TV

Lucille Ball hawks cigarettes in newly restored ads

See Lucy smoke! See her and Ricky hawk cigarettes! Again and again and again. Even longtime fans of “I Love Lucy’’ may be shocked to learn that when the beloved sitcom premiered in 1951, there were wall-to-wall cigarette commercials and plugs embedded throughout — unseen for decades, and newly available to watch on Blu-ray.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were so grateful that Philip Morris would sponsor a show with a mixed-race couple (Arnaz was Cuban) — when no one else would — that they hawked their cigarettes with an intensity unusual even in an era when the line between entertainment and advertising was often blurred.

This long-unseen and fascinatingly creepy material was purged from reruns decades before cigarette commercials were banned altogether from US airwaves in 1970. The series’ obsession with cigarettes was only hinted at in previous DVD releases of “I Love Lucy’’ that restored the original series openings — with animated versions of Lucy and Desi plugging cigarettes instead of the familiar heart-on-satin credits (still available as an option for those who want to avoid the smoking plugs).

But for the just-out Blu-ray debut of this beloved TV classic’s first season, CBS has painstakingly restored all of the original commercials in their jaw-dropping glory. (Seen this way, each episode is prefaced with this new all-caps disclaimer from CBS: “WE DO NOT RECOMMEND SMOKING, WHICH CAUSES LUNG CANCER AND OTHER DISEASES.’’)

Lucy hawks a pack of cigarettes, while Desi takes a smoke.YouTube

Episodes open with the cigarette company’s “living trademark,’’ bellhop Johnny Roventini — arguably better known than either Ball or Arnaz at the time — singing the then-famous jingle “Call for Philip Morris.’’ In the first four episodes, he’s followed by a smoking, hard-sell announcer citing claims by “medical authorities’’ that the cigarettes cause “less irritation’’ than competitors before the show begins.

Ball and Arnaz frequently appear in the lengthy (by contemporary standards) commercials, happily smoking and touting the cigarettes, sometimes in character as Lucy and Ricky — occasionally joined by Fred and Ethel — or in their animated personas, who were apparently aimed at kids in the audience. This continued for the series’ first three seasons, when Philip Morris was the series’ sole sponsor.

Some of this material, derived from 16 mm prints of the original series (which was distributed to select affiliates 60 years ago and long ago fell into the public domain), has surfaced on YouTube — see the compilation below — but they look far better in the new high-definition transfers on the Blu-ray. And there are many more of them.

Ironically, Arnaz died of lung cancer in 1986, and Ball of heart disease three years later — deaths that have long been linked to their cigarette smoking.

Also added to the copious extras carried over from DVD to the Blu-ray are 10 minutes of newly discovered hair and makeup tests done before the first broadcast episode, with an introduction and narration by Lucille Ball’s protégé, Turner Classics Movie host Robert Osborne.