House cleaning

People often ask me, "Chris, how do you, a professional artist and game developer, keep you bathroom tile so sparkling and new looking? I scrub and scrub, but nothing seems to work!" Well, here's a little trick I've learned that you can try at home.

The next time you are sorting your junk mail, check the credit card offers for those fake cards that are often included. You know the ones...the AmEx with "Your Name Here" printed on the bottom. Set it aside and save it the shower.

The next time you are in the shower and notice some unsightly soup scum build up, pull out your little Visa or Mastercard and scrape away! Years of buildup can be eradicated in seconds with a few strokes of one of these durable plastic cards. If the card does break, don't worry! A replacement scraper will be delivered to your home free of charge in about a week!

It's like Netflix for your bathroom tile.

The Rilly Big Shew

My plans to delve into the Shadow are on hold until I have free time for a longer post. As we near Halloween, my thoughts turn to the scary icons of my childhood. Also, I was struck by my friends Cliff's blog on growing up with television, so I wanted to revisit my Strange Interlude post of month's back. Prepare for a ramble...

Cliff had talked about the fact that, in an era when we had--if you were that lucky with reception--a half dozen TV local stations, you tended to watch shows you wouldn't bother with otherwise. Choices were few--and we wanted to watch that box just as much as our modern counterparts do--so unless you hit a time of day when there wasn't anything on, you watched what you were given. Afternoon soap time and Sundays were rough and sometimes forced a child to actually do something, but otherwise we watched TV.

I think that was broadening.

Like a macrocosm of the Ed Sullivan Show, TV presented us with something for everyone. You watched and absorbed while you waited patiently for your turn at programming aimed at YOU. I watched Speed Racer and West Side Story, Star Trek and Huntley and Brinkley, Friday Night Frights and Gunsmoke.

Dad loved Westerns and cop shows--not always good ones--and baseball. Mom loved musicals and watched a of of PBS. We all liked comedy/variety; The Smothers Brothers, Laugh-in, and Carol Burnett. But I liked anything with fantasy...

I remember a co-worker a few years my junior laughing at what he presumed was a joke name--Buster Crabbe. As a pre-cable kid, I recall getting permission to stay up late to watch channel 8 show Buck Rogers just before sign-off, or getting up early on a Sunday to watch Flash Gordon. I remember the thrill--and disappointment-- of Friday Night Frights. I missed George Ellis as Bestoink Dooley on Atlanta TV by a few years, my host was Bob Chesson as Dead Earnest. Each week I would hope for an old Universal "A" picture, like Frankenstein or Dracula...or perhaps the original Godzilla. Far more often it was a "sub B" programmer, like Donovan's Brain or Dr. Cyclops...but I watched just the same. It was a BIG DEAL to watch...it was MY TURN. When a classic horror or SciFi movie did make it onto the television it was a huge deal, and I learned to appreciate the artistry of older films it in spite of dated special effects or black and white film (of course, all TV was black and white for most of my youth.)

An old boss of mine commented that the Universal monsters were timeless classics...I no longer believe that. I think the release of those films to TV in the 1950s struck a chord with baby boomers that locked them in as icons in our popular culture, but as a parent trying to share elements of my childhood with my kids, those films of the 30s and 40s have very limited appeal to kids who have 5 channels of cable programming devoted to them whenever they want it. Those films are passing into the land of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton. They will always be loved by a core group of film fans, but as popular entertainment, they can't attract the audience of the poorly conceived Van Helsing.

Cable is the entertainment version of a buffet of chicken fingers, corn on the cob, sloppy joes, pizza and cheeseburgers. I know my kids won't go hungry, but they won't learn to appreciate the comfort foods of my youth, the meatloaf and tuna casserole offerings of Harryhausen and Karloff. While it saddens me that my nostalgia may not translate to them, I also fear they may also miss out on some broader horizons along the way. Ben flirted with an interest in film making in college, but I could never get him excited about watching classic directors who defined the visual language of film. He concentrated his film viewing on more popular fan favorites--albeit some of them avant-garde.

If the ease of finding junk food programming on cable prevents them from enjoying the broader range of entertainment I watched with my parents, if they grow up unable to sit through The Music Man or The Maltese Falcon or The Third Man, then my kids will have missed out on some great things. They won't be getting their vegetables from TV like I did.

I had to eat what I was served and I think that has served me well.

Apropos of nothing...

My Scandinavian Name is:

Ulric Loki

What's Your Scandinavian Name?

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear...concluded

Piecing together a listing of all the episodes of a series is a bit like playing Sudoku without having all the clues necessary to solve the problem. Episode listings, or logs as they are called, provide the air-dates and titles of the episodes for a particular series. In the case of the Otter Project Wiki, the existence of recordings and the first line of dialog are also noted when available.

Logs frequently are drawn from radio listings in contemporary newspapers and magazines. Like TV listings today, these are prepared well in advance of the actual air-date and can be full of errors. Scripts and documentation from the production, if available, can augment listings. The most useful information, however, can be found in the recordings themselves. Clues to air-dates can be found in holiday episodes, episodes referencing current events, daily broadcasts mentioning the weekend break, or any sort of internal evidence. While researching The Adventures of Superman, I discovered that the series titled Pan/Am Highway was logged as occurring in November of 1941, but the story opens with Jimmy Olsen trying to enlist in the army and several mentions of the war. This story clearly starts after December 7, 1941. Since the stories for the season run one into the next, the entire 1941 season seems to be logged inaccurately by three or four weeks.

For collectors, confusion in logs also arises from reuse of tiles. Many programs featured sensational sounding titles which, over the course of a long run, might be recycled over and over. The Shadow features a number of recurring tiles in it's log. Two episodes titled "The Creeper" have survived to the present--the earlier, rare Orson Welles episode is greatly sought after by collectors. Logging the first line of episodes gives a fast way of checking recordings that might otherwise be confused by fans.

To add another wrinkle to the problem, there are a number of examples of rebroadcast of episodes with slight content changes. The Shadow had a number of episodes packaged for syndication with canned dramatic music added to make the adventures more in keeping with the new era. This helped preserve some of the original broadcasts, although the format is somewhat strange sounding. To add more confusion, The Shadow's popularity inspired an Australian version of the program recorded from US scripts, sometimes using new titles...sometimes not. And a number of fan recordings have surfaced recreating lost episodes from recovered original scripts, causing confusion on the secondary market. Caveat emptor...

***

As a post script to my last blog, it's worth mentioning that in the 1940s radio transcription moved to magnetic wire and later reel to reel tape, which was cheaper and could withstand multiple playbacks without loss of sound quality. Bing Crosby was a pioneer of tape technology on his radio show in the 1950s. Sadly for OTR fans, this format was also reusable, causing programs to be lost to erasure. Magnetic recording also has less fidelity over long periods of time. The Shadow's final cast features the returning Bret Morrison teamed with Gertrude Wilson, who was with the show for six years--the longest running Margot Lane of the series. Ironically, despite her long run, only one of her performances has survived, "The Vengeance of Angela Noland." The sound quality is so muffled that it is barely audible.

Next, I'll be blogging about The Shadow, which is the topic I set out to discuss when I allowed myself to get side tracked to radio trivia land.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear...continued

Old time radio is a part of our pop culture history which, where it has been preserved at all, has been preserved largely accidentally. No one working in the medium intended that it be preserved, any more than actors in any live show expect that performance to last beyond the curtain call. Despite radio being the most disposable form of entertainment of it's time, a large body of radio performances have survived. The reason requires a little understanding of radio history.

Most radio programming for the United States originated on the east coast, primarily in New York City. There was an abundance of talent in New York theater to draw upon. Getting programming out to the rest of the country was a bit of a problem in the 1920's, however. Without satellites or elaborate cable systems for competitors to transmit signals cross country, AT&T enjoyed a technological edge as an early radio network pioneer. Using their monopoly on phone lines (did I mention there used to be just one phone company, kids?) they were able to shut out rivals from transmitting programs to affiliates via telephone. Competitors like RCA (Radio Corporation of America--formed by radio manufacturers GE and Westinghouse to promote radio ownership) had to make do with telegraph wires, shortwave or relay transmissions, all of which resulted in poor sound quality for network programming.

In 1926, AT&T got bored with the network radio biz and sold their interest to rival RCA, putting them in charge of two networks under the new NBC banner, the Red and the Blue (later split off as ABC.) AT&T phone lines were leased by the new company, opening up "transcription by wire" to affiliates across the nation. Soon CBS and the Midwest based Mutual Network would join the transcription parade.

So how did it work? Programs were performed live in recording studios, frequently in front of an audience. The performance would go our over phone lines to the members of the network, with regional commercial programming often performed live during the show in multiple recording booths off the main sound-stage. On the receiving end of these phone lines, transcription discs would be recorded--typically on 16" aluminum platters. These records would then be played back at the appropriate time by the local station. It is these platters, intended originally for one time use, that would give birth to the rerun, and allow radio programs to survive to the present time...in some cases.

I recently worked on cataloging the early episodes of the Adventures of Superman, which ran every weekday for much of it's history. From its premier in February 1940 to August of 1942, we have an unbroken run of 325 episodes of this program. But there are less than 100 episodes scattered throughout the rest of the War years (1944 yields only four disconnected fragments). Aluminum became a valuable wartime commodity and radio programs began to be transcribed on glass--with predictable results for posterity. We are lucky to have the unbroken chain of early episodes, as scrap drives started to claim existing aluminum discs from 1942 onward.

Making sense of what's left can be challenge in it's own right--but that's another blog.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear...

My fascination with old time radio began with a couple of 1960s albums of my brother's featuring Flash Gordon and The Shadow. Both featured performers who made the characters famous, Buster Crabbe playing Gordon, and Brett Morrison (the longest running Shadow actor) recreating his radio role in "The Computer Calculates; but The Shadow Knows!" and "The Air Freight Fracas." Soon I was collecting radio sets on LP, starting with the Green Hornet and Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson need no introduction. Although other actors would play the characters before and after them, they were portrayed through most of their radio history by screen actors Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Petri Wine, later the cornerstone on which Allied Grape Growers was built, was the sponsor for much of the run, with Dr. Watson touting the benefits of the wine during breaks from his narrative. The announcer would chime in "Petri wine is GOOD wine, and I really mean it!" (Marketing genius, that.) The stories were occasionally adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle originals, but usually were written for the show, with varying degrees of success. Most of the Rathbone/Bruce series was broadcast on the Mutual Network, which was responsible for many of the great radio shows I'll be writing about. Mutual died a slow death, finally fading away in 1999.

The Green Hornet was the creation of George W. Trendle, best remembered as co-creator of the Lone Ranger. In fact, the Hornet was basically an updated version of the masked rider of the plains. The Green Hornet was actually Britt Reid, grand nephew of the Lone Ranger (Britt's father, Dan, actually figured into some of the Lone Ranger stories). He was aided by his Japanese (but after Pearl Harbor, Filipino) chauffeur Kato, who played the Tonto role. The announcer would explain each week that the Green Hornet "hunts the biggest of all game, public enemies even the G-Men cannot touch!" but with the start of the war this also changed to "public enemies who try to destroy OUR America!" Growing up in the post McCarthy era, the phrase "Our America" always amused me, and while I suppose it was all part of the wartime excitement, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. Instead of a white horse named Silver, a custom car named the Black Beauty was the Hornet's ride. The Green Hornet was another Mutual show. The Green Hornet also made the leap to film serial in the 1940s and TV in the 1960s.

It was the Green Hornet, along with The Shadow (the The is part of the name and apparently ranks capitalization) who defined my sense of old time radio. They were characters contemporary to their time and conveyed a sense of the era to me. My interest in them would translate directly to my reading pulp fiction of the era, most notably Doc Savage, and would provide the subject matter for many of my professional illustrations. Recently, I've returned to my radio roots by doing volunteer work for the Superman OTR Project Wiki, which I'll talk about sometime soon.

So tune in tomorrow for another thrilling adventure...

Letters from Yokkaichi

We spoke to Ben via Skype for about an hour this morning. He's adjusting to the jet lag and enjoying night again after his long trip. Life in a small Japanese city is taxing his language and bicycle riding skills. Despite this, he has managed to get his residency papers filed, open a bank account, sign up for cell phone service (with a third generation tech phone that has a bar code scanner that connects your phone to the web for product information while you shop) and, of course, hook up Internet service.

Ben has posted photos of his apartment, complete with a shot of his combo sink and toilet (oh, those Japanese!) at http://picasaweb.google.com/bentyndall/Yokkaichi

Ben's roommate Ross has been there a bit longer and has shots of the area around them...including the worlds largest carrots: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=35147249

Now I just need a webcam to broadcast shots back.