“Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splainin to do.”
It’s hard to miss, but sadly, someone did. Late last month, a pair of screenshots of a recently released Blu-ray box set of the entire “I Love Lucy” series went viral because of what looked like a horrifying case of remastering gone wrong. It appeared that when upscaling the original show’s image quality to HD, the process inadvertently created an eye-popping moment in which background characters’ faces suddenly became bizarrely enhanced.
It’s a short moment on a multi-year restoration project that otherwise looks pristine, but the images stand out nonetheless and had people on Reddit and other forums crying foul.
The images show a woman seen in the background just over Ricky Ricardo’s shoulder who now looks decidedly more masculine, with bulging, dead eyes, and a toothy smile floating over a necklace. A man to the left of the frame looks oddly out of place too, with a scarily smooth face and grin jumping out from what was meant to be an onlooker originally seen out of focus. The original filmmaking choice here was for them to be out of focus.
The moment is not long, but when seen in motion in context of the scene — which appears in the first episode of the 1957 “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” titled “Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana” — it immediately distracts from Desi Arnaz in the foreground.
It’s not some viral gag either. A company source at Paramount told IndieWire that during the restoration and remastering process of this particular episode from earlier this year, a few faces in the background were “accidentally over-enhanced” in a scene. The source says the background of the scene is being corrected and an updated version of the scene will be available soon on Blu-Ray.
It’s a shame that’s the moment that stood out, because at least one review argued the new box set looked exceptional. The collection, which was remastered and restored over a period of four years by Paramount and other third parties, is a 1080p remaster of the ’50s TV classic and was designed to look as Desilu intended back in the day, as the series was shot on film.
Though the show was originally shot on 35mm, the restoration process on the whole combined some of the original 35mm negatives, 16mm film reels that were sent to network offices, and even some more recent video tape, which accounts for why it was necessary to both restore the original footage and upscale the picture quality. The company source says as many as four minutes of material were missing from some episodes, with other reels requiring restoration of warped, dirty, or scratched frames to get everything looking consistent. It’s a surprise considering how famous the show has remained in the decades since its release.
It also required a treasure hunt of sorts to find the missing material and piece it together. While the first two seasons of “I Love Lucy” had been restored previously, subsequent seasons, including the 13 “Comedy Hour” specials that ended its run, were all newly restored and remastered for this 32-disc box set released on November 5. You can see a side-by-side of the before and after in one scene from the “Comedy Hour” above.
But many online have speculated that the upscaling process was done with artificial intelligence in order to save on costs (“Gee, why is it that everything that’s wonderful costs money,” as Ethel once said). The Paramount rep denies this was the case. Generative AI tends to have trouble with depth of field and will attempt to progressively sharpen blurry images in an effort to bring them into focus, so you can imagine why people would jump to the conclusion
But in this instance, the company source explained that generative AI was not utilized, and the restoration and remastering process just “enhances” what was already there in the episode.
We hope that ‘splains it.
