Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel
Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel (initially Beagle, Shyster & Beagle ) was a radio show with Groucho and Chico Marx . A total of 26 half-hour episodes were broadcast between November 28, 1932 and May 22, 1933. The program was produced by the Standard Oil Company and Colonial Beacon Oil to promote the joint Esso products.
The first three episodes were broadcast under the name Beagle, Shyster & Beagle . The title was changed after a New York attorney named Beagle threatened a libel lawsuit.
Except for the last episode, all recordings of the original broadcasts were destroyed, but in 1988 the originals of the scripts written by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman were rediscovered in the archive of the Library of Congress . Based on these scripts, the BBC began re-recording the series in 1990 with impersonators of Groucho and Chico Marx. In German there is a radio play version with 25 episodes based on the translation by Harry Rowohlt and Sven Böttcher , which was recorded in 1989 as a WDR production. The three main roles are voiced by Harald Leipnitz (Waldorf T. Flywheel), Stefan Behrens (Emanuel Ravelli) and Corinna Genest (Miss Dimple), in supporting roles are speakers such as Gert Haucke , Brigitte Mira , Horst Niendorf , Carolin van Bergen , Wilfried Herbst and Heinz-Theo Branding .
Characters and storyline
The radio show played around scenes in a law office in which Groucho Marx speaks to the lawyer Waldorf T. Flywheel ( Waldorf T. Beagle in the first three episodes ) and Chico Marx speaks to his assistant Emmanuel Ravelli.
Waldorf T. Flywheel is cheeky, sometimes outrageous and constantly snubs his clients by saying things about their appearance, their clothes etc. The naive Emanuel Ravelli , whose Italian ancestry the listener can easily recognize by his accent, is fun-loving and therefore not really into his work, but all the more interested in women, in the game of billiards and the opportunity to pickpockets. The pathetic clients who get lost in the office are usually insulted by Flywheel and robbed by Ravelli before they embroil the chronically lacking duo in further inconvenience. Miss Dimple , Flywheels secretary, is the third person appearing in all episodes, but doesn't have a particularly elaborate character, but rather serves as a punch line for Flywheel and Ravelli.
The action of the individual episodes is of secondary importance. It serves to lead the two protagonists to new places (courtroom, election event, boxing hall, farm) in order to get new "food" for punchlines. In general, it can be said that almost every second sentence in the dialogues is a punchline: The consequences derive their appeal from the enormous density of gags, not from a "story" in the narrower sense. All the characters in the Nonsense series behave in a highly unrealistic manner - no client would entrust their lawyer with financial matters after he made half a dozen jokes at his expense. How little the authors cared about the coherence of the content also shows that there were always minor inaccuracies in the scripts - a secondary character could be called "Bill" on one side and "Buck" on the next. That didn't bother, as the figure was only designed as a target for the sayings of Flywheel and Ravelli.
At the end of many episodes, there was advertising for the two products Esso gasoline and Essolube motor oil, packed in the episode's typical puns ("He ought to be thankful" - "Tankful? I got a pretty tankful of Esso, which is." better than any gasoline! "/" He should be grateful. "-" Tankable? I know what is tankable: Esso! ").
literature
- Michael Barson [Ed.]: The Marx Brothers Radio Show . Hamburg: Roger & Bernhard, 1989. ISBN 3-8077-0241-5 (Original title: Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel )