There are lots of old time radio shows available at Internet Archive (shows like the Lone Ranger, Sherlock Holmes, Adventures of Sam Spade, Adventures of Superman, Amos and Andy…)
https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
Anyone have any favorites?
XM had (or maybe still has) a station that played all these old shows. I always like The Bickersons, The Whistler, X Minus One, The Shadow, Have Gun Will Travel, Dragnet and a ton more that aren’t coming to mind right now. For 3 or 4 years it was the only station my car ever had on.
I quite enjoyed listening to Fibber McGee and Molly from 1941 on. I’ve also listened to a bunch of episodes of The Great Gildersleeve, which is more of a typical sitcom (but still often pretty funny).
I like Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. I can’t listen to too much of it because it gets tedious, but it’s a nice break once in a while. Wish I could have kept up on my expense reports like that.
Vincent Price as The Saint-Such a delight!
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows !”
** Specially the ones with Awesome Orson Wells, and the Goodrich Safety SilverTown Tires ads. Curiously, the tires are still being made.
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** On a recent TopTenz from that youtube guy that never sleeps, Simon Whistler, in a list about things that never happened (Wells “War of the Worlds” really did not cause wide panic scares) had the YouTube auto caption turning Whistler’s accent way to say “Orson” into “Awesome”.
I was excited to hear ads for a particular product on The Great Gildersleeve: Kraft Dinner Macaroni & Cheese! (Usually it was just Kraft Parkay margarine, though.)
I prefer the crime stuff to the comedies. The crime shows have enough comedy in them as it is. I love the Howard Duff episodes of “Adventures of Sam Spade”. (Duff was blackballed by the McCarthyites and fired from the show. Still there is about a hundred episodes with him still available.) Alan Ladd is pretty good in “Box 13”. I also think “Man Called X” and “Richard Diamond, Private Detective” are pretty great. There are quite a few others with only a handful of episodes, even though they ran for years at the time. The “Thin Man” has only about a dozen episodes recorded, it’s such a loss.
Ton of great stuff on these two sites I use
My favorite two are The Shadow that ran across the 1930s-50s which I spoke about in another thread here not too long ago and Journey Into Space. The Shadow is about a “wealthy young man around town” named Lamont Cranston who has secret hypnotic powers that allow him to cloud men’s mind and solve crimes. The other program I have engrossed myself in listening was a 1950s BBC sci-fi drama which incidentally was the last BBC radio program to get more listeners than the primetime BBC TV show got viewers.
My husband’s a big fan of Johnny Dollar.
Yeah, “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit.” The Shadow’s my favorite. I also fondly remember Vincent Price’s rendering of Three Skeleton Key. And Dick Tracy’s Wedding, starring just about everybody.
I haven’t run across many fans but it was incredibly popular on the radio in it’s time. Fans of old TV shows will recognize some voices like Parley Baer and Howard McNear from the Andy Griffith show, among other well known actors. Many of those actors developed distinctive voices for radio that continued to serve them well on television.
Johnny Dollar is great. I can even enjoy a single episode without worrying about the plot.
I also love the cost of his expenses.
I’m crazy about X Minus One. Great sci fi stuff
Yeah, Johnny is great. I also like Richard Diamond, Fibber McGee, Life or Riley, and The Halls of Ivy.
(and X Minus 1)
CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
Takes me back to riding in the backseat of our ‘67 Galaxie 500, coming home from the cabin.
A second vote for Fibber McGee and Molly, and for The Great Gildersleeve.
Add the radio show of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.
Many of the radio shows on the Archive site are from the Old Time Radio Researchers (OTRR) group. Their site has a collection of Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story) radio monologues at their website. otrrlibrary.org
I tend to like Dragnet, Gunsmoke, and The Whistler.
“The Lives of Harry Lime was a British radio series that was produced in London by Harry Alan Towers. Called The Adventures of Harry Lime when first broadcast in Great Britain, the program featured Orson Welles as the title character, reprising his role from the 1949 cult movie, The Third Man . The radio series was set before that classic film, and depicted Harry Lime’s many misadventures as a con-artist…”
Note that producer Harry Alan Towers had a long career in radio and (generally sleazy) movies, as well jumping bail on some very interesting vice charges in the early 1960s. Perhaps working on a show about a con man gave him some helpful hints when it came to being a fugitive movie producer.