"Adventures in time and space told in future tense! Dimension X!"
Tomorrow I'll be looking at X Minus One so I won't get too deeply into that series except to acknowledge that yes, the majority of Dimension X episodes were also dramatized on X Minus One, but the latter program had a shorter running time and would often truncate the Dimension X scripts, even making substantial changes to the climax of "the Veldt," for instance!
Unlike X Minus One, Dimension X (April 1950-September 1951) was sponsored for part of its run by Wheaties. Despite being an NBC series it had unique music that wasn't simply recycled from their library. And it featured a majority of programs that were adapted from recent science fiction publications, sprinkling in a mix of original stories written by NBC staffers (notably Ernest Kinoy).
In 2016 I blogged about Ray Bradbury's radio adaptations for Halloween, including "Kaleidoscope," "the Martian Chronicles," "Marionettes, Inc.," "the Veldt," "There Will Come Soft Rains," "Mars Is Heaven!," "Zero Hour," "And the Moon Be Still as Bright." They also adapted his stories "To the Future" and "Dwellers in Silence" and at that time, Bradbury was one of the biggest and best-known authors of science fiction.
Other famous authors on Dimension X who received great adaptations were Kurt Vonnegut ("the Barnhouse Effect"), Jack Williamson ("With Folded Hands"), Robert Bloch ("Almost Human"), Robert A. Heinlein ("the Green Hills of Earth" and "Requiem"), Murry Leinster ("A Logic Named Joe"), Donald Wollheim ("The Embassy"), H. Beam Piper ("Time and Time Again").
Of the original scripts presented on Dimension X I most enjoyed "Perigi's Wonderful Dolls" (I recently blogged about it here); the space invasion story "No Contact'; the bittersweet "Martian Death March"; and the invasion-in-plain-sight story "The Parade."
Dimension X had a bit of humour in the shows I've listed above ("A Logic Named Joe" is a fairly wry bit of comedy) but not as much as X Minus One would. It was an early entry in the effort to prove adult audiences would listen to science fiction drama so Dimension X took itself fairly seriously; I think that paid off for the series - it still sounds good to this day.
Here's the Old Time Radio Researchers collection of Dimension X on YouTube.
Tomorrow: I fire off X Minus One.
2 comments:
I love this show and I love X-Minus One. The science fiction work per se is increasingly dead. Most of the great works of hard sci-fi involve artificial intelligence and often in ways that seem ominously possible. These shows and Sci-fi 68 and Exploring Tomorrow are about as good as it gets but the latter two have very poor audio quality. You can't just listen in the background; you have to focus but Sci-fi 68 has two or three wondrous episodes that are more moving than anything I have heard on the other shows.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is an all-time classic. Anything by Heinlein or Dick that you can find on OTR tends to be very very good. We Can Get it for you Wholesale is in the implanted memories genre which is a sub-set of AI. 2001 A Space Odyssey is mostly AI-based with some fantasy thrown in.
Most great science fiction has very little to do with science except to use it as a backdrop. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a sci-fi version of Atlas Shrugged.
I enjoy the Martian stories by Bradbury but none of them were remotely geared in science. Most were allegories. And yes, he could be over the top in the Veldt and in the the Zero Hour. The endings ruined these for me by going too far.
Star Wars isn't sci-fi; nor are comic books. is the Foundation? The is another group of books mostly based on AI concepts with some other allegories thrown in.
Virtually all sci-f is too much based on travel and they always imagine a traveling capacity for human beings that is eons of time too large. Humans might make it to a planet or two and the moon but unlike the great episode Shanghaied, we aren't going off on massive trips of emigration to the stars.
The movie the Martian was somewhat focused on science which made it great but it was also highly derivative of Castaway and other desert island books and movies. Humans weigh too much to go flitting about and the idea of pleasure ships as in Star Trek where people march around something akin to a Hilton Hotel or the Love Boat, eh but they are still good shows when they deal with Mr. Data and AI. CBSRMT was very, very poor at science-fiction to the point of being laughable. I am not sure why because the show is top-notch otherwise. X-Minus One has a far better opening theme song than droning Dimension X but I consider them as basically the same anthology show. Any difference in quality is minimal; indeed these two shows in my opinion are among the best anthologies in OTR history. The episode to episode consistency among episodes is extremely high. Not as many stars as Suspense or Escape but I put them above Suspense in episode consistency and equal to Escape which, like X Minus One has an incredibly rousing introductory song. Creme de la creme of OTR history and X Minus One continued almost to the bitter end ending in 1958. I revisit these shows often and they never grow old. The Green Hills of Earth is barely sci-fi and basically a railroad tramp story but what a beautiful episode and the music is haunting. That episode is an all-time OTR classic in story but especially in performance.
Hello Jane,
You're discussing the difference between "hard" and "soft" science fiction. In the 1950s, it was John W. Campbell who was promoting "hard" through writers like Heinlein & Asimov, while Bradbury - who could never get Campbell to buy his stories - fell into the "soft" category. But either way, they're all examples of science fiction, it's just a distinction between natural sciences ("hard") and social sciences ("soft").
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