Groucho Marx - You Bet Your Life: The Best Episodes (DVD, 2004, 3 Disc Set)

Groucho Marx was and still is, the high mark in entertainment and comedy. If you're reading this, you most likely agree. He was one of the first, and still remains one of the few entertainers to dominate three different mediums; movie, radio, and t.v. The "You Bet Your Life" episodes are all examples where they exist, of his reign on the newfangled thing called television. In the nineteen fifties, it was hard to go twelve hours without seeing his show playing on one of your three or four channels.
The style he presented on Y.B.Y.L., was like an early talk show host; mildly cajoling, genuinely interested in the contestants, and never mean or purposely abrasive. His style was copied by many later such as Jack Paar, Dick Cavett,and Merv Griffin, all hosts who were more interested in their guests more than themselves, and the style should be repeated more today.
This collection is one of two good ones..The other similarly packaged, also eighteen episode collection entitled, "The Lost Episodes", is one you should look for.
This collection, called "The Best of", starts off with a bang by showing a nearly impossible to find elsewhere, appearance of Groucho's, at the time, eleven year old daughter, Melinda Marx, and her also eleven year old friend, a young Candace "Candy" Bergen..( Yes, later of Murphy Brown fame )...Her father, Edgar Bergen of "Charlie and McCarthy", and his walk on into the show, make this one a gem...Also on this disk are shows with Johnny Weismuller, of "Tarzan" fame, and a heartbreaking one with an obviously down on his luck, ex-heavyweight champion, Joe Louis...
Phillis Diller is here, in the break she used to get her career started. But the real cream of this collection are the "ordinary" people like half crazy outdoor man, Boots Bootzin, ( Who is still alive at the age of ninety six)...All of the "average" joes such as the guy who blows up an innertube, a fencing champion, weird housewives, strange farmers, they all are often much more facinating than the "stars" of the time.
With skilled and talented questioning and mild joking or teasing, Groucho gleans the gold from the average lives of folks in the middle of the last century.
He lets them talk about themselves with wit and wise reflection. Always letting his guests keep their dignity and their own valued opinions or slants on things.
It's cliche but true, that Groucho Marx is the type of performer who only comes along once every hundred years or so. Anyone who knows entertainment won't be sorry they spent the twenty five or thirty dollars this usually goes for on Ebay..
Groucho Marx, in any of the three mediums he mastered; movie, radio, and t.v., should never be missed.
This collection of eighteen great You Bet Your Life episodes is no exception.
Don't miss it, and go get it.