I second Gunsmoke, Dragnet, and X Minus One.
And maybe it’s not for everyone, but I enjoy the quirky comedy of Vic and Sade.
Not so old but most of the 21st century Howard Stern Shows are also available at the Internet Archive.
Takes me back to being at the cabin where my grandmother lived. No TV, but a huge floor-standing radio with tubes.
As a li’l shaver, Sundays we’d all go “over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go”… huge dinner mid-afternoon, then dinner after dark. Just popcorn and apples while we laid on the floor and listened to Johnny Dollar, the Lone Ranger, and my first super-hero, The Shadow.
But some of the Shadow mp3s I’ve found are poor quality. Any of these archives have good quality (or is there a source for cleaned-up or even remastered shows)?
In my early teens (late 1970s / early 1980s) I would listen to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. I still remember the intro… a creaking door shutting, and then the voice of E. G. Marshall. The episodes were very good.
Bob and Ray. It used to be rerun in the 1980s and we’d listen to it as we went out on Sunday drives.
thanks. for that site … back in the Napster days I had half of my fave otr shows on a hard drive
But there used to be places that had them on cassettes that id find in the library so you might find them on CDs there also … some more old time radio - Search
A second vote for Vic and Sade. And an anti-vote for Fibber McGee, Eddie Cantor and most if not all radio comedy that is not Vic and Sade - and for that matter an anti-vote for the term “old time radio”, lumping everything into a big ball of Old Fogeyhood.
(Hard to explain Vic and Sade’s appeal; it is brilliant and stupid at the same time; a whole new language was invented for the three (later four) characters, you just have to listen to a few examples to get into it. Why does Mr. Chinbunny want Vic to teach him how to smoke cigars? The answer may surprise you.)
I came in to mention Vic and Sade, which was one of my father’s favorites. And while it is brilliant, I think “quirky” and “stupid” don’t quite convey to people who’ve never heard it the utter surreality of the show, which is masked as the rather humdrum non-adventures of a mid-western family. As one reviewer at the site @Hatchie linked to said, creator/writer Paul “Rhymer created a world that was both as fantastic as Oz and as real as everybody’s neighbors.”
It’s a completely unique show and phenomenon, with brilliant acting and writing. (Every one of the 3,500 episodes was written by Rhymer!)
Fun fact: the character of Rush, the title couple’s son, was played by Bill Idelson, who as an adult played Herman Glimpsher, Sally’s sometime boyfriend on The Dick Van Dyke Show. He also wrote for dozens of TV shows from the 1960s to the late movie 1980s, including The Twilight Zone, Get Smart, The Odd Couple, and Punky Brewster.
Their collection of Jack Benny is spotty, but…well, it’s Jack Benny…even with only a couple dozen episodes, several of which aren’t complete, it’s still fun.
I find most of the radio comedies are unlistenable for me. Johnny Dollar is my favorite. Dragnet, Gunsmoke are also fun choices.
Did someone say radio comedies? I agree, most old ones are embarrassingly painful to listen to. But BBC4 is still doing some great ones, and anything written by John Finnemore is wonderful.
I found his comedy serial Cabin Pressure (with Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Allem) on archive.org, as well as his sketch show John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme.
Cabin Pressure was the first contemporary show brought back those old days of happily listening to radio programs, and I’ve been through the series innumerable times.
I tried a couple of episodes of Vic and Sade. Not finding it appealing at all. Yeah, quirky and slight amusing, but it’s like listening to my old relatives talk about the quality of produce at the Publix.
And shit, that just reminded me I’m one of the old relatives now.
Two of my favorites (that I didn’t see mentioned) are The Six Shooter (starring jimmy Stewart) about a wandering cowhand who can’t seem to say “No” to anyone how assumes he’ll help and Frontier Gentleman (starring John Dehner, who also did the radio version of Have Gun, Will Travel) about a newspaper correspondent from London traveling through and writing about the American West.
Vic and Sade is definitely an acquired taste. And it’s not usually laugh-out-loud funny.
Like it or not, “Old Time Radio” has become a term of art for the kind of radio shows we’re discussing here, from the 30s, 40s, and 50s; so that if you’re looking for that kind of thing (at Internet Archive or elsewhere online), “Old Time Radio” or “OTR” is what you would search on.
I’m sure it appeals to some people, and it might have seemed much more offbeat back in the old days. I think I’ll eventually listen to a couple more episodes out of curiosity.
I’m actually amazed that it lasted for as long as it did, and I have a feeling that many of the people who listened at the time didn’t really get the surreal aspects of it, but just enjoyed the down-home quality of the characters.
I’ll check those out, thanks!
Yup, you are sadly not wrong but to me it will always reek of cheap nostalgia for “a simpler age, when people had respect” and all that blather. I guess I would prefer to just call it “old radio”, no capitalization and no “Time”; so it doesn’t sound like some sort of wisful apologia that filters out the less savory aspects of an era.
I checked with some media/radio fans, and they do not assume “Old Time Radio” has hidden meanings like “the old days were better in every way”. The younger ones (my Millennial kids and their friends) said stuff like “Just the opposite. OTR = Radio from when society was boring so people listened to the radio.”
Just got around to checking the archive, and I’d almost forgotten about “Casey, Crime Photographer”. Haven’t listened in years, but I remember these episodes being some of the best, with the snappiest dialog and most compelling plots.