I remember when Jack Benny died, a writer in the “New York Times” said it was far more funnier to hear Benny’s decrepit Maxwell automobile sputter and wheeze on the radio as compared to seeing it on television.
At least now we have podcasts and mp3 players, though. Even for those who drive old cars, there are mp3 adapters that will allow them to hook up their mp3 player, iPod, or smart phone to the car stereo, and play OTR or whatever they want. I agree about the random scheduling, but most of these episodes are downloadable as podcasts, so you can listen to what you want when you want.
Thanks for the recommendations; I’ll certainly check these out.
I’m not sure about other programs, but Signal Oil - the sponsor of The Whistler - often stated in the advertising portions of the show that a road map (available at Signal Oil gas stations, of course) also had a list of stations that carried the show so you wouldn’t miss it while traveling.
I like Botar’s for vintage radio shows in podcast form. Most of the suspense shows hold up quite well. The comedy can be hit-or-miss though.
I think the OP has the tail wagging the dog. They didn’t just shut down radio drama one day. What happened was the general public lost interest in radio drama and after it did so, radio stations responded by cancelling those dramas.
It’s like lamenting the demise of newspapers in our times. If there was a large bunch of people who actually cared about newspapers, then they wouldn’t be going out of business.
There is a large bunch. There’s not a large-enough-to-be-profitable bunch. The distinction is subtle but critical.
it was AM band so signals would travel farther than FM.
the radio networks, maybe four, were strong then sent the shows around the country.
in the earliest times between the radio, aerial and batteries it was a big package. things got smaller like they do now. there were portable radios the size of a picnic basket.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater aired from 1974 until 1982. My dad and listened to E.G. Marshall and his “tales of the macabre” (uneven in quality, mystery, and macabreness) in the car when he would drive me places as a kid.
When NBC started its weekend program, Monitor, (WARNING: It isn’t just a pdf, it’s a 140 page pdf!) critics called it “the doom and damnation of radio” and one dismissed it as a “seemingly endless succession of unfinished bits and pieces…” compared, I infer, to traditional radio programming.
It’s many a moon ago now but I recall being told in Media Studies module that TV soaps followed the formula of radio soaps, in that oftentimes looking at the screen wasn’t necessary to follow the story, there were more audio leads than on other shows. However this may only have been in the context of British soap operas.
The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was a conscious attempt to revivie the type of radio drama that had been popular in the “golden age” of radio, and its creator/producer, Himan Brown, had been active during that golden age. I agree that it was “uneven in quality, mystery, and macabreness,” and IMHO it would have been better (tighter and more effective) if it had stuck with the half-hour format of its predecessors.
Uneven is a charitable description. CBS RMT was mostly pretty bad. I was an avid listener as a teen in the 70s, but it was very nearly all that was available for radio drama. RMT was most successful when they did adaptations of authors like Poe or Twain. Original scripts are uniformly bad. I’m not going just from memory. The show’s whole run, or nearly so, is available and I’ve tried to listen to it. More than a few eps are so bad I didn’t finish them.
OP are you acquainted with the clear channel AM radio stations? At night you could hear these for hundreds of miles: