You Bet Your Life!

[Hunter_aka_Scotty]

For those that might be interested, the TV Show "You Bet Your Life" hosted by Groucho Marx has been added to Netflix instant play.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Cool. I just picked up the home version of the game at a local antiques mall. Thought about selling it, but I think I'll hang on to it as I love the show and the game is complete and still very playable.

 

[Dixon Cannon]

My favorite episode! I'm a BIG Lord (Richard) Buckley fan! .. [video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhstToY9kk[/video]

-dixon cannon

 

[skyvue]

Sadly, it appears that what's available are some DVD collections of the show (all of which I already own), and just one of those collections, with 14 episodes, is available for streaming.

Better than nothing, of course, but I was hoping that maybe Groucho's estate had made arrangements to have the entire run of the show made available via streaming.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's a stroke of luck that any of them exist at all. In 1972, NBC was engaged in one of its periodic purges of its film library and had marked their entire YBYL holdings for scrapping. Someone in the film library called producer John Guedel and asked him if he wanted to keep a few reels as mementos -- and Guedel was horrified. He immediately got his lawyers on the phone with NBC to remind them that he owned all rights to the show and they'd better deliver all the prints to him immediately or they'd be sorry. That led to a reissue of the series for syndication in the 70s, to take advantage of the nostalgia craze, and it became a big hit all over again.

 

[skyvue]

Nice that YBYL avoided the fate that befell the Tonight Show tapes from the sixties.

For fans of YBYL, in 1976 or so, Groucho coauthored an entertaining memoir about the show called The Secret Word Is Groucho. It's out of print, but is fairly readily available from used-book retailers.

 

[Espee]

I saw an article in an advertising journal from the late 1950s, which said the sponsor emblems seen on the show's set weren't really there-- they were superimposed. At least by that era. So in syndication, they could, theoretically, be replaced.
A little like the First Down indicators which aren't really on the football field; they're only on the TV screen.

 

[Espee]

The show turned up on Los Angeles Channel 5 right after Groucho received his Honorary Oscar in 1974. Supposedly someone called the management and said "Would ya save Groucho the trouble of running the shows on his projector?"
A guy I knew at high school, two years older than I (and who lived every second year with his mother in Mississippi) told me he'd already seen a bunch of them.