A high-speed chase just went by my house.  A black car driving so fast I couldn't tell the make or model from my window vantage point was followed by about five police cars, all blaring an unusual siren…not the same one I hear when one cop car is rushing past to get somewhere.  A minute later, I heard what sounded like one or more helicopters zooming overhead.  At the moment, most of the local stations have on 11 AM newscasts but none of them are covering it.

I see these things on TV and on YouTube all the time and you don't realize how noisy they are.

This one's a bit of a mystery and here's everything I know about it: In 1962, a deal was made to produce a pilot for a Marx Brothers TV show. Screen Gems, which was the television arm of Columbia Pictures, put up the dough and the show was done in what we would now call "Claymation."

Some folks have said that the animation was the work of Louis Bunin, an artist and puppeteer who made a number of films not unlike this one. I have no idea how true that may be.

Some folks have also theorized that Groucho's voice was done by Groucho himself or Dayton Allen or Pat Harrington, Jr., the latter two being comedians who occasionally replicated Groucho's voice for commercials or cartoons. I don't think it sounds like any of the three and Chico's doesn't even sound to me like a professional actor.

"Don M. Yowp" — whoever it is who hides behind that name and runs this fine, well-researched blog on Hanna-Barbera history — dug up his item from Variety for October 18, 1961…

Chico Marx, the man who never really retired, in a sense will still be "in the show," despite his sudden passing Oct. 11 in his Beverly Hills home of a heart attack, The 70-year-old comedian, eldest of the Marx Bros, and known to millions as piano-playing, Italian-dialect member of the brothers act, will appear with Groucho and Harpo as a life-like figure in an animation comedy teleseries Screen Gems is prepping.

It was Chico's third attack in the last two years, and like the others it came almost on the eve of his getting back into his "Italian" character and making with the laughs again. The figure of Chico in a special tri-cinemation—and secret—process was completed only a few weeks ago. Series will be made up largely of earlier comedy routines when the Marxes appeared together, according to studio, which will bring the Marx Bros, to fresh audiences as well as those who followed them on the Broadway stage and later in motion pictures.

Here is the video which was restored by the folks at Thunderbean Animation. It apparently did not succeed in convincing anyone back in '62 that there should be more of this…and you now know at least as much about it as I do. If you know more, share it with me and I'll share it here…

Here's where most of us are glad we weren't at Midnight East Coast Time: Times Square…

From 12/30/94 (not New Year's Eve, please note), here's a bit from David Letterman's show for which they got Dick Clark to go up on a rooftop a day or two before his annual broadcast from Times Square. There's a joke in there about Jocelyn Elders and in case you don't remember who she was: She was briefly the Surgeon General of the United States. Not long before this video, she had been pressured into resigning because some folks didn't like her remarks — honest though they were — about topics like drug use or masturbation.

I worked for Dick Clark in the early eighties and could have been on that rooftop in New York with him one New Year's Eve to do the live inserts on that year's episode of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Here's a repost of something I had up here in 2011…

There are a couple of job offers in my past I turned down or had to turn down and now sorta regret. One was to write on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I was busy that year, figured it would probably be offered again…and it wasn't. Another was to go to Vegas on New Year's Eve and help produce a live telecast, competitive with Mr. Clark's, that would emanate from there. That particular setup just sounded like a nightmare of crowds and logistic problems…and when I later talked to the guy who accepted the job I passed on, I learned I was right. That one I don't regret skipping but one year, Dick (with whom I'd worked, both as a writer for his shows and as a producer on a show where we hired him) asked me to get involved with his New Year's broadcast.

It meant working on the music segments that were all pre-taped in October — when the acts were available and not charging what they charge to perform on New Year's Eve — with the hosts saying, "And now, let's cut to Dick Clark in Times Square and see what's happening there. Dick, what's the mood like in New York tonight?" And while this was being taped in L.A., Dick was just off-camera. Then 12/31, Dick and I would fly to New York at the last possible minute, do the live remote from the rooftop, then fly back almost immediately.

I remember being amazed at how close he cut it, given that he had to be on the air live at a specific time…and it was not a time when travel in and out of the Times Square area was likely to be a breeze. If I absolutely had to be on a rooftop there at the moment the new year commenced, I think I'd have flown to New York a few days before, checked into that hotel and not left it until the telecast…then flown home a few days later.

Dick's itinerary that year called for getting to his N.Y. hotel (a few blocks from where the chosen rooftop was located) around 4 PM on the last day of the year, making his way to the building somewhat later, then getting back to his hotel after the broadcast and flying home first thing the morning of January 1. I think it was like an 8 AM flight. Thinking back, it now sounds like it might have been a fun adventure but when it was offered, I somehow didn't imagine it that way.

Again, I was busy at the time and I figured (wrongly), "They'll ask me again some other year." No, sometimes they don't. Always a good thing to remember.

Here's Dave and Dick…

Dubai always puts on a great firework show on New Year's Eve. Let's see what they did for this new year…

Here's a nice segment from CBS News on some of the more famous folks we lost this year. You'd think that Shecky Greene — who like all great comedians had great timing — would have died a few days earlier so he could have been in this…

Here's one of my favorite magicians, Daniel Roy. At the end of this video, he insists that he does all these feats without trick photography or editing and that you'd see the same thing if you saw him perform live. Well, I did — one time at the Magic Castle, sitting about three feet from the guy. Very impressive…

I meant to include this on our Christmas countdown but, hey, Christmas lasts twelve days of servants and poultry, right? Here's Pentatonix with a holiday tune I always liked. If you don't want to think of this as six days late, just think of it as 357 days early…

It's already 2024 in Australia! Here's how they welcomed in the new year in Sydney…

Hey, how about some Smothers Brothers?

Here's Johnny Carson's show from December 31, 1982 — in other words, New Year's Eve. It features Tina Turner, magician Jonathan Neal Brown, a variety act named Dr. Flame-o and a very young Bill Maher…

Like any sane human being, I'm staying in this evening. If you're sane enough to do the same, you might want to enjoy some of the video links I'll be posting here.

You might also like to tune in Stu's Show, the video podcast hosted by my buddy Stu Shostak and his lovely consort, Jeanine Kasun. The guests on tonight's New Year's gala will be cartoonist Scott Shaw! along with authors Julian David Stone and Antonia Carlotta, plus there will be fun film clips and comedy and all sorts of things. It's starts at 8 PM West Coast Time which is 11 PM East Coast Time and here's a link to watch his channel which will begin airing the show when it commences.

If that doesn't work for you, you can figure out how to watch it over at the Stu's Show website. If you have a Roku TV with the Stu's Show Channel installed, you can watch it there.

I sure wish I'd gotten to see Shecky Greene in what some said was his perfect environment: A showroom in a casino hotel where the management didn't care if he went overtime. Not a lot of Vegas-type performers had that honor. 97% of them could do whatever they wanted on that stage just as long as they finished when they were supposed to finish. After all, every extra minute you're sitting in that showroom getting a show is a minute you're not out at the roulette table losing next month's mortgage payment.

But most casinos let Shecky go as long as he wanted…within reason. They did this mainly because they couldn't stop him and he was a tremendous draw, particularly with high-roller customers. An old Vegas showroom manager once told me Shecky brought in the kind of patron who on the way in or out might easily drop a grand or three.

One of his devoted fans who definitely did not fall into that category was my father who loved visiting Vegas but came back distressed if he'd lost more than about forty bucks at the tables. That loss was mitigated though if he'd gotten to see his favorite entertainer. He'd come back raving about how unbelievably funny Shecky Greene was.

Like I said: I wish I'd gotten to see what my father saw but by the time I began to go to Vegas, Mr. Greene was semi-retired and I never seemed to be there when he did his occasional few nights at some hotel.

I did get to meet him one day in, of all places, a doctor's office in Beverly Hills. I was there for some sort of simple matter and while waiting to see my doctor, I ran into the comedian Charlie Brill, whose doctor happened to share an office with my doctor. Charlie said, "Hey, Mark…have you ever met Shecky Greene?" And sure enough, there next to him was Shecky Greene. I think Shecky, who ordinarily lived in Vegas, was visiting L.A. and needed some sort of medical attention…so Charlie brought him to his doctor and…

Well, all you need to know is that I suddenly found myself introduced to Shecky Greene. I immediately began babbling to him about all the joy he'd given my father over the years and how I wish he was playing Vegas more then so maybe I could see what my father had described to me. I said, "I'll tell you how funny you are. You were even funny when my father, who worked for the Internal Revenue Service, was telling me what you said and what you did on stage." He took it as a compliment and said, "Hey, I don't work so hard these days but maybe we can get your father to do my act some night at the Riviera."

Sadly, the Riviera hotel isn't there anymore and now, neither is Shecky Greene. Here's a link to a real good obituary about the man and here are links to Part One and Part Two of an interview of him by my pal Kliph Nesteroff.

One of those folks who asked me to withhold their name sent me this…

What encounters, if any — even fleeting or from a distance — have you had with folks whose greatest show biz fame and/or achievements — however slight — came from their work in silent film? Which is to say not George Jessel or Mickey Rooney — both top-billed silent stars — but rather someone like Baby Peggy, or as obscure as Wyn Ritchie Evans (1900-2003), child of Billie Ritchie, wife of composer Ray Evans, and occasional Chaplin bit player from Pay Day (1922) to The Great Dictator (1940).

Well, the biggest star of silent movies I ever met was Harold Lloyd, who was a pretty big star. I told that story here. I also met his one-time partner, Hal Roach, who was a pretty important producer of silent movies. Both Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Roach did a lot in the talkie era but they distinguished themselves enough in the silent days that I think they qualify.

My time with Mr. Lloyd was brief and what I wrote about it pretty much tells you everything I got out of him. I spent more time with Mr. Roach and I wrote about it here and here. Mostly, we talked about Charley Chase and Our Gang because Mr. Roach was more loquacious about them and I got the feeling he'd been overinterviewed about Laurel and Hardy.

He also talked a lot about the studio he ran and about how everyone on the premises — the cameraguys, the prop men, the carpenters, everyone — knew comedy and it wasn't just the gagmen and the actors who put in the funny. I remember him saying (approximately), "Take a look at the films Stan and Babe made for me and then look at the films they made for other studios." (Do I have to explain that "Babe" was the common nickname for Oliver Hardy?)

Actually, what I remember most about my time with Hal Roach was him asking me about "these girls today." He'd been reading in Time or Newsweek these stories about how the young women of then-today were amazingly promiscuous. It was not "dirty old man" talk so much as honest curiosity about whether what he was reading was to be believed. And he must have used the phrase "When I was your age" a hundred times.

I may be missing someone but I'm thinking the only other person I can recall meeting who worked in silent movies was the film editor, Martin Bolger. I did spend about ten minutes once with Billy Gilbert who got into movies just when they were starting to talk and may have made a silent or two but I got nothing out of that conversation except being able to say I'd met Billy Gilbert.

I wish I'd met more of those folks. They were a number of them around when I became interested in silent films but I didn't really know how to contact them and was actually very shy about approaching strangers. From the few I did meet, I don't think I learned anything they didn't say in recorded interviews but it was great to "connect" with them in any way, no matter how superficial.

Below, I have embedded a half-hour episode of the game show I've Got a Secret from May 25, 1964. I've set the embed to start playing at the beginning of the third game of the night…the celebrity guest spot. If you want to view the whole show from the beginning, just move the slider all the way to the left. If you just click, you'll see that celebrity guest spot right away and I think you'll enjoy it…