Old Time Radio

Don't really go looking for it, but I might listen if I ran into it. I think I caught a few minutes of Dragnet on NPR the other day.

Groucho and Chico Marx did a hilarious show around 1933 called Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel. Unfortunately the original recordings were lost. The transcripts are still a blast to read though.

My Dad loves this shit. He's got storage containers full of tapes of old shows. He used to always put them on when he took a nap. He liked "Dragnet," "Fibber Mcgee and Molly," and "The Life of Riley" the most. Every now and again I'd listen to them as a kid if there was a power failure.

I'm a huge Jack Benny fan, and my wife constantly makes fun of me for it.

I was driving cross country a few years ago and decided do drive through the night to make up some time. All the way across I 20 & 10 in Texas, I got an AM station that was doing a special all-night line up of old radio programs. It was pretty cool to be all by myself, zooming along, listening to Dragnet.

We had the Sirius satellite radio thing in our van for a year or so. I used to love to listen to the radio classics channel. Plus, when we'd go on drives across state, the kids enjoyed listening to it. My son described it as "It's like tv in your mind, only not as good".

Maybe....but it kept the four of them quiet on the highway.

Your dad and I park our cars in the same garage.
Dragnet is pretty good, but some of the more obscure thrillers are where the real awesomeness lies. There's a series called The Whistler wherein criminals usually get theirs via some ironic twist ending. Kind of an EC crime comic for the radio. The sci-fi shows are pretty good too. A lot of them are adaptations of classic short stories. "Invasion" is a legetimately creepy Bradbury tale. I think they also adapted it for The Twilight Zone, but try tracking it down on the internets.

Oh yeah, my pops loves him some "Whistler." The other spooky one I remember the theme to was "Lights Out."

Aside from "Dragnet" the other big crime one he was into was "Gangbusters." It might be fun to listen to some of those at Thanksgiving if we have a power failure.

There's some great links in this thread...

Old Time Horror Radio

BBC Radio still does a lot of series and ghost stories. I was just up in Nova Scotia with friends, and after dinner we would get stoned and listen to spooky radio, either old stuff like Lights Out, Quiet Please and Suspense ("Three Skeleton Key" is outstanding) or modern stuff like BBC's The Red Room (adaptations of MR James and others) and Ray Bradbury Presents.

I'd been intrigued in OTR since reading "Danse Macabre", and was sold when I listened to a few great programs at one of the World Horror Conventions.

NPR used to air a lot of these back when they first started. I remember hearing The Life of Reilly and The Great Gildersleeve, and the occasional Groucho show.

I love stuff like this. Particularly old Jack Benny and Burns and Allen.

I remember reading about Stephen King listening to an adaptation of "Mars is Heaven" in Dance Macabre. A number of years later, I actually heard the adaptation itself, and it's just as creepy as he describes it.

My dad has been working on a biography of Jack Webb for a number of years, so he subscribed to this old-time radio catalogue and we had quite a few of these on tape. Many nights, I'd go to sleep listening to Dragnet instead of the radio. It's been a while since I heard them, but I remember being really enthralled by not just the shows, but the form itself.

You would think, in the podcast age, that something like this would have a renaissance, but since good radio drama is so hard to not only write, but perform, I can see why.

Any time frame on when your dad might be done with that Jack Webb biography? That's a slam dunk for my old man for his birthday, Christmas, or Father's Day.

I don't know, really. He worked on it for much of the time I was in junior high and high school, collecting a metric ton of Webb-related memorablia, like the Dragnet game and every Julie London record released (and, by proxy, L.A. true crime shit, which is how I got into James Ellroy). This was back before DVD, so we had tape after tape of Dragnet episode ordered through catalogues and membership services like "Columbia House". He even interviewed Harry Morgan a couple of times when he was out in LA on buisness.

Then, around my junior year, he heard that another author was releasing a biography of Webb. Disheartened, he pretty much abandoned the project and moved on to writing mysteries instead. When the Webb biography came out, he read it and was disappointed by it (and the fact that Harry Morgan wrote the forward must have stung), but not enough to start his more "serious" biography. I think he wanted to write something in the vein of Richard Schickel's biography of Eastwood, except about Jack Webb.

I don't know if it'll ever be finished, or if he ever did any serious work on the book itself beyond the research. Hell, since he remarried, he may have gotten rid of or packed up all that stuff he bought. He is not a big sharer.

Boy, talking about my sad old man in this thread, my dead mom in the other one. I'm an over-sharing machine this weekend!

If you like the kind of colonialism, jungle-trekking, and treasure-hunting stuff that Indy was inspired by, this old show is pretty great... WORLD ADVENTURERS CLUB

 

http://www.archive.org/details/OTRR_Certified_World_Adventurers_Club

 

Edited by DARKMITE8 - 8/30/11 at 9:08pm