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.

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...