I Love Lucy: Season Six

SEASON SIX

1 - Lucy wants Ricky's new club, Club Babalu, to succeed, so she tries to get Bob Hope to perform there; she accosts him at a baseball game disguised first as a hot dog vendor, and then as an umpire!

2 - When Little Ricky learns how to play the drum, his non-stop playing drives the Mertzes up the proverbial wall, and almost destroys the friendship between the couples.

3 - An episode I always loved, Lucy tells her high school drama teacher that he is performing Shakespeare with Orson Welles... except that she is cast only as a mute/asleep dummy in his magic act; at least, until she starts spouting Juliet's balcony scene in the middle of Welles's magic act!!

4 - Just before his first recital, Little Ricky gets terrible stage fright, and the four adults have to figure out what's bothering him and cure it; Ricky has a great father-son talk about the problem, and Little Ricky performs admirably. 

5 - The great episode where Mario, the gondolier from Venice that they all met, comes to NYC and requests the Ricardo's help to find his cousin; to get him money for his trip, Lucy ends up working in a pizza parlor, with hilarious consequences!

6 - The classic episode where Ricky is off to Florida to play and be in a movie, and the wives come separately, hitchhiking because Lucy lost the train tickets; they hitchhike with a jerk woman, and both parties become convinced the other is an axe murderer!! (woman driver is played by famous actress Elsa Lanchester, wife of Charles Laughton and star of a ton of movies)

7 - When the wives spend too much money on bathing suits, they make a bet with the husbands that they can catch a bigger fish; when BOTH men and women buy a 100+ tuna at the fish market, they both have trouble hiding the ENORMOUS fish from each other.

8 - When the husbands are offered positions judging a beauty contest, the jealous wives scheme to keep them away, and make sure the boat they are out on runs out of gas; but when they run aground on a "Desert Island" Ricky and Fred turn the tables with hysterical consequences.

9 - An episode I remembered the instant I saw it, Lucy visits Havana to meet all her in-laws, is extremely nervous; when she tries to buy fancy cigars for her uncle-in-law, she ruins them, then masquerades as a cigar roller and rolls the world's biggest cigar!

10 - Both couples volunteer in Little Ricky's class play; not much to say here, most of the episode is just watching little kids recite lines, cute but not funny.

11 - Christmas Show, this is a collection of clips from previous episodes; this must be the very first clips episode every filmed!

12 - The famous Loving Cup episode, where Ricky mocks Lucy's ugly new hat, and Lucy sarcastically tries on a horse racing trophy cup instead; when it gets stuck on her head, she has to make her way down to Bleeker Street to present it in person!

13 - One of the most famous of all the episodes, Lucy promises Little Ricky that she will get Superman to appear at his birthday party (defeating her nemesis Carolyn Applebee in the process); when she doesn't think Superman will appear, SHE dresses like Superman and goes out on the ledge, ready to make her big entrance... except then the REAL Superman appears! (Superman played by George Reeves, the actor who first made him famous, and who died extremely mysteriously in 1959, just a few years after this)

14 - When Little Ricky brings home the cutest puppy of all time, everyone is charmed - until the dog starts barking alllll niiiiight lonnnng, and one particularly jerky neighbor complains. 

15 - Lucy is tired of city life, and wants to move into suburbia, and Ricky puts a down payment on a house; when Lucy has second thoughts, she and the Mertzes dress up like undesirable  gangsters to get the down payment back from the sellers, who are horrible jerks. 

16 - The title search is delayed, and so the Ricardos have to board with the Mertzes for two weeks, and the apartment quickly becomes a nightmare maze of boxes that both couples quickly tire of navigating.

17 - The Ricardos miss the Mertzes and vice versa; the Ricardos come to NYC to visit the Mertzes, and the Mertzes come to Connecticut to visit the Ricardos, and eventually it comes to a head in CT when both think the other couple is a pair of burglars. 

18 - Lucy gets close to her new neighbor, Betty Ramsey (a completely boring, useless character), and is pressured into buying $3000 of new furniture; her inability to say she can't afford it leads both Big and Little Ricky into fights with their opposite numbers in the Ramsey family. 

19 - The famous episode where Lucy decides to raise chickens to help make ends meet; she enlists Fred, who grew up on a farm, to help, and soon the whole house is swarming with baby chicks!!

20 - Ricky is mad because the chickens aren't producing more eggs, and swears to sell them all; Lucy then buys 5 dozen eggs, and tries to pass them off as the real thing so the chickens won't have to go, but when she has to practice a tango with Ricky (for a PTA benefit show), with eggs stuffed in her blouse, everything goes to hell.

21 - In a total clone of an earlier plot, Lucy promises the PTA that Ricky and his band will perform at a PTA benefit, but Ricky absolutely refuses; Lucy gathers Fred, Ethel, and Little Ricky into a band, but they are horrible, so Ricky has to come through in a pinch. (SEE: Season 3, Episode 25)

22 - The two couples decide to go back into NYC for a night on the town, but Lucy screws up the timing and they miss their matinee show; when they get tickets for the later show, all hell breaks loose when Lucy drops her purse from the balcony onto a very grouchy old woman.

23 - Ethel is very jealous of Lucy's friendship with next-door neighbor Betty Ramsey, but when it turns out Ethel and Betty are both from Albequerque they bond instantly, leaving Lucy out in the cold, and totally furious.

24 - Lucy decides to build a brick backyard BBQ with Ethel; she thinks that she has lost her wedding ring inside the cement during construction, and disassembles the entire finished BBQ to find it!

25 - After the husbands super-ogle a new blonde at the local country club, the girls decide to glamorize; the husbands catch on and cater to the wives, until Lucy suspects a trick. (the ogled blonde is Barbara Eden, famous as Jeannie in I Dream Of Jeannie)

26 - Lucy gets into a fierce contest with her neighbor over who can grow better tulips; all hell breaks loose when she runs over the neighbor's garden with a lawnmower, and then Ricky destroys Lucy's tulips... and both are replaced by wax tulips that begin melting.

27 - The final 30-minute episode, in which Lucy accidentally destroys a Revolutionary War statue to be dedicated in the town square; meanwhile, Little Rickey's dog Fred is missing, and the two plots converge wildly when Lucy has to dress AS the statue to hide the fact that she busted it.