Monday evenings in 1932 and 1933, an NBC radio program called Five Star Theater presented episodes of a comedy series called Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel starring Groucho as the slippery attorney Waldorf T. Flywheel and Chico Marx as his assistant, Emanuel Ravelli. Years later in The Big Store, Groucho would play the equally-slippery detective Wolf J. Flywheel and Chico had already used the name Emanuel Ravelli in Animal Crackers.
When I first became involved in Marx Brothers fandom and history, all traces of these shows had disappeared off the face of the planet but for a few reviews and magazine articles about them. Eventually, the audio surfaced for pieces of a few episodes and one complete one. You can click below and hear the one complete one…
In 1988, someone found almost all of the scripts (25 out of 26) in The Library of Congress. They were published in book form and a number of folks recorded new re-creations with faux Grouchos and Chicos. The most ambitious of these projects was done in the early nineties for BBC Radio.
They took some liberties with the material, sometimes combining two or more of the original scripts to make one episode, sometimes interpolating songs. In one, their Groucho sings "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" which the real one sang in the 1939 movie At the Circus. The tune probably hadn't even been written when Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel was originally airing.
Still, the shows are entertaining and every so often, the BBC puts them up on their website for our listening pleasure. "Every so often" includes now. For the next 29 days, you can listen to the first episode at this link and others will be available there in the future. Don't thank me. Thank Chris Collins, who let me know this one was back up.