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...