Flywheel of Fortune

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 and Chico Marx. 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. One Marxist scholar I knew spent several fruitless months trying to track down what he believed might be the only extant recording of an episode. When he finally got his mitts on it, the audio was about as clear as that 18-and-a-half minutes on the Nixon tapes.

But miracles sometimes happen. In 1988, someone found almost all of the scripts in The Library of Congress. They were published in book form and at least two separate groups recorded new re-creations. And then eight years after that, someone found a few fragments of actual Flywheel audio plus one complete episode. The show is not great but hey, it's Groucho and Chico. How often do you get to hear new (to you) 1933 Groucho and Chico banter?

And yes, we have a link for you…but it's BBC Radio so you have to hurry. Their audio links don't stick around for long. It's a half-hour special that runs about half an hour and includes the surviving episode plus an interview with Nat Perrin, who was one of the writers. Go for it. And thank Stu West, a reader of this site, for letting me know about it so I could let you know.