Old Time Radio Shows!

Cafe Society
1

I’ve met very few people who share this hobby, but you never know who you’re going to meet on the SDMB. So – anyone else out there a fan of old time radio (OTR) shows? I’m talking about the stuff from roughly the '30s to the '50s: Gunsmoke, Suspense, Jack Benny, Orson Welles, etc. I started downloading the stuff a few years back when I was sick in bed, too ill to sleep and too tired to keep my eyes open to read or watch TV. I’ve been a fan ever since. Considering the genre only really blossomed for roughly 30 years at most, there’s some really great stuff out there – comedy that hasn’t aged, thrillers that still thrill, etc. And this is a golden age for a fan – for a few bucks you can get an MP3 CD holding over a hundred half hour shows. Pop it into an MP3 player, and you’re good to go. It’s great if you do a lot of traveling – for those long train trips where you can’t sleep and there’s no light to read.

Anyways, if there are any other OTR fans out there, list some of your favorite shows, and tell how you discovered the genre.

Some of my favorites are: The Jack Benny Show, Suspense, Lights Out, and Information Please.

2

Go search yahoo groups for OTR. There are many groups that trade shows.
You should be aware that trading and buying these shows are a grey area in copyright.

I have thousands of them.

My fav?

I love a mystery.

Not many of them left.

3

I’ve always found that stuff fascinating, but never knew where to get started. Can you recommend some websites, fan cooperatives, mailing lists, or etc. where one might get started with this stuff? My local public radio station used to run those for hours on sunday nights, and I loved to listen - the comedies were surprisingly still hilarious and relevant!

4

I discovere OTR by being around before television was widespread. I can just barely remember most of it, but what I remember I loved.

That’s what I did all the time before I could read. We were a little isolated except for the boy with horses across the road. I was a mere girl and spent a lot of time alone with that floor model radio in the 1940’s. It still stands within fifteen feet of where I type. (I’m very loyal to old friends.)

Some of the shows and celebs I remember:

Gangbusters, Beulah, Baby Snooks, the Shadow, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Sky King, the Lone Ranger, Arthur Godfrey, House Party (with Art Linkletter) Grand Slam (a game show that came on either just before or just after Godfrey in the daytime), Young Doctor Christian, Grand Central Station, Fred Allen, One Man’s Family and Suspense.

I think that I listened to a lot of soap operas besides One Man’s Family. I just can’t remember the names --maybe one called Backstage Life or Backstage Wife*. I may have listened to Stella Dallas.

Was there a show called The FBI? Was My Friend Irma on the radio as well as TV?

I think I remember someone reading the funny papers aloud on the radio and describing them as he read.

My favorite children’s radio show was called Let’s Pretend. I still remember the theme song:

*Cream of Wheat – It’s so good to eat and we eat it every day…
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Loved that song. Hated to even look at Cream of Wheat.

I found out three or four years ago that that program was broadcast from what became the Ed Sullivan Theater. That’s where Dave Letterman broadcasts now. I think it’s kind of cool that that studio continues to keep me entertained fifty-five years later. It’s kind of like a blankie.

5

When I was a kid in the '70s I used to like to listen to E.G. Marshall’s Radio Mystery Theatre.

6

lonesome – Yeah, I know there are groups online, but I’ve met very few people either in person or on a non-OTR message board who were into it.

As for the copyright issue…most of the websites I’ve seen that sell MP3 CDs prominently state that the shows they sell are, as far as they know, in the public domain, and that if they’re informed that they’re not they’ll stop selling them. Either whoever owns the copyright isn’t following up or they really are public domain, because there’s plenty of places to buy them.

I haven’t heard “I Love A Mystery” yet, but I’ve heard other stuff by Carlton E Morse, the guy who wrote it. Incidentally, the guy who writes “Lost” reminds me a lot of Morse – great with plot twists and turns, but always with a human element.

VCO3 – Leonard Maltin wrote a book called “The Great American Broadcast” that might be a good introduction to the charms (though a lot of the anecdotes will only be interesting if you’re already familiar with the shows). Still, it does a good job of introducing some of the better OTR shows.

If you want to get into it, there are a lot of “one-off” shows that are good to listen to – shows with a unique story and characters each week so you don’t feel lost when you’re listening to it. Most of the big suspense ones – Lights Out, Inner Sanctum, Escape, Suspense – are that type of show. Some of the comedy shows take a lot of listenings before you can really appreciate all the jokes – The Jack Benny Show isn’t so funny the first couple times you listen to it (or at least it wasn’t for me), but as you get used to the characters and the conventions it gets better and better. Bob and Ray is kind of like that too.

But the shows are so cheap to get that you really can’t go wrong by buying a couple of discs and just giving them a spin. There are lots of vendors on Ebay (just type in OTR). Another good website is www.otrcat.com, which sells MP3 CDs for about five dollars. (And I think the money even goes to a charitable cause.) The good thing about that site is that all the shows are categorized for convenience, and each is given an informative introduction.

I’m not familiar with any other websites or mailing lists (well, www.jackbenny.org), but I’m sure they’re out there.

It really is a great genre; check it out!

7

The Goon Show, BBC, 1950-1960, starring Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Spike Milligan. I have every extant show, over 150, not just the 90 or so that have been re-released on CD by the Beeb.

Vic and Sade, written by Paul Rhymer, 1942-46. I don’t have any myself, but my dad has a good collection. Great, but relatively obscure show from the 1940s. Completely unique humor, brilliantly written and acted.

8

That show can be a mixed bag, but there were some episodes that scared the living sh*t out of me. I remember one in particular about a young couple snowed into a deserted ski lodge with a serial killer… ::shudder::
One of the pleasures of listening to the old stuff is catching bits of “living” history. The Lux Radio Theater usually had a guest star speak during their act breaks, and on one show they announced that the scheduled guest, Amelia Earhardt, could not attend because her plane had just been reported missing a few days before, but they were hoping for her safe return. Recently I listened to an episode of “Information Please” from late 1938; usually it’s a very funny quiz show that had guest celebrity and politicians as panelists. On this particular show a question came up about Hitler’s threatened annexation of the Sudetenland. You could feel the mood change in the studio as the topic of a potential war came up. The guest political journalist spoke very reassuringly about how he was sure that Mr. Hitler was bluffing and that war would be averted after all. It was positively eerie hearing these people talking about the subject, and knowing that they didn’t know the catastrophe that was about to happen. And this was a particularly clear episode, not scratchy at all – you could hear the audience moving around uncomfortably, or at least that’s how I heard it. Amazing.

9

I think you mean The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, which was hosted by E.G. Marshall in its first few seasons.

10

I used to belong to a group that did OTR re-enactments. Always a great deal of fun. I haven’t heard anything from them for a while so I’m afraid they might be defunct. We did all sorts of shows, comedy, drama, mystery. Great fun re-creating the sound effects. My friend who owns her own theremin was wildly popular.

I have a lot of shows, mostly on tape unfortunately so I can’t listen to them in my car or rip them to my iTunes. iTunes also has some OTR channels.

11

I have a long commute, so I’m constantly searching for new stuff to listen to. I’ve thrown some old-time radio in there from time to time. The Goon Show was great, once I got used to the crazy structure of the show. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the full run of The Strange Dr. Weird, which was fun. In particular, I liked the commercials run during that show, which were quite quaint (“Every man looks better in an Adam Hat! Only five dollars!”). Five Minute Mysteries was a bit too transparent and far-fetched, and that organ music got old real fast.

12

I’m a fan of radio drama:
Hitchhiker’s Gude to the Galaxy
Lord of The Rings (BBC)
Fourth Tower of Inverness (& other Jack Flanders) tho they are a bit new agey
Cantacle(sp?) for Liebowitz(sp?)

I liked “Mind Webs” - sf short stories

Brian

13

The SciFi Channel’s website used to have related OTR shows- two good ones were Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD (spoken intro by A.H. himself) and also a NBC production of Orwell’s 1984, both from the 1950s

I picked up a set of OTR cassettes at W-M- a few years back (they were also offerred on radio) which had the above BNW, also a 1930s James Cagney version of JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, and a Hollywood promo for WWII bonds which concluded with FDR speaking about how the war with Hitler’s Germany was essentially a war between Christian civilization & Paganism. Wow!

14

I’ve become a fan by listening to Radio Classics on XM satellite radio. I generally prefer the variety and mystery shows. I’ve found the westerns really haven’t aged well and the “Indian Talk” really bothers me on Red Ryder. Some of the older Sci-fi shows are good, others are a bit dated.

I’d have to say Suspense is my favorite so far.

15

You can get a lot of old radio shows on casette – there are several companies listed online, or in the backs ofsome of the fantastic film magazines.

I’ve listened to several old science fiction shows from radio, and I’m amazed at how much more daring and experimental they were than SF TV or even movies. Lots of adaptations – Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll”, asimov’s “C-chute”, de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur”, Bradbury’s “Mars is Heaven”.

On the other hand, too much radio drama ends up being too simplified and truncated. I’ve been disappointed in a lot of SF radio for that reason. I also find radio editions of plays disappointing. The “new” Sherlock Holmes radio plays written by John Dickson Carr (who co-wrote The xploits of Sherlock holmes), with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce (who did Holmes and Watson in the movies) were not good, despite the excellence of those involved. I have to blame the limitations of commercial radio as it was back then. I’ve got some BBC Holmes that isn’t as restricted in time as the US one, and they’re excellent.

16

For the past couple of years I’ve really enjoyed exploring some of those old shows.

Gunsmoke is very well done; all the shows I’ve heard so far have been well-constructed and entertaining.
X Minus One has some very well-done adaptations of classic science fiction stories (by the likes of Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, etc.).

I’ve ordered from that site and been satisfied (their “Halloween Sampler” disc has a bunch of the great old horror classics), but there are other good sites to order from as well (http://www.yourradioshows.com, http://www.otrnow.com, http://www.otrchuck.com/, and http://www.bobbysotr.com, to name a few)—they vary according to selection, price, organization, and amount of information given.

One place you might start is the Old-Time Radio Program Guide, which has lots of links. Anyone who’s particularly interested in SF-type stuff should check out the Plot Spot.

17

If you like old-time radio, Apple’s iTunes radio can connect you to these OTR stations:

• ACB Radio Treasure-Trove
• AM 1710 Antioch
• Mystery Play Internet Radio

Other OTR stations available from Live365.com (see their “Talk” category):

• Crimetime OTR
• Sherlock Holmes Radio
• Knotted Note Radio
• Old Time Thrillers
• Central New York Old Time Radio
• Radio Mystery Theater
• Memories Live365
•KIBM: Classic Comedy
•OTR Goes on Vacation
• OTR — X Minus One
• Tim’s sci fi radio 1
• TheMonsterClub.Com OTR
• Old Time Radio Home
• Soap Opera Radio
• Various Old Time Radio
• Old Time Radio Shows
• Crypt Theater
• Gold Time Radio

18

radiospirits.com has a some free shows you can play. Gotta love that Stan Freberg! Click On the Radio for the schedule. This week’s show is Frankenstein from the Suspense series. Love it. Do check out the archive for The Wizard of Oz!

19

A couple things I’ve noticed about the commercials on old radio: they were pretty much all mini-lectures about why you should buy the product, and every other sentence began with the word “yes.”

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Own about 500. Mostly SF (have almost all the episodes of “Dimension X,” and about 2/3rds of “X-Minus One”). As mentioned before, they’re great – about 90% of them are based on published short stories, and even the originals (mostly by staff writers Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts) are pretty good.

Sir Rhosis