Old Time Radio......

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So I know this thread does not quite fit here, but it really does not fit anywhere in the modern lexicon of entertainment ......


Due to sensory issues, sometimes I cannot tolerate full on movies or TV......

During these times I need an dark room and soothing voices ! !! !

Anyway, I listen to a lot of OTR stuff via the old time radio Android App.

I love Jack Benny, old sci-fi like Space Patrol and Dimension X.....



Also the Mercury Theater with it's productions of Treasure Island, Dracula, and the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast is not to be missed...


So, any other radio fans out there?

Last edited by GoonSquad on 21 Jan 2013, 10:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

I agree that Jack Benny is great.

I've also listened to quite a few of the old radio westerns. Also shows such as Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, and Burns and Allen.

Also some newer stuff as well.

Have you ever heard of Jean Shepherd? He's the author of the Christmas story about the kid wanting the Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. He had a radio show that is sheer genius. If you look around, you can probably find a lot of his stories.

One of my favorites was a St Patrick's Day broadcast when he told about being in Dublin on St Patrick's Day.

Another more modern radio show that is quite enjoyable is the Ruby, Galactic Gumshoe series.

And Prairie Home Companion is usually very, very good.

By the way, have you ever seen the movie "The Final Countdown"? In the movie the USS Nimitz somehow goes back in time to just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

In the movie, they are listening to a Jack Benny radio show on Saturday, December 6, 1941, the night before the attack on Pearl Harbor with the following exchange between Rochester and Jack Benny:

In reality, Jack Benny's radio show was recorded live in front of a studio audience and broadcast on Sunday nights, not Saturday nights. That particular episode was recorded and broadcast on the night of December 7, 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was over.

Another thing that is great is some of the World War II news broadcasts on radio.

Some of my favorites are "X Minus One" "Fibber Magee and Molly" and "Dragnet"

Love it. Where I live, I used to listen to the KNX Drama Hour every night at bedtime, until the management decided to drop it for obviously stupid reasons. Morons.

I listen to a lot of westerns too. I love Have Gun, Will Travel complete with period commercials.

I love those commercials: "Three out of four Doctors smoke Camels!"

I also like A Prairie Home Companion mostly for the musical guests though. Keillor's humor can be a bit lame sometimes.

I gave up on PHC when Garrison Keillor started using the same basing techniques Rush Limbaugh uses on his show.

The stuff that Orson Welles did with the Mercury Theatre was excellent, The War of the Worlds and Dracula in particular. All of it can be downloaded for free on the Mercury Theatre website, and I assume YouTube as well.

I've also listened to quite a bit of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce starred in while they were still making the Holmes films at Universal. The films took place in the 1940s and had Holmes going up against Nazis and film noir style femme fatales, while the radio shows took place in the 1890s and stayed a bit closer to the books. It was good stuff.

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes...

Other than Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, is there anyone even attempting to portray Holmes to these titans?

I like the old CBS Radio Mystery Theater from 1974/82, Dimension X and X Minus One. When I listen to CBS Radio Mystery Theater, it reminds me of my grandmother, we used to listen to it together when I was a kid.

If you're asking if there's anyone worthy of Rathbone and Brett, I would add Peter Cushing to that particular Hall of Fame. I'm also quite fond of the current three (Downey, Cumberbatch, and Miller), but it's too soon to start pinning medals on them.

I used to hang out at WDAD Radio in Indiana PA when WHTM-TV morning anchor Dennis Buterbaugh ran the sign-off shift. The CBS Radio Mystery Theater usually ran before sign off, since the station ran it on tape delay. Denny was also the station manager at WIUP-FM when I started there, as that uptight classical music announcer cum music history major who had to endure with all the piece of crap equipment the university had in the studio. What I would have done to have the music department's Studer open reel deck in the studio, rather than that piece of junk Scully Deck that was continually breaking down. The only decent equipment they had were an ancient Ampex Open Reel Deck and an Orban Opti-Mod stereo exciter and limiter, which engineering had set to compress the signal so badly that the music I played sounded horrible.

I grew up with that stuff. Did you ever hear the original Orson Welles broadcast of his 1938 verions of "War of the Worlds"

Thousands of people in the New York and New Jersey area were scared witless.

I live about 8 miles from where the Martians "landed", Grover's Mill, New Jersey.


ruveyn

It's a fascinating study of hysteria. People out in rural areas called their local police stations, claiming that they could see the fires and black smoke far off in the cities. Farmers shot at water towers, mistaking them for Martian tripods. A lot of people assumed that it was actually the Germans invading, and that their firebombing war machines were being mistaken for Martians by the newscasters. Of course, these gullible people could have calmed themselves by switching to any other radio channel, none of which had anything about this invasion, or listened to the multiple interruptions in the broadcast identifying it as a work of fiction... but the show was so damn good and sounded so real that I can understand, at least to some little extent, the confusion it caused.