re: Audio Dramas With Full Cast

quote:

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old radio shows
do not sound interesting to me at all

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Do you like The Twilight Zone?



Dimension X

Dimension X ran on NBC 1950-1. The show was later retooled as X Minus 1 in 1955-8. They dramatized stories from the pulp SF "golden age" of the 1940s by writers like Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein etc.

While there are plenty of rocketmen and space travel stories, the most interesting episodes IMHO are those that prefigure the classic "The Twilight Zone" situation -- ordinary people caught up in fantastic situations. Stephen King once commented that Richard Matheson took horror out of the gothic mansion and let it happen anywhere, even the minimart down the street. That's what these shows helped do for SF -- although Twilight Zone would get the credit. I wonder how often Rod Serling listened to them.

Dimension X

"Kaleidoscope" - Bradbury

"To The Future" - Bradbury

"Mars Is Heaven" - Bradbury

"Dwellers In Silence" - Bradbury

"Dr. Grimshaw's Sanitorium"- I can't believe they got away with this ending in 1950.

X Minus 1



"Zero Hour" - Bradbury (notice a pattern here?). The ending is a masterpiece.

"The Last Martian" - Fredric Brown. This was later filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents starring Steve McQueen. IMHO this radio version is superior.

"Hostess" - Asimov

"The Cold Equations"

"Venus Is A Man's World" - not all that great an episode, but a fascinatingly prescient satire on feminism (from 1957!)

X Minus 1 also did two stories by a very young, little-known writer named Philip K Dick, "Colony" and "The Defenders". They're nothing special, although "The Defenders" is not a bad cold war allegory -- apparently a frequently-used device in SF of this period, at least judging by these two series.

Do you like Alfred Hitchcock Presents?

Suspense is essentially the radio version of AHP (Hitchcock himself directed the pilot). Suspense ran for 20 years (over 900 episodes!) and produced numerous classics such as Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number" (which Orson Welles called "the greatest radio play ever written) and "The Hitch Hiker" (starring Welles, later filmed for Twilight Zone).

Fletcher also wrote a brilliant "spooky old house" chiller, "Fugue In C Minor" (starring Vincent Price), which unfortunately was never filmed. Too bad, as it seems to be crying out for visuals.