Another Deck ID Request

[Wild Joker]

This time, I kind of how a feeling this wouldn't just some cheap, generic, off-brand deck, considering they look really stylized, but is it possible for anyone (admist the old black-and-white, distortion, and compression) to identify this deck that was used in this memorable scene from I LOVE LUCY?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ox7uoYcEM

[Don Boyer]

This time, you're asking for a miracle...  I have no info that can help you.

I can only say this: the deck that Lucy uses in the start of the scene to demonstrate her supposed skill at card handling, giving the appearance of springing the cards from one hand to the other over a long distance, is a gimmicked deck known to magicians as an electric deck.  It's a very old trick, not used much these days - it's considered a little old hat and some people in a modern audience actually know the gimmick.  It's actually not too hard to spot, even for laypeople.

Seeing the stunt done legit with a real deck is a lot more impressive - it's one of Ekaterina Dobrokhotova's specialities.  She's a modern-day card flourisher and magician as well as a fashion model, originally from Russia and now residing in Canada (Quebec, I think - she speaks fluent English, Russian and French).  You can find her pretty easily on YouTube, if you want to see some real talent in action.

[joshsearles]

Best I can deduce is that the cards appear to be plastic coated by the shine. I don't recognize the back design.

EDIT: Added the clearest pictures I could find of these cards.

[Don Boyer]

I would add that the back pattern is asymmetrical - a feature more common on bridge decks than poker decks.  Using bridge cards would make sense, since Lucille Ball likely had smaller hands than the guys in the scene and would have found bridge cards easier to handle.  It's also less common, though not completely unheard of, for a poker deck to have a solid pattern like that; most of the standard patterns are monochrome prints with roughly equal amounts of color and white space, plus or minus maybe 25%.

This pattern might even have more than one color, judging from the differing values of gray on the back in the black-and-white image - again, something more common to bridge back designs than poker decks.  On black-and-white screens, middle-value yellows are very pale gray that's close to white, middle reds tend to show up as light gray, middle greens are a darker gray and middle blues show up as being a gray that's closer to black.  The background color on these cards was probably a blue or a dark green.

[Wild Joker]

Hey, I think I found them!

[Don Boyer]

Hey, I think I found them!

You could be right...  The border doesn't look exactly the same, but considering that TV at the time wasn't a high-res medium, it's entirely possible that it's the same deck and you just can't see the border clearly enough to know it's there.  It's certainly plausible.

It's interesting that they might have used Kem cards on the set.  They were always a more expensive deck than paper cards and still are today - prop masters tend to buy what's cheap and good enough more often than not, especially for a prop that's relatively insignificant.  Sure, they're playing cards, but it's not like they're presenting the Crown Jewels or something - it's your typical cards night, probably a game of bridge or canasta, two popular games of the period.

[Wild Joker]

The border caught my eye as well, and I strained trying to see if I could make out a border on the cards they're playing with, and I can't quite see one, but as you say, TV wasn't high-res back then, so obvious distortion with the picture is what makes it difficult to make a solid confirmation. Still, studying the center design as best I could, and comparing it with the pic that I found (looking out of focus, that is), I think these may be it - or, at the very least, a strong possibility.

Oh, and I just took another look at the first pic that was shared: is that the box by Desi's elbow, or a cigaratte pack? I'm not expecting it to help try to confirm the cards, I'm just curious as to what it is. For some reason, box designs always seem reminiscent of cigarette packages to me . . . I mean, when I look at Bicycle boxes (particularly red decks), I somehow feel like I'm looking at Marlboro packs.

EDIT: I took one more look at the pic I found, this time without my glasses, and somehow, the way the border blurs makes it look like it more or less blends like a gradiant from the outer white border to the inner design.

[Don Boyer]

It's very hard to tell scale accurately, but that pack of "whatever" by Desi's elbow in the first photo appears to be slightly more narrow than the playing cards - I'm thinking it's a pack of cigarettes.  They all smoked on-camera during that show at one point or another.  It makes sense - you'd put an empty pack of cards anywhere, but you'd keep a full pack of cigarettes nearby if you were a smoker.

[Wild Joker]

I got a little creative last night and fired up Fireworks to see if I could possibly make a better match, and I believe I have.

First of all, I took the photo that I found of the Kem cards in question (which according to one particular eBay listing I found, are known as the Cameo deck, with a Greek back design, and were originally printed in 1946), and converted it to grayscale . . . I also did a vertical flip, because the best I could tell, this was the way they were holding the cards in the scene:


Then I took a couple of the pics that joshsearles shared and imported my edited image into them; not only that, I did some further editing including scaling and skewing the image to get the right shape, and I also adjusted both the brightness and the contrast for both so the cards in the photo would better match the cards in the screencaps (that and I blurred them slightly as well).



I definitely think we matched them. Notice how when scaled down and blurred, that border does seem to disappear? And it would appear that your hunch in believing the cards they were playing with were probably green in color was spot-on, Don; when converting the pic to grayscale, the green deck appeared darker than the burgundy deck, and as you can see when added to those screencaps (and taking the adjusted brightness and contrast into consideration), the green deck appears to be a better match.

[Don Boyer]

Good detective work!  It looks like a match to me.  We can't say with 100% certainty, but I'd call it 99% or better.

Yep, the greens are darker.  It's a spectrum thing.  Reds have shorter wavelengths, blues have longer ones, so when seen in black and white, reds are generally brighter than cards closer to blue in the spectrum.