Hello to the world! It has been a while since I have written
anything, too long really, and I’m feeling its time to rectify that situation.
I hope everyone had a great holiday season and got lots of cool nerdy stuff!
But that is not today’s topic. Entertainment is what our lives have become all
about. Video games, cable TV, Netflix, movies, and other distractions now cloud
up our short lives with interesting stories, life lessons, or just for the hell
of it. But there is one medium that used to dominate the lives of American
culture. Back before television families would gather around a large electric
box and listen to stories, comedies, news and other programs that were
entertaining and informative. Radio today is a lot different then back then.
Today
the focus of radio has become limited to music and information. Scanning the
radio dial now tends to yield the same results, either music of some style or
another, news, sports, and commercials. What happened to the interesting
stories? Radio has become a lost art when it comes to entertainment that isn’t
music or ridiculous talk. Radio entertainment began in the late 1880’s but
really didn’t peak in America until the 1930s and ended around the 1960s. Great
programming was developed during this time period for everyone in the household
on an array of topics. One of the most famous classic radio broadcasts was the Orson
Welles production of War of the Worlds. This drama is just fantastic and is so
famous because of the panic that it caused. The first part of the story is mock
news broadcasts describing an attack on earth from Martians. Unless people
listened to the beginning they had no idea it was a fake broadcast causing the
public to panic.
Wild stores of the future or alternate universes were very common when
it came to old time radio. It is really the best part of radio shows when the
listener can picture how they think things looked and acted out in their
imagination. Some of the best programs to me are the science fiction shows. X
Minus One is a great example of science fiction on radio. The stories that were
broadcast were written out of the two most popular science fiction magazines of
the time. Each episode is a stand-alone story usually with a twist or something
unexpected happening before the end.
One of the best parts of X Minus One is how the stories are produced and
just listening can cause the panic, fear or other emotion the story wants you
to feel.
A third drama I want to mention is a program called
Suspense. Suspense is a lot like X Minus One in which each show is a
self-contained story but Suspense is really not as science fiction based and
the people who star in the show tended to be more famous for the time period. Suspense
was also on for a long time with its first show airing in 1942 and its last
airing in 1962. The show covered more horror and thriller elements with some of
the shows scripts being written based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P.
Lovecraft.
Radio dramas of the day were not all serious drama programs. Detective
shows are also a favorite of mine. Listening to a normal person find clues and
figure out the cases can be such a thrill with many of them putting singing and
humor into the writing of the show. One of my all time favorite detective shows
is called Yours Truly…Johnny Dollar. Johnny Dollar is and insurance
investigator based out of Hartford CT. He is hired by various insurance
companies to investigate different insurance claims. It sounds boring but it
really isn’t. Obviously there is always something just not right about what
happens in each case. The show really gets good once Bob Bailey takes over as
the lead character and Jack Johnstone becomes the writer. The show went from a
half hour program to a fifteen-minute program where one story can take up to 5
episodes to complete making them better overall.
Another fantastic police/detective show was based on real stories from
the Los Angeles police department. Dragnet was a radio show that ran from 1949
to 1957, almost in tandem with the TV show. Its main character remains that
same in both iterations of the show being both the lead character and narrator.
It also starts the same way the TV
show does with the briefing before going into the story and the signature
music. It was also nice to hear the dedication at the end of every episode for
a police offer that was killed in the line of duty.
But radio back then had more then just drama programs to listen too.
Like TV today there were a lot of different comedy programs on the various
stations of the radio dial. The Jack Benny Program is a personal favorite of
mine. Jack Benny was a radio and later TV star. The program features Jack along
with several other friends talking about various events and essentially picking
on the flaws of the programs front-runner. The jokes tend to be quick jabs at
Jack as he plays his character (a cheap fellow who wants to spend as little as money
possible but gloats about dating movie stars). What’s great for me is the
feeling that everyone on the program is having a good time while broadcasting
with jack and company making comments that were clearly not scripted.
As with Jack Benny, a lot of radio shows and stars ended up
moving to television after radio started to decline. Lucille Ball’s character
from I Love Lucy was actually developed from a radio show called My Favorite
Husband. In this program Liz Cooper gets into various situations with a best
friend, usually to the dismay of her husband George played by Richard Denning.
The show has a similar feel to I Love Lucy with more verbal comedy then slap
stick visual comedy for obvious reasons.
Radio is not what is used to be and the stories from the past can be
corny but fantastic. The programs allow the listener to imagine what is
happening in the story almost interacting with them better then TV. Modern
radio does not accomplish this. An argument could be said that the story
telling of radio has not gone away but actually jumped mediums. There are a lot
of podcasts that also provide entertainment beyond interviews and music.
Podcasts are a great medium for this type of entertainment but they do not and
will not reach the same amount of popularity as the classic radio show of the
past. Thankfully these classic radio shows are preserved in several different
places. On satellite radio there is an entire channel dedicated to them. But
websites like Archive.org have created a digital library where these show can
still be enjoyed. Each picture above links to archive.org and the specific show
I have discussed. Feel free to explore the website more and find some other
great stuff on this digital library. What do you think? Did anyone find or know
of a show that they enjoy? Are there any podcasts that do a similar style or
storytelling? Let me know!
