dear
Abby
is
an advice
column
founded
in 1956 by Pauline
Phillips
under
the pen name ‘Abigail Van Buren’ and carried on today by
her daughter, Jeanne
Phillips. In 1965, CBS aired a radio version of Dear Abby’s column. Lucille Ball also had a CBS radio series at the time.

In this episode, Lucille
Ball’s hairstyle (probably a wig) has longer bangs and sides. This
could be to cover the ‘lift tape’ (a sort of non-surgical face lift)
that she wore on camera starting around this time.

To decide where to put the computer in the office, Mr. Vigran feeds it a punch card. Punch cards were widely used through much of the 20th century in the data processing industry. The IBM 12-row / 80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry. Many early digital computers used punched cards as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. While punched cards are now obsolete as a storage medium, as of 2012, some voting machines still used punch cards to record votes.

When
Lucy lifts the computer the second time (just to prove she can), she
gets a round of applause from the studio audience! This happens
again when she lifts the desk in her apartment. Apparently the audience completely invests in the silly premise that Lucy has
developed super human strength.

When
Lucy inadvertently crushes the can of tomato juice, she says in a
childlike voice: “Boy,
it sure doesn’t look like tomato juice!” In the 1960s “Wow,
it sure doesn’t taste like tomato juice!”

was the advertising slogan for V8,
a beverage manufactured by Campbells.

V8
got its name from the fact that it originally contained the juice of
eight different vegetables.
It
was first marketed in 1933 and is still sold today.

Lucy
swats a fly with a rolled up magazine and breaks a support column in
half. This is the same column that muscular Frank Winslow broke in
half when he was startled awake and went into a karate chop in “Lucy
and the Sleeping Beauty” (S4;E9). The column in “Lucy, the Superwoman” is much narrower
than the one seen above.

When
Lucy breaks the blood pressure machine causing a spurt of liquid into
the air, Mr. Mooney shouts “Thar
she blows!”
“Thar
she blows”
is what the lookout on a whaling ship would shout when seeing a whale
surface and blowing air out of its blowhole.

When
Lucy sneezes and blows the paperwork off the shelves, Mr. Mooney says
“Now
I know why they name hurricanes after women.” In
1953, after a brief two-year period of using the Greek alphabet,
meteorologists began using female
names for hurricanes.
In 1979, after much pressure from women’s groups, male names were
integrated into the naming. Hurricanes now alternate between male and
female names.

Lucy’s
twenty foot standing broad jump and hurdle stunts were accomplished
by speeding up the film and putting Lucy on wires.

It is likely that most of the lab scenes were shot without a studio audience due to the nature of the stunts involved. Also telling is that after Lucy does her first ‘flight’ the studio audience does not applaud, as they had for the much simpler stunts earlier in the show.

Examples of Lucy’s super human strength:

She
lifts Mr. Mooney off his feet into the air when helping him up
She
breaks the return carriage off her typewriter
She
staples a document and breaks off the end of her desk
She
closes a file cabinet drawer which smashes a hole in the wall
She
rips the doorknob off Mr. Mooney’s office door and then rips the door
off as well
She
closes her apartment door with a kick and splits it in two
She
squeezes her grocery bag and collapses a can of tomato juice and cans
of vegetables
She
tears the door off her refrigerator
She
squeezes 6oz of juice from a 3oz orange
She
pulls the bottom off an ice cube tray
She
swats a fly and breaks a pillar in half
She
empties a full glass of cranberry juice in one sip
She
saws through a table when cutting a slice of roast beef
She
brings a professional wrestler to his feet with a handshake
She
causes paperwork to fly off the shelves with a sneeze
She
breaks a blood pressure machine
She
kicks a tray into the air when her reflexes are tested
She
nearly deafens the doctor when she talks into his stethoscope
She
pitches an iron shot put ball through a glass window pane and a brick
wall
She
jumps twenty feet in her first attempt at the standing broad jump
She
hurdles in the air over three men who are bending over

Callbacks!

Mary
Jane says that the TV reporters are calling Lucy “Superman with
prettier muscles.” In 1957, Lucy Ricardo pretended to
be the man of steel in “Lucy and Superman” (ILL S6;E13).

Lucille Ball also used wires to ‘fly’ as the Witch in “Little Ricky’s School Pageant” (ILL S6;E10).

And again in “Danny Thomas’s the Wonderful World of Burlesque” aired just a few months before this episode of “Here’s Lucy”.

Lucy
operated a similar massive gray computer that was located in the bank
lobby at the start of “Lucy and Bob Crane” (S4;E22), although
neither she nor Mr. Mooney mention it in this episode.

Fast Forward!

In 1972, Harry Carter also gets a computer installed in the office to help with the workload in “Lucy’s Replacement” (HL S4;E19).

Mrs. Carmichael wants to ask the new computer for dating tips like it is a mechanical Dear Abby. Two years later, Lucy Carter consulted a computer for dating tips in “Lucy the Matchmaker” (HL S1;E12).

The desk that Lucy Carmichael lifts with ease will turn up again as set decoration for Harry Carter’s Home in “Lucy’s Wedding Party” (HL S3;E8) in 1970. Lucy Carter dusts it, but doesn’t lift it!

Blooper
Alerts

Keep Jiggling, Viggie! When the computer is first installed, Mr. Vigran has a bit of trouble getting the second dolly out from underneath the computer so it can fall on Mr. Mooney’s foot. After a few seconds of jiggling, it comes free.

Desk Work! When
Lucy lifts the desk in her apartment, the track for raising it off
the ground can be seen underneath, despite being painted the color of
the wall.

Super-Strong Sweet Tooth! Lucy comes home from work holding a shopping bag and 5 pink bakery boxes. Why does a woman living alone need five boxes of baked goods? The boxes were a familiar item on the show and the Desilu props department must have had quite a few in stock! Also, if Lucy went shopping on her way home, why doesn’t she have any stories of the mayhem she must have caused in the stores to tell Mary Jane when she comes over?

I’ve Got A Beef! When Lucy picks the roast beef up off the floor, we can see that the roast has been glued to the plate!

At the lab, Dr. Davis asks Lucy if she’s ever had any accidents. She says that except for fender benders, she hasn’t. She must have forgotten that she suffered a blow to the head and got amnesia just two years earlier!

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