Can anyone recommend a good place to get old time radio shows? I don’t want to sign up for a service then find out that they only have poor quality recordings.
Thanks.
Many OTR programs are in the public domain and are traded amongst OTR enthusiasts for free. Services who charge for OTR programs are generally dealing with public domain programs as well, and none of the money you spend is passed on to the original creators or even the networks that broadcast them.
Here’s an overview of copyright duration.
The best way to get OTR over the internet is to get a good newsreader like xnews and grab programs from alt.binaries.sounds.radio.oldtime.
Thanks for the links Larry. I wasn’t aware of the copyright information.
Have you seen this thread from last November? It has some links and other info.
I get mine at www.otrcat.com. Nice quality disks. The guy who runs it is definitely a fan who wants to spread the joy. I doubt that he’s making any money from doing this.
I have a sampler (Fibber McGee, etc.), Let’s Pretend, Inner Sanctum, Suspense, and the Mercury Theater War of the Worlds.
Yes and no. OTRcat used to be a regular poster to the OTR binary groups, so it’s clear he doesn’t mind spreading the joy. On the other hand, everything that he offers for sale is downloaded from the binary groups, for free. (He even used to offer a disc that included a psychedelic collage I made, called Through the Looking-Glass Darkly, which he could only have gotten off the groups or P2P.)
When you sell a twenty cent disc loaded with material you got for free at the price of $5, there’s a fair profit margin involved. He’s making money, and has taken a fair amount of criticism for it in the groups.
My collection started with cassette tapes made from Jack Cullen’s impressive hoard. He hosted a sunday night radio show (“Lights Out”) for years – and if you were interested, he’d allow you access to archive to grab episodes which had audio quality deemed unsuitable for play on commercial radio. Super nice guy. For decades, if you had any OTR in Vancouver, you either got it off his radio show, from him personally, or from third generation dubs taken from his collection (for free) and resold at flea markets and used book stores.
When I technology advanced and I found the OTR binary groups, my collection exploded. Not even limited by the prohibitive cost of cassette tapes, the time required to transfer programs, and the degeneration of audio involved. (Many of Jack’s best tapes were so poor that you felt privileged to simply hear them – but there was no point in trying to make a usable copy.)
Now I have several hundred CDs that each hold about 48 hours of mp3s. I can set my computer up to play my Suspense! collection and it’ll run solid (in chronological order) for a week and a half without repeating a program. Cost to me, for the entire run: One dollar and change.
Newsgroups are definitely the way to go. They’re also super-spiffy because the newsgroups are an old (pre-WWW) corner of the internet. Files aren’t hosted on one server which may be on the other side of the planet, like a web-page is; they propagate throughout the network and are downloaded from local news servers. This means that less people are trying to grab the file at the same time, and, more importantly, the data isn’t being routed through twelve different servers before it gets to you – it’s a direct line. So download speeds are ten or twenty times what you get from web-based downloads. For example, I just downloaded a nice quality .mp3 of a half-hour episode of the Molle Mystery Theatre. The file size is 8.5MB, and it took 40 seconds to get it from the Telus news server onto my hard-drive.
Sweeeet. 
Does your local shopping mall have a Suncoast Videos store? They have a pretty good selection of that sort of thing.
Thanks for the replies. I hadn’t seen that thread (kept getting a page cannot be displayed type thing every time I tried to search again. Lots of good information in it.
Do you guys recommend any shows? I’m new to this, and so far I’ve listened to some episodes of Quiet Please (a horror type show) that I really enjoyed. I’d be interested in hearing recommendations for shows from any genre though.
The selection is limited, but the next time you’re in a Cracker Barrel restaurant, you might want to check out their selections.
I haven’t really studied these while waiting for a table, so I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure I saw cassettes or maybe CDs with some of these there.
Hey, you went directly to the very best. Arch Obler was a fantastic writer, and less superficial than most of his contemporaries in the genre. Quiet Please, is arguably his best stuff, but you will also enjoy his other series’, Lights Out and Arch Obler’s Mysteries.
For mystery/horror, also check out Inner Sanctum Mysteries (of course,) and Mystery in the Air, starring Peter Lorre and narrated by Harry Morgan.
The best Sci-Fi show ever is X-1, which adapted scads of short stories published in the pulp Galaxy. Of course, many of these are classics now, like A Logic Named Joe.
For drama, go first to Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air (later Campbell Playhouse.) Top quality stuff. Their adaptation of The Man Who Was Thursday may be my favourite radio play, ever. Also, The Lux Radio Theatre was a great show that did one-hour adaptations of popular films with (mostly) the original cast. Also be sure to check out The CBS Radio Workshop, which did some pretty edgy literary stuff in the mid-fifties. They have a two-part adaptation of Brave New World that’s spectacular, and a great black-humour Christmas special called The Plot to Overthrow Christmas, entirely in verse, in which the very worst denizens of Hell (Lucretia Borgia, Caligula, Simon Legree, etc) attempt a hit on Santa Claus. It’s not as tedious as the recent (earnest) talk about a plot against Christmas might lead you to believe. One year I stuck it up on my webpage for Dopers to grab. (Only an image there, but it’s fun.)
For comedy, check out The Mel Blanc Show (class!) or The Phil Harris / Alice Faye Show, which is a spin-off of the Jack Benny show (featuring its bandleader) which was quite boundary-pushing and always a scream.
A lot fo the OTR stuff is fun just as a curiousity, too. I’m a big fan of I Was a Communist for the FBI, which is vintage paranoia in which the eeeeevil communists are up to all sorts of stuff, and Matt Cvetic, the hero, holds his nose to pretend to be one of them and infiltrate union meetings and suchlike.
In no particular order (and admitting to personal eccentricities):
All and any of the broadcasts of Fred Allen, especially those made from roughly 1935 to 1942.
- Information Please*, possibly the best panel show to ever be created.
The Columbia Workshop, the 1930’s-1940’s version of the CBS Radio Workshop already mentioned.
If you have a taste for the popular music of the period, there are several programs that I recommend, most notably the Kraft Music Hall.
Finally, if you have an interest in historical broadcasting, I recommend the Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour (Rudy Vallee) and the Chase and Sanborn Hour (Eddie Cantor) programs of the early 1930’s.
Doh! The Plot to Overthrow Christmas is a Columbia Workshop production. (I think it was repeated once during the run of the Columbia Radio Workshop, though.)
Let’s not forget “I Led Three Lives”. Admittedly not radio, but in the same genure as the above post. Richard Carlson starred, I think.