Best radio dramas, past and present(?)

Gunsmoke began as a radio drama and kicked arse.

Old time radio is available all over the internet. There are podcasts of everything. It's especially great to get them with the vintage ads.

USA Today article from a couple of years ago. For anyone interested in learning about Old Time radio it's not a bad place to start.

The web’s best kept secret? Free classic radio dramas

quote:

---

If you’re looking to fill up your smartphone, tablet or laptop with great content, there’s a lot more than just music, videos, ebooks, and games. Without costing a dime, there are many tens of thousands of “old time radio” shows – from the golden age of radio – available for streaming or downloading.

You might be asking yourself “Why would a future-looking technology journalist want to fill up his phone with radio dramas popularized in the ‘40s and ‘50s?” Yes, I see the irony. But you’d be pleasantly surprised at how entertaining these are – and they’ve kept me sane while commuting in a car or resting my eyes on a plane. Or, in many instances, I'm playing a game on my phone or tablet while listening to these shows at the same time.

These bite-sized old-time radio (“OTR”) shows are typically 20- to 40-minutes in length. We’re not talking audiobooks here, which are typically narrated by one person, but rather, these are well-acted radio plays, often with music and sound effects. Because you're using your imagination to "see" the characters, environments and actions, these shows feel wonderfully intimate and personal.

---

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

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.

Old Time Radio Network

Old Radio World

quote:

---

Phillip Marlowe is good also

---

DL Philip Marlowe episodes here

This series is probably the closest any medium ever came to the Marlowe of the novels. Even Raymond Chandler himself didn't completely hate it.

The highlights of the show -- in particular the early episodes -- are absolutely the opening and closing narrations. Some of them are classics. The great episode "Red Wind" opens with the famous description of L.A. nighttime taken directly from Chandlers story:

"There was a rough desert wind blowing into Los Angeles that evening. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anna winds that comes down out of the mountain passes... On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight, and meek little housewives finger the edge of a carving knife and study their husband's necks. Anything can happen when the Santa Anna blows in from the desert."

The plots are generally not so hot -- they invariably hinge on Marlowe spotting something which the audience can't see (obviously) and only explaining how he figured it out in the tag. But with only 30 minutes of show they clearly had to decide between Agatha Christie plotting and Chandler ambience. Fortunately they chose the latter.

The show is definitely a buried noir treasure. Maybe someday it will be rediscovered.

Lucille Fletcher, the Queen of Radio Suspense:



She wrote what Orson Welles called "The greatest radio play ever written":

"Sorry, Wrong Number"

Agnes Moorehead doing "Sorry, Wrong Number":



A year earlier Fletcher had written an equally superb episode, "The Hitch Hiker", starring Orson Welles in a tour de force performance.

"The Hitch Hiker"

If the story sounds familiar it was later filmed for The Twilight Zone.

Fletcher also wrote a classic "spooky old house" chiller which unfortunately was never filmed. Too bad, as it seems to be crying out for visuals:

"Fugue in C Minor" -- starring Vincent Price

quote:

---

Johnny dollar

---

"Your's truly..Johnny Dollar"! Love when he would do his expense wrap up at the end of every episode.

Also like The Shadow, Our Miss Brooks, and The Rancheros.

The SXFM Radio Classics channel is fantastic and worth my subscription alone.

Oh, as for current or at least contemporary (early 2000s) Try Underwood and Flinch. Its a podcast but done in Classic Radio show style.

Jack Benny & Frank Nelson - "Istanbul, Not Constantinople"

quote:

---

What are some Christmas programs we should check out

---

A classic Christmas episode from the short-lived 1953 series The Six Shooter starring Jimmy Stewart. I can't recall ever hearing this premise used in a western.

"Escape" was a popular 30 minute radio drama and I'm especially fond of 3 episodes -
"A Shipment of Mute Fate", about a deadly viper that gets loose on a ship
LINK

The Country of the Blind",
LINK an adventurer who stumbles upon a jungle tribe who are all blind,


And "Leinengen vs the Ants", about a carribean plantation owner trying to save his spread from a hoard of invading army ants.
LINK

Sirius Radio Classics have aired all three and you can find them online as well. Some of these episodes were remade by other series (Suspense) and also have television versions as well.