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...

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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.