The Marx Brothers are titans in the comedy world for a reason. While Groucho often gets the credit and recognition he wouldn’t be nearly as effective without Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. Heck, Even Gummo was part of the troupe’s stage act which is what made them famous to get signed to do movies. While Zeppo helped establish the act on film, it was ultimately the famous trio or Grouch, Harpo and Chico that would find long careers. While fans may remember that Groucho had a game show “You Bet Your Life” much of the post-film work has been forgotten.
Enter Shout Factory and The Marx Brothers TV Collection. Here we get a lot of television appearances by Groucho, Harpo and Chico, some together, some separately, each one well worth the price of admission. Alright, so this isn’t an absolutely complete compendium of whatever was broadcast featuring at least one of the Marx Brothers, but it does come close. Taking out “You Bet Your Life” (which saw its own (limited) home video release – and here’s hoping that more of that show will arrive at some point in the future) we are missing a few items such as the television pilot Chico made, but this is still an amazing collection of material that most people don’t know exists.
Material presented here ranges from guest appearances (such as Groucho appearing on “The Jack Benny Program”) or short features made specifically for television (Harpo appearing with Carol Burnett in “The Wonderful World Of Toys) to commercials and clips from appearances on variety shows. This is a treasure trove of stuff for fans of The Marx Brothers. Not everything is “bust a gut” funny, and as a matter of fact some of it is sort of dull, but for a fan to have this stuff available, it’s nearly priceless.
Coming out swinging for the fences with the first entry on disc one is “The General Electric Theater” entry, an anthology series hosted by Ronald Regan. The Incredible Jewel Robbery is a mostly silent film starring Chico and Harpo as two criminals working out an elaborate scheme. The second disc contains another entry from the same anthology series, this time Groucho’s only televised dramatic performance (featuring a young Dennis Hopper).
Chico gets the short end of things with fewer appearances than the other two. It’s a shame the three didn’t do more together, really, but that’s the way it is. There’s a reason Zeppo left the act after a few films.
I could go on and on about each of the different appearances and shorts that are on the three discs, but I won’t. It would be pointless. The bottom line is this is a fantastic collection for fans of The Marx Brothers. Hours and hours of material that I had never seen. I laughed so hard at times my sides hurt.
Some of the stuff on this is indispensable. Besides some of the things I mentioned previously there’s “A Silent Panic” starring Harpo as a mechanized window display fixture witnessing a murder. It is not to be missed. Home video footage narrated by Harpo’s son, and so much more. This is kind of like having 3 discs of special features.