beer, had begun in March 1943 and had failed to catch on. Groucho left the program in June 1944 and was replaced by vocalist Kenny Baker (who appeared with Groucho in 1939's At the Circus) until the show ended two months later. He also reluctantly appeared in two films with brothers Chico and Harpo Marx, A Night in Casablanca and the lackluster Love Happy. During a radio appearance with Bob Hope in March 1947, Marx ad-libbed most of his performance after being forced to stand by in a waiting room for 40 minutes before going live on the air. John Guedel, the Hope program's producer, formed an idea for a quiz show and approached Marx about the subject. After initial reluctance on Marx's part, Guedel was able to convince him to host the program once Marx realized the quiz would be only a backdrop for his contestant interviews and the storm of ad-libbing that they would elicit. Guedel also convinced Marx to invest in 50% of the show, in part by saying that he was "untouchable" at ad-libbing, but not at following a script. As Marx and the contestants were ad-libbing, Guedel insisted that each show be filmed and edited before release to remove the risqué or less interesting material. The show for the studio audience ran longer than the broadcast version. On December 28, 1949, episode #49-13 was filmed as a visual test in preparation for the show to be broadcast on television. The president of Film Craft Productions, Regina Lindenbaum (who did the subsequent filming), cited it as the first television show filmed before a live audience. Most television histories incorrectly credit I Love Lucy with that achievement, but Lucy premiered a year after Groucho's first filmed season. While filming both shows did indeed allow for greater control in post-production editing, the principal reason they were filmed was so that they could be produced in Hollywood before the advent of the "coaxial cable" that allowed live coast-to-coast broadcasts. They also produced clearer images for the West Coast than the fuzzy kinescope recordings that dominated network programming there in television's early days. Gameplay Contestant teams usually consisted of one male and one female, most of whom were selected from the studio audience. Occasionally, famous or otherwise interesting figures were invited to play (e.g., a Korean-American contestant who was a veteran and had been a prisoner of war during the