Showing results by author "Radio Shows of the Past!" in All Categories

Ray Bradbury’s stories lend themselves well to radio, so it’s no surprise that there have been so many adaptations over the years — some adapted by Bradbury himself. Radio also played a pivotal role in Bradbury’s development as a writer early in his career.

The Twilight Zone is a nationally syndicated radio drama series featuring radio play adaptations of the classic 1959–1964 television series The Twilight Zone. The series was produced for the British digital radio station BBC Radio 4 Extra airing for 176 episodes between October 2002 and 2012. In the United States, it aired on nearly 200 radio stations including WCCO, KSL, KOA, WIND, XM Satellite Radio channel 163 and Sirius XM Book Radio.Most of the stations aired two episodes each week, usually on the weekends and many times back to back.Many of the stories are based on Rod Serling's ...

Blackstone, the Magic Detective was a 15-minute radio series based on Elmer Cecil Stoner's comic book series Blackstone, Master Magician. The program aired Sunday afternoons at 2:45pm on the Mutual Broadcasting System from October 3, 1948, until March 26, 1950.Radio.Starring Edwin Jerome as "the world's greatest living magician," the radio series was based on real-life magician Harry Blackstone, Sr.The series was announced by Don Hancock from October 1948 through June 1949, and Alan Kent from July 1949 through to the end of the series in March, 1950. The background organ music was ...

"The Haunted Crossroads" was a horror radio show that aired in 1932, likely as part of a larger series called "The Witch's Tale" which was known for its spooky, supernatural stories; "The Haunted Crossroads" would have been one episode within that series, featuring a narrative centered around a haunted intersection. Key points about "The Haunted Crossroads":Part of "The Witch's Tale":This episode was most likely part of the "The Witch's Tale" radio show, which ran from 1931 to 1938 and was known for its eerie, supernatural themes.Genre:Horror fiction, focusing on a spooky story centered ...

The English-language propaganda radio programme Germany Calling was broadcast to audiences in the United Kingdom on the medium wave station Reichssender Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States. The programme began on 18 September 1939 and continued until 30 April 1945, when the British Army overran Hamburg. The next scheduled broadcast was made by Horst Pinschewer (also known as Geoffrey Perry), a German-Jewish refugee serving in the British Army who announced the British takeover. Pinschewer was later responsible for the capture of William Joyce.Through such broadcasts, the ...

Nelson Olmsted was one of the last great radio horror performers. Born Leroy Nelson Olmsted, Jr. on January 28, 1914 in Minnesota, he was raised in Texas, where he became an announcer for local radio stations. For the album notes on his Sleep No More album, he offered a bit of biography:“By the time I moved to WBAP in Ft. Worth... the announcer's life seemed endlessly sterile.What to do about it? Dramatic shows cost money and there were no budgets. The cheapest drama for radio I could think of was good literature, read aloud. Especially the work of that great dramatist who never wrote a play...

A radio dramatization of the original Star Wars film trilogy was produced in 1981, 1983, and 1996. The first two radio series, based on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, were produced and broadcast by National Public Radio (NPR) as part of NPR Playhouse. A dramatization of Return of the Jedi was produced by most of the same team and it was also broadcast on NPR.The radio serials were made with the full cooperation of George Lucas, who, in exchange for a dollar each, sold the rights to KUSC-FM, the public radio affiliate at his alma mater, the University of Southern ...

Dragnet was an American radio series, enacting the cases of a dedicated Los Angeles police detective, Sergeant Joe Friday, and his partners. The show took its name from the police term "dragnet", meaning a system of coordinated measures for apprehending criminals or suspects.Dragnet is perhaps the most famous and influential police procedural drama in media history. The series gave audience members a feel for the boredom and drudgery, as well as the danger and heroism, of police work. Dragnet earned praise for improving the public opinion of police officers.[1]Actor and producer Jack Webb's ...

CBS Radio Mystery Theater (a.k.a. Radio Mystery Theater and Mystery Theater, sometimes abbreviated as CBSRMT) is a radio drama series created by Himan Brown that was broadcast on CBS Radio Network affiliates from 1974 to 1982, and later in the early 2000s was repeated by the NPR satellite feed.The format was similar to that of classic old time radio shows like The Mysterious Traveler and The Whistler, in that the episodes were introduced by host E. G. Marshall who provided pithy wisdom and commentary throughout.Unlike the hosts of those earlier programs, Marshall is fully ...

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.At age 21, Welles was directing high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theatre Project in New York City—starting with a celebrated 1936 adaptation of Macbeth with an African-American cast, and ending with the controversial labor opera The Cradle Will Rock in 1937. He and John Houseman then founded the Mercury Theatre...

Bob Hope was a classic entertainer and his shows are still hilarious today. It's great to hear the ones where he's entertaining the troops during World War 2 as well.

Dangerously Yours was a half hour show sponsored by Vicks. There were sixteen episodes broadcast in 1944, with eleven of them available to collectors today. Each episode seemed to star Victor Jory as the leading man, and concentrated heavily on romance, with much airtime being devoted to lovers murmuring sweet nothings at each other, and the action and adventure being relegated to backdrop status. At the end of each episode, the announcer would give a very brief teaser for the following week's show.

The 15-minute continuing series Perry Mason aired weekdays October 18, 1943 – December 30, 1955, on CBS Radio. Geared more towards action than courtroom drama, it mixed mystery and soap opera, with attorney Perry Mason sometimes even exchanging gunfire with criminals.Erle Stanley Gardner's literary success with the Perry Mason novels convinced Warner Bros. to try its hand, unsuccessfully, with some motion pictures. However, the Perry Mason radio show stayed on the air for 12 years.As The Edge of Night, it ran for another 30 years on television, but Gardner disliked the proposed daytime ...

a police-based dramatic crime anthology, ran from 1935-1957 and focused on dramatizing crimes from police files. The show also broadcast alerts, known as Gang Buster Clues, of suspects wanted by police around the country. Sadly only a limited number of episodes are known to survive. The dates, episode numbers and titles are believed to be correct based on available information, but any corrections are welcome.

In the fall of 1933, NBC writer Wyllis Cooper conceived the idea of "a midnight mystery serial to catch the attention of the listeners at the witching hour." The idea was to offer listeners a dramatic program late at night, at a time when the competition was mostly airing music. At some point, the serial concept was dropped in favor of an anthology format emphasizing crime thrillers and the supernatural. The first series of shows (each 15 minutes long) ran on a local NBC station, WENR, at midnight Wednesdays, starting in January 1934. By April, the series proved successful enough to ...

The Man Called X is an espionage radio drama that aired on CBS and NBC from July 10, 1944, to May 20, 1952. The radio series was later adapted for television and was broadcast for one season, 1956–1957.Herbert Marshall had the lead role of agent Ken Thurston/"Mr. X", an American intelligence agent[2] who took on dangerous cases in a variety of exotic locations. Leon Belasco played Mr. X's comedic sidekick, Pegon Zellschmidt, who always turned up in remote parts of the world because he had a "cousin" there. Zellschmidt annoyed and helped Mr. X.Jack Latham was an announcer for the program...

One of the longest running young-adult-oriented old radio shows during the golden age of radio was the widely popular "Dick Tracy." The series aired over a period of 14 years, from 1934 - 1948, and was based on a newspaper comic strip. This juvenile police detective radio program began as a 15-minute show which was later extended to a full 30-minutes due to popular demand.The series’ central theme was crime-fighting taken to a higher level by the many mind boggling plot twists the shows writer’s came up with. What set Dick Tracy apart from other old time radio serializations was his use of...

The Six Shooter is a United States Western old-time radio program starring James Stewart as a gunfighter. It was created by Frank Burt, who also wrote many of the episodes, and lasted only one season of 39 episodes on NBC (Sept. 20, 1953–June 24, 1954). Initially, it was broadcast on Sundays at 9:30 pm Eastern Time, through October 11. Then it was heard at 8:30 pm for three weeks. Finally, on November 8, 1953, through March 21, 1954, it was broadcast Sundays at 8 pm; beginning April 1, 1954, through the final episode, it was on Thursdays at 8:30 pm. One old-time radio directory called the ...

Fu Manchu (Harold Huber) was a diabolical criminal mastermind. British official Nayland Smith (Hanley Stafford), assisted by Dr. Petrie (Gale Gordon), set out to stop Fu Manchu at any cost. In Radio Crime Fighters (2002), Jim Cox wrote:The plots of Rohmer's insidious figure and Smith and Petrie's attempts to thwart the archenemy formed a repetitive theme in the storyline.A stunningly exotic Karamaneh became the slave girl of the evil doctor; an objective of the combatants was to secure her release. The series, though brief, is memorable, and focused on one of the most effective villains to...

The period 1948-1950 brought major changes to network radio, as CBS hired a number of stars from NBC in what some have called "talent raids". Some of the top performers who changed networks were Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Edgar Bergen, and the husband-and-wife duo George Burns and Gracie Allen. One result of the changes was that 12 of the 15 highest-rated radio programs at the end of 1949 were on CBS. Harold Peary did not find such success, however. Peary switched to CBS, while the program in which he had starred, The Great Gildersleeve, stayed on NBC. Those changes resulted in a new ...