Dec 8, 2014 4 min read

Anyone who regularly navigates his way around the Internet is well aware that it is powered by lists – or “listicles,” to use the favored parlance – that are sure to stir debate and, above all, generate clicks.

Thus, we get lists of favored beers, best movies, worst cities, best Monty Python sketches, worst “Saturday Night Live” guest hosts, best guitarists, worst one-hit wonders, most underrated ukulele strummers, most overrated martial-arts stars, and on and on and on.

Whenever you stumble onto a list of the best television sitcom episodes – presuming it’s assembled by someone whose cultural memory extends past the beginning of “The Big Bang Theory” – it inevitably includes an episode of “I Love Lucy” that aired on CBS-TV on Sept. 15, 1952, called “Job Switching.” It is more commonly known as “Lucy and Ethel in the Candy Factory.”

It was a variation on a timeworn vaudeville routine, and Charlie Chaplin employed a version of it in his 1936 classic, “Modern Times.” Unable to keep pace on the assembly line where candy is packaged, Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz (played by Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance) simply start to eat the candy, furiously stuffing their mouths with the sugary treats. Then they frantically put the candy in their hats and down their shirts. It’s become, perhaps, the “Citizen Kane” of situation comedy, along with “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” a 1975 installment of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Contest” from the 1992-93 season of “Seinfeld.”

So, it was with some surprise, and no small amount of dismay, that we saw commercials touting a Christmastime rerun of that classic episode on television over the weekend, but this time with Lucy and Ethel in color.

No, your memory is not fooling you. The episode originally aired 62 years ago in black and white. Color television did not come into widespread use for well over a decade after. And, no, some canny archivist did not come across some heretofore unknown color print of the episode in an unlabeled box in a warehouse. The episode was colorized.

Our question: Why?

Admittedly, adding some color to an “I Love Lucy” episode is not as urgent or as dire a problem as, say, the lawlessness overtaking the Central African Republic, the political polarization that has rendered government dysfunctional in our own country, or any of the other seemingly intractable national and international troubles generating headlines day after day.

And, we’ll concede that, to some folks, a sitcom episode is still a sitcom episode, no matter how deftly executed or revered today. “Job Switching” was not meant to be enduring art at its creation, some might argue, so why get bent out of shape if a little color is added? It’s not like someone wandering into the Louvre with an eye toward adding a mustache to the Mona Lisa.

But “Job Switching” has become a cultural touchstone. And rather than adding anything – it’s no news flash that Lucille Ball’s hair was red – all that colorizing the episodes demonstrates is that CBS-TV, and the owners of “I Love Lucy,” don’t have sufficient faith that contemporary television audiences will tolerate anything in black and white. We think they’re wrong, particularly if it’s something good enough to have already withstood the test of time, as is the case with “Job Switching.”

This whole debate was enacted with greater fury almost 30 years ago when media mogul Ted Turner started peddling colorized versions of classic movies that he controlled after purchasing the MGM/UA catalog. Film enthusiasts and some of the actors and directors who were still alive vehemently insisted that the black and white palette of “The Maltese Falcon,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Magnificent Ambersons” was not evidence of technical limitation, but was integral to the mood and themes of the films, and shouldn’t be altered. They were correct. Fortunately, their arguments carried weight, public interest waned and fad of film colorization soon faded.

It all comes back to what a very wise soul once observed: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.