Welcome to the second episode of Full Marx! On this episode, Ian and David put on their African explorers costumes and take a journey into deepest, darkest Animal Crackers, the Marx Brothers second film and an amazing improvement on their first. What did Ian and Dave think of it? Well, you’ll just have to listen to find out!
Thanks for listening.
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Full marks for Full Marx, guys. These shows are great.
Here’s a lovely clip of Groucho and Margaret Dumont, together for the last time to reprise Hooray for Captain Spaulding / Hello I Must be Going on US TV in 1965. Dumont passed away just a few days after this was taped. Groucho always maintained she never got the jokes, but I’m not so sure. She really twinkles here.
Great podcast! One of you reference the film Three Little Words. It wasn’t Danny Kaye in the film, it was Red Skeleton with Fred Astaire. Nice movie that includes a scene while they’re writing Hooray for Captain Spaulding. I’ve done some tribute videos to each of the brothers on YouTube. Yet to do Zeppo, not sure how to approach that!
Looking forward to the rest, thank you.
Thanks, Paul! I am a big fan of your YouTube videos and have watched a bunch of them including your Marx Brothers tributes. I’m a big fan of silent comedy so I really enjoyed the Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd ones and, of course, WC Fields was an amazing comic too.
Here are Paul’s Marx Brothers videos for all you Full Marx listeners out there (I hope Paul is okay with me embedding the videos here!):
Yes I’m fine with this. I make these videos so people who don’t know these comedians may discover them. May they never be forgotten. I just listened to your Room Service podcast and agree it’s not a typical Marx movie but I still like it for what it is. I like your reference to Swing Time , a film I am a big fan of. Anyway cheers from me in Australia to you in Canada.
I’m watching the Paramount movies again, and just finished “Animal Crackers”. And each and every time I watch it I get hung up on Groucho’s exchange with Chico when they’re reviewing the forgery:
It could be spinach.
Look at all the sand.
You mean it’s an old Spinach custom?
I feel like they’re riffing on something contemporary – but what? What? What! It’s driving me mad.
The closest I’ve gotten is Roy Evans had a song about this time “An Old Spanish Custom in the Moonlight” but I can’t confirm it was in circulation before 1930.
Any thoughts on what Groucho was referencing?
Animal Crackers script: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=animal-crackers
Lovely podcast! But, in your discussion on Animal Crackers, you forgot to cover the lefthanded moths sequence.
Thanks, Pablo!
Glaring omissions like this are the reason we began doing our more extensive scene-by-scene recaps of the films. It’s surprisingly easy to forget key moments in the heat of discussion.
As always, our podcasts are a work in progress. I think we finally got it together in the Love Happy episode!
I don’t know if this has ever been mentioned before, but in Animal Crackers, when Ravelli and Chandler get out of the frame in the painting’s room after talking to each other for the first time, the camera suddenly pans in an awkward way before the cut to the next scene. I’ve always noticed that whenever I’ve watched the movie, it’s very weird. But today, I’ve found that as the weird camera movement happens, you can hear two voices that are not Chico’s nor Louis Sorin. One of them whispers something, and I could swear that the other one says “Cut!”. Am I dreaming, or did they leave the very end of the take in the movie? The movie’s full of strange editing mistakes like this one, which is probably because of the technical difficulties of working with sound at the time of the production…