LUCY’S REPLACEMENT

S4;E19
~ January 17, 1972

Directed
by Coby Ruskin ~ Written by Fred S. Fox and Seaman Jacobs

Synopsis

Harry
gets a computer and fires Lucy, who then gets a job in a typing pool
at an insurance company. When she starts to miss Harry, Lucy and Kim
sabotage the computer to get her old job back.

Regular
Cast

Lucille
Ball (Lucy
Carter), Gale
Gordon (Harrison
Otis Carter), Lucie
Arnaz (Kim
Carter)

Guest
Cast

R.G.
Brown (Mr.
Conrad, Insurance Office Manager) appeared on “The Andy
Williams Show” (1963) and “The Rich Little Show” (1976). He
will do one more episode of “Here’s Lucy.”

The
character’s name is only used in the final credits.

Phil
Vandervort (Joe
Hackley) appeared
in two episodes of “The Lucy Show” where he met Lucie Arnaz. The
two were married from 1971 to 1977. This is the second of his
three episodes on the series.

Joe Hackley is an electronics major who Kim is dating
(occasionally). Lucy calls him “that funny looking guy with the glasses.”

EXMO-III
[Experimental
Model #3] Model 15545 was designed by ‘Al Rylander.’

It is established that EXMO is a ‘he’. EXMO speaks, but his voice is uncredited.

The
11 typists at the insurance company are played by uncredited
background performers.

Coincidentally, two weeks before this episode aired (but well after its filming in late 1971), the first scientific electronic pocket calculator, the HP-35 was introduced by Hewlett-Packard and priced at $395 (equivalent to more than $2,400 today). Although hand-held electronic machines that could multiply and divide had been made since 1971, the HP-35 could handle higher functions including logarithms and trigonometry.

For
this episode (only) Lucy
Carter wears her hair in a bun similar to the way Lucy Ricardo did.
Lucille Ball’s hairstyles are credited to Irma Kusely.

Lucy
calls the behemoth computer “a
left-over from ‘Star Trek’.”
This is the first mention of the space series that was first produced
by Lucille Ball at Desilu. Four days after this episode first aired, the very first convention of ‘Trekkies’ took place in New York City.

Harry
credits the creation of the computer to his friend Al Rylander.
Rylander
was
Gale Gordon’s ‘go-to’ name during dictation to Lucille Ball on both
“The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy.”

Harry
mentions Lucy’s son Craig, despite the character no longer being part
of the series.

Regarding Lucy’s typing skills, Harry facetiously calls Lucy “the high priestess of hunt and peck.” Hunt-and-peck is a method of typing where one looks at the keyboard and only uses the index fingers to depress the keys. The traditional method of typing has the fingers gently resting on the ASDF JKL; keys with eyes on the material being transcribed or the typed paper, not the keys.

Lucy goes to work in the secretarial pool at The Great Pacific Insurance Company.

In
“Lucy’s Vacation” (S3;E17) Kim says that Harry has fired Lucy 14
times. This episode brings the total up to 17!

The
coordinated typing sequence was ‘choreographed’ by Jim Bates, who
introduces the episode on the series DVD. It is performed to “The
Typewriter”, a novelty instrumental piece written by Leroy
Anderson in
1950, and first performed by the Boston
Pops.
The song was recently seen on Amazon TV’s “The Marvelous Mrs.
Maisel” using archival footage of a performance of it by Liberace
in the late 1950s.

Kim
calls Harry and EXMO the odd couple. “The
Odd Couple”
was a popular television series (based on a 1966 play of the same
name by Neil Simon) that starred Tony Randall and Jack Klugman as
mismatched roommates. It aired on ABC from 1970 to 1975. Tony Randall guest starred on “Here’s Lucy” (above) during “The Odd Couple’s” first season.

After
being sabotaged by Joe Hackley, EXMO squirts coffee and cream in
Harry’s face, thereby fulfilling one of “Here’s Lucy’s” staple
comedy bits: Getting Harry wet! Off screen, Lucy nicknamed Gale Gordon “Old Soggy Crotch”!

When Lucy walks in on a still-reeling Harry after EXMO has nearly electrocuted him, Lucy asks if he is “trying to bring back the Turkey Trot”. The Turkey Trot was a dance done to fast ragtime music popular from around 1900 to 1910. The basic step began with four hopping steps sideways with the feet apart. The dance fell out of favor by 1915.

Fast
and precise typing was demonstrated by Wanda Clark in “Lucy
Protects Her Job” (S2;E14). Clark was also Lucille Ball’s
real-life secretary.

Lucy also had trouble with typewriters in the 1949 film Miss Grant Takes Richmond. In the film, Lucille Ball played Ellen Grant, the worst student at the Woodruff Secretarial School.

Although it wasn’t revealed until 1957′s “Lucy Takes A Cruise To Havana” (LDCH S1;E1), Lucy Ricardo also went to secretarial school (with Susie MacNamara) and wrote an operetta,

novel and a play using a typewriter!

Lucy Carmichael was also a skilled typist and became secretary to Mr. Mooney at the bank, where typing was part of her job.

While
working for Mr. Mooney, Lucy Carmichael had a human replacement
played by Ruta Lee in “Lucy’s Substitute Secretary” (TLS S5;E14).

One of the world’s first computers was mentioned on “I Love Lucy” in “Lucy and Bob Hope” (ILL S6;E1) in 1956! UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) was an early computer made by Remington Rand that at the time was used mainly for weather forecasting, but would also correctly predict that outcome of the 1956 Presidential election.

UNIVAC was mentioned again in 1964 in “Chris Goes Steady” (TLS S2;E16). Viv says that UNIVAC “couldn’t have come up with a better match” than Chris and her new boyfriend, Ted.

In 1966, ten years after Hope’s ad-lib mention of UNIVAC, Mr.
Mooney (Gale Gordon) installed a computer at the Westland Bank in “Lucy, the
Superwoman” (TLS S4;E26)…

…as well as another one in “Lucy and Bob Crane”
(TLS S4;E22).

On “Here’s Lucy,” Computer
Dating was the subject of “Lucy the Matchmaker” (S1;E12) in 1968. The comic payoff of most episodes featuring computers was having them short-circuit and run amok!

Logistics! In the office, the door at the left that is usually a closet, now allows Kim, Lucy and Joe to pass through to the outside hallway. Similarly, the door on the right, sometimes a bathroom, is here called the storage room. The exits are used as per the requirements of the plot without regard to prior episodes.

Props!

For the high speed typing practice session, the spare paper is
dog-eared to make it easier for Lucille Ball to pick up.

Sitcom Logic Alert! Time flies when EXMO announces it is 2:02pm. Less than 80 seconds of screen time later, EXMO announces it is 2:05pm! At the end of the scene, EXMO announces it is 2:09pm, yet less than 5 minutes have elapsed since he announced it was 2:02! Is is ironic, that on the table just behind EXMO is an hourglass, one of the oldest time-keeping devices known to man!

Knowing Your Place! In the first office scene, EXMO is positioned against the wall behind Lucy’s desk and the shallow table normally there has been removed. In the second office scene, Lucy’s desk has been moved to the side, EXMO has been moved forward and the shallow table has returned! That’s a lot of moving of some very heavy furniture!