With DVD’s being provided for all those lost-in-space old TV shows long since defunct and not even available on the cable channels that specialize in revitalizing them, at least there’s the possibility for folks born since their heyday to get in on the “excitement” of the golden years of TV.
Not so old radio dramas. Unless you can locate a website that some archivist has built to honor them, or unless you can find a cassette with old episodes from them (I’ve seen such at Cracker Barrel), you’re SOL for ever having the thrill of what passed for entertainment in the pre-TV and early-TV eras.
Except for movies, all you had besides radio were books and comics and such.
Anybody old enough to wax eloquent about old radio dramas?
Can you remember:
The Shadow
True Detective Mysteries
Mike Hammer
Philo Vance
Stella Dallas
One Man’s Family
Fibber McGee and Molly
Lum and Abner
Nick Carter, Master Detective
Big Jon and Sparky (drama? Nope, but fun anyway)
Sky King
The Lone Ranger
Sergeant Preston of the Mounties (title uncertain)
The Fat Man
Gene Autry and the Melody Ranch
Bobby Benson and the B-bar-B Riders
Gangbusters
Johnny Dollar
?
Add to the list
Do you have recordings you made yourself or have managed to buy of those old things?
No, unfortunately not. My grandmother and I have always been close, and she’s talked fondly of the old radio dramas. They sound more entertaining than most of what the radio offers today.
Speaking of which, I recall the Don & Mike Ray-deee-oh Show’s send-up to old radio dramas, “As the Aherns Turns,” inspired by former * Washington Post * radio columnist Frank Aherns’ plea for less shock/political/sports talk and more old-time radio drama. This was a compelling drama about Aherns’ life, which consisted mainly of Aherns living out of his parents’ basement. Starring Don Geronimo as little Frankie Aherns and Mike O’Meara as Frankie’s overbearing mother. Beautiful old-time organ music and dramatic pauses.
Radio Dramas were going on, to my knowledge, into the 1980s at least. There were new dramas at CBS Radio Mystery Theater, and in Boston one of the radio stations ran vintage radio dramas at night. I suspect that you can still find radio drama somewhere. Certainly you can obtain tapes of vintage dramas – check out Amazon, or the back pages of magazines like FilmFax.
Heck, I wrote, directed, and produced a science fiction radio mystery play when I lived in Salt Lake City several years ago.
I can still remember crowding around the radio with my older brother and listening to Ira Blue of San Francisco’s radio 81 KGO. Blue quite possibly originated the radio talk show. He had a fabulous pair of clowns by the names of Hal Coyle and Mal Sharpe. These two would do a “man in the street” schtick. They would walk up to people and ask them things like; “What would you say to a thespian being elected to office?” The replies were hilarious. They even got one person’s agreement to participate in a subtly implied cannabilism ritual. It took me years to figure out what Coyle and Sharpe meant by “The Weather Tree,” from which they would give hilarious meteorological forecasts. (So low budget that their long range forecast involved climbing a tree.) Ira Blue would broadcast live from the famous Hungry Eye night club in San Francisco. To give himself breaks and pace the show he ran nighttime serials like:
Orson Welles narrating:
“The Black Museum”
and the famous,
“The Secrets of Scotland Yard”
It would be many years before our family bought a television set. Listening to Russ Hodges broacast the Giants games when Mays and M[sup]c[/sup]Covey were batting was big entertainment back then.
I remember listening to radio drama as part of my nightime ritual. But these were relatively new RDs (LOTR, Cantacle for Liebowitz, Secret Garden, Jack Flanders, Star Wars).
I also remember the Goon Show and “Mind Webs”
LOTR and Jack Flanders are avaialble (the later at www.zbs.org - check it out for other radio drama including .mp3 samples)
First hand, no, I wasn’t around when new radio dramas were being amde. But when I was a kid, WRVR radio in New York used to re-broadcast old radio shows every night, and for a long time I was hooked on Sherlock Holmes (voiced by Ralph Richardson & John Gielgud), the Green Hornet, the Shadow and the Clock.
How true, scout1222. Even my memory of them has them as pretty cheesy by today’s standards. Like the car driving off: you can hear it go through more gears than a semi. And the footsteps in gravel. Ahhhh! To be young again and to marvel at the arts of radio!
I’m only 20, but I have really fond memories of cassette box sets my parents had of The Shadow, Escape, Suspense and a few Inner Sanctum. We listened to them in the car on long trips, and a few episodes stick out in my mind…
The Shadow, where society matrons with gambling issues are balckmailed into insurance fraud, then splashed in the face with Acid!!!
The episode of I think Suspense, with Lucille Ball, called “A Short Piece of Rope” where she is a frustrated actress who uses he babyface looks and a schoolgirl uniform to lure dirty old men up to the woods, where she robs them, only to discover that her latest mark had been a serial strangler who lured schoolgirls up to the woods!
And certainly not the least, the episode of Escape about a group of people on a tropical plantation which is in the path of an army of giant ants!
Thanks for the link, rowrrbazzle! I have it bookmarked until I have a little cash kicking about!
Besides all the other good stuff they appear to have, there are over a dozen Ellery Queen episodes. I’m an EQ fanatic, and I’ve read many of their radio shows in their various anthologies and magazines, but actual broadcasts are hard to come by. I’ll definitely be huddling over the crystal set tonight.
I found it by Googling for “Journey Into Space”, which I listened to as a kid, but I never heared some if the great US shows on there, so I think I’ll be at the old crystal set for a while as well!
Another fan here. Too young at 39 to remember the hey-day of radio drama, but after listening to my mom and step-father talk of them, I started buying them on vinyl as a kid, then on cassette and CD. Probably have about five hundred total–mostly SF (Dimension X and its follow-up X-Minus One are stand-outs) and mystery (various interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, and Suspense and Escape are favorites).
I have a forty-minute drive to work–nothing like hearing a good thriller at 0-Dark-Thirty on a lonely road.
Dude, how could you omit “Tarzan”, “Capt. Horatio Hornblower”, and “Amos & Andy”? I heard, first person present, all those you did mention. (Deprived kid, no TV in the house before I left out.)
I remember Big John and Sparky with fondness. Even included a reference to that show in a short story once. I had forgotten Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B ranch until you mentioned it.
I think the Mountie show was “Sargent Preston and his wonder dog, Yukon King” [Sgt. Preston]On King! On you huskies"[/Sgt. Preston].
Thanks for calling this up!
PS: Clearly, this is some type of genetic/community memory, similar to the Borg. No way am I that old…
I can remember listening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater every night from about 4th grade to 6th grade. That’s the closest I come to classic radio drama, but it was enough to hook me. You can still find snippets around – audio books, stuff on NPR (Keillor, Riders in the Sky)
Why is this a lost art?
If we can support countless blowhard political talkshows, godknowshowmany a.m. drivetime comedy teams and fergodssake Dr. Laura, why can’t radio support the theater of the mind? People would listen.
Hell, most of your audience is captive in their vehicles. You can’t tell me that the vast majority of the listening public would miss the generic pap ClearChannel shoves down our throats. And it couldn’t be any more expensive to produce than the popmusicmarketingmachine or the political spinners.
I don’t want to make you feel any worse, Frankd6, but we still have drama on BBC Radio in the UK.
Some of it is written especially for radio (two plays per day on average Mon-Fri), some of it is classic drama or dramatised literature (Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights this week), The Archers is a serial drama that has been running for over fifty years and there are plenty of narrated novels too (for instance, Stephen Fry has read all the Harry Potter stuff over the last few years IIRC). Sometimes they feature some well-known US voices.
The BBC has special funding of course, but it has proven that there certainly is a market for sound-only drama. Enthusiasts even claim that “the best pictures are on the radio”. They also use it as a cheap way of testing comedy and other potential TV projects.
It also keeps a small teams of Foley artists in business.
