Although I have the DVDs, I watch The Lucy Show sometimes on Decades TV. But with the episodes being beautifully cleaned for DVD, I wonder why the Decades episodes are the dirty, speckled prints.

I don't get Decades, but if they're green and purple and look like old films they're probably using the free public domain versions of the Lucy Show. Before the Lucy Show had it's official DVDs commercially released these lousy looking public domain versions were all that was available.

They’re using the old CBS daytime rerun prints. You can tell because they have the kaleidoscope opening pasted the onto most of the episodes, and they mess around a bit with the episode credits and the closing credits. These prints are positively ancient. They were also used by HA!, Nick at Nite, and MeTV. Decades should get the new prints that CBS used for the DVDs, but they probably don’t want to shell out for them.

If you want to see even worse prints, check out the public domain ones that Amazon Prime is using for it’s “May only!” run of “The Lucy Show”.

This is shocking because CBS owns Decades. Or the Weigel Broadcast Company owns it, but is partnered with CBS.

CBS has pulled Decades off most of it’s owned and operated stations, so I think the partnership is over. But even if it weren’t, the CBS broadcast stations are a different division from CBS Television Distribution, which handles the library shows like “The Lucy Show”.