Lubango Vlog: Reflections

As we leave Angola, my wife and I reflect on our activities and accomplishments of the previous month.

How Not to Hunt Lions

While in Angola I recorded my Uncle Steve delivering his famous "How Not to Hunt a Lion" story. Now you can see it for yourself!

Lubango Vlog: More Junk Food Testing!

My wife and I made another junk food testing video for your enjoyment!

Radio Recap: The Silent Men

The Silent Men was an NBC program that aired for one season from October 14, 1951 to May 28, 1952. The program was hosted and starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Although it was an anthology program, each week Fairbanks portrayed a different character. At least, so he'd claim; all of Fairbanks' protagonists sounded alike, they just had different names and held slightly different jobs. Every episode was about the adventures of a federal agent, all allegedly based on true stories. The series drew on a lot of familiar radio performers, with William Conrad or Paul Frees sometimes appearing as Fairbanks' boss (Conrad would also double as other characters in the same episode).

The Silent Men feels representative of many other law enforcement programs of the early 1950s - programs that were inspired by Dragnet but didn't want to cover the same ground. The Silent Men is especially similar to shows like the FBI in Peace and War and This Is Your FBI, although it featured characters in government services outside of the FBI, such as treasury agents and even the mail!

What holds back the Silent Men is that it's yet another 1950s NBC dramatic show; NBC relied far too much on stock music for all their dramatic shows that resulted in nearly all of them sounding alike (Dimension X and X Minus One were happy contrasts). The music cues are particularly clumsy - they don't punctuate a significant line of dialogue or signal a scene transition - they all have the same weight so therefore nothing is given weight by the music. There aren't that many sound effects employed and although the casts are talented, they're small. Most of the heavy lifting is on Fairbanks as the narrator and star, so if you don't enjoy hearing him talk for 25 minutes, this really isn't a program for you. I found it all right, but it isn't a program to "binge" - simply listen to an episode just now and then.

There are episodes written by some great talent like John and Gwen Bagni but even then... the Bagnis' episode "Blood Money" recycles parts of the script they wrote for the Escape episode "Border Town," suggesting they didn't feel like putting in an effort for the Silent Men.

You can hear the surviving episodes of the Silent Men on the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Library.

Radio Recap: Murder at Midnight

Murder at Midnight was a syndicated mystery anthology program heard from September 16, 1946 until September 8, 1947. It was directed by Anton M. Leader, shortly before he became the director of Suspense and just after working on Words at War.

The program's announcer was Raymond Morgan, who had the unusual background of being a minister who went into show business. He rumbled out the program's title at various points through each episode: "Murderrr! Aaat... Miiidniiight!" In fact, the scripts would often take pains to set events around midnight so that when the announcer interrupted the drama he could remind listeners how near they were to midnight (and whether a murder had happened or was about to happen).

Amazingly, much of the series was recycled from existing scripts. A lot of episodes were reused from Inner Sanctum Mysteries, particularly scripts by Robert Newman and Sigmund Miller. Some of these episodes no longer exist in their Inner Sanctum version, so the Murder at Midnight copies at least give us a performance of the work. Others exist in both forms, such as "Death Across the Board" and "the Dark Chamber."

There's also an episode of Suspense that was recycled on Murder at Midnight - "A Week Ago Wednesday - but the Murder at Midnight version appears to be lost. Most surprising is that many episodes were recycled from the Shadow, meaning they had to edit the character of the Shadow out of the script! You can observe this for yourself if you listen to the Murder at Midnight episode "Trigger Man" and compare it to the Shadow episode "Death Keeps a Deadline."

I've blogged about one episode of Murder at Midnight before -- that would be "the Creeper", the drama of a murderer targeting women. It was first produced on Molle Mystery Theater. Interestingly, some Murder at Midnight episodes were later adapted on Molle Mystery Theater - the episode "Nightmare" became "I Dreamt I Died" (it was also adapted for Murder by Experts).

But amidst all these adaptations there were a number of original scripts. A good chilling episode is "Terror Out of Space" about an extraterrestrial consciousness that possesses a scientist. Or there's "the Heavy Death" about a man who's made himself extremely dense. And there's an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Suicide Club" called "The Ace of Death" that makes a few changes to the story but works pretty well.

I feel Murder at Midnight is of interest primarily to people who like the other shows I've mentioned. If Inner Sanctum Mysteries, the Shadow, Suspense and Molle Mystery Theater are your cup of tea, then you ought to give this series a chance. The program's one great shortcoming is that every episode opens with a brief preview of the upcoming drama, sometimes giving away part of the story's climax! It's a very bad idea and ruins some of the suspense.

You can hear Murder at Midnight using this YouTube playlist created by the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Group.

Radio Recap: Police Reporter

Police Reporter was a 15-minute syndicated program that appears to date back to 1933. It featured dramatizations of what were all apparently true-life crime cases.

There are plenty of other programs about true-life cases, but what sets Police Reporter apart is that the cases were frequently gruesome. There are some infamous true crime stories like that of the "Vampire of Dusseldorf and Burke and Hare and they retain a lot of details that later programs such as the Black Museum would never speak of. Easily the biggest departure from what you're used to in radio violence is the episode "A Gruesome Murder," which is exactly what it says on the tin.

The 15-minute running time keeps every episode of Police Reporter very brisk and easy to listen to, even when the crimes themselves are quite awful. There's little time devoted to thinking and pondering the clues to solving a crime, instead every scene is driven by incident and the dialogue is snapped out by the actors with urgency. If you're a fan of Rick Geary's Treasury of XXth Century Murder graphic novel series, you'll probably really like this radio program.

You can hear the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Group collection of Police Reporter on the Internet Archive.

Lubango Vlog: Mural Painting, Days 6-8

Here are 3 days' worth of my wife and I making progress in the CEML mural repair!