The Old Gold Comedy Theatre (or, as it was announced on air, "Comedy Theatre") was an anthology series heard on NBC Blue from October 29, 1944 to June 10, 1945. Like many 1940s anthologies (like Academy Award Theater, Lux Radio Theater and Screen Directors' Playhouse) it featured adaptations of popular films, truncated to fit a half-hour timeslot.
What makes The Old Gold Comedy Theatre stand apart is that it only featured adaptations of comedy films and it was hosted by the legendary Hollywood silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, who hadn't been involved in radio until the series launched (it's listed on some websites as Harold Lloyd Comedy Theatre). Lloyd would appear at the intro, half-way point (participating in the commercial) and at the close, engaging in banter with the program's guest stars. They even adapted one of his films, "The Milky Way" (February 18, 1945).
Many of the adapted films were popular choices on radio, like "Bachelor Mother," "My Favorite Wife" and "June Moon" but there are some great less-common comedy stories like "The Lady Eve" and "Vivacious Lady." My personal favourite is "True to Life" (November 12, 1944) with Dick Powell.
You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers' collection of Old Gold Comedy Theatre episodes with the YouTube playlist below:
Exploring Tomorrow was a latter-day half-hour science fiction program heard on Mutual from December 4, 1957 to June 13, 1958, just as the program X Minus One was wrapping up at NBC. Like X Minus One's predecesor, Dimension X, it was affiliated with the magazine Astounding Science Fiction; unlike Dimension X, it featured active collaboration with the magazine as editor John W. Campbell hosted every episode (which he'd previously done for the short-lived Beyond Tomorrow)!
Exploring Tomorrow has two faults; radio being what it was at the time, it's a very truncated series (episodes tend to run about 15-18 minutes) so the drama is sped through very quickly. The other is the aforementioned Campbell. He considered himself the gatekeeper of science fiction, the tastemaker of the genre, but the man had no talent for dramatics. His unprofessional murmured introductions and outros (while "As Time Goes By" played in the background) really bring down Exploring Tomorrow; as an east coast Mutual program, the actual performances came from the same sort of east coast talent heard on shows like the Mysterious Traveler such as Larry Haines, Mason Adams, Maurice Tarplin, and Lawson Zerbe.
Stories on Exploring Tomorrow came from Astounding and included authors like Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Gordon Dickson, Philip K. Dick, Murray Leinster and Poul Anderson. Unlike X Minus One, there were no original stories.
X Minus One often had a very whimsical tone, particularly in its stories adapted from Robert Sheckley and the original scripts by Ernest Kinoy. Exploring Tomorrow, being so closely associated with Campbell, had that same Campbellian starchiness. There's precious little light-hearted content - Exploring Tomorrow took itself very seriously. There were even some barbed references to inhuman aliens called "Kinoys" in the episode "The Decision!" Campbell was unkind to people he saw as "outsiders" to the genre (such as Kinoy) dabbling in science fiction and all evidence suggests the majority of science fiction prose writers of the 50s were likewise very hostile towards radio and television people writing in the genre. Note the advertisement above, from an issue of Astounding, with its contempt towards "1930s style BEM's and ray-guns-cum-spaceships!"
Of interest is that Exploring Tomorrow featured its own adaptation of Tom Godwin's "Cold Equations," which did, after all, originate in Astounding. It's a very good adaptation, although I prefer the performances in the X Minus One version.
The first time I heard Exploring Tomorrow it was presented on my local radio station (QR77) as an episode of X Minus One, even though it still had Campbell's mumbled speeches (I didn't know what to make of Campbell's intro and outro - I assumed it was some disc jockey who talked over the original X Minus One intro and outro). The episode was "The Convict" and I wondered then why it sounded so unlike every other X Minus One I'd heard! On the other hand, "The First Men on the Moon" (January 22, 1958) featured a rocket blast that reused the introduction heard on X Minus One! Someone in the sound booth was having fun.
I do like the episode "The Mimic" (by Robert Silverberg) about an extraterrestrial who absorbs other people into its collective - it's a pretty good horror story.
Exploring Tomorrow's brief radio run had nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the diminishing stature of radio drama; when Mutual cancelled the series, it was nothing personal - they were also cancelling the entirety of their dramatic fare on radio!
You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers' collection of Exploring Tomorrow episodes with the YouTube playlist below:
"Another transcribed adventure of the man with the action-packed expense account, America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar!"
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a detective series that ran over CBS from February 11, 1949 until September 30, 1962. It was one of the very last old-time radio shows, ceasing its broadcast run on the same night CBS cancelled Suspense. The role of Johnny Dollar was played by Charles Russell (1949-1950), Edmond O'Brien (1950-1952), John Lund (1952-1954), Bob Bailey (1955-1960; also known for Let George Do It), Bob Readick (1960-1961) and Mandel Kramer (1961-1962). However, it should be stated up front that of them all, Bob Bailey not only had the longest-run, but today, his episodes continue to be the most thoroughly circulated among all episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; to many fans, Bob Bailey is Johnny Dollar.
In every iteration, Johnny Dollar was an insurance investigator working out of Hartford, Connecticut, who would be sent by insurance companies to investigate their clients' insurance claims. This would involve an element of mystery and usually some danger as Johnny would inevitably find someone trying to steal or destroy an insured item, kill an insured person, or commit insurance fraud. The stories were narrated by Johnny as he indicated the various expenses he incurred on his account. In the early years, he sometimes traveled to investigate clients in exotic locales in Europe, Asia or the Caribbean; but usually, he was stateside. Initially, his tagline "yours truly" came with an implied question mark and his employers would complain about how he'd pad his expense account; that was dropped in time as Johnny became increasingly virtuous; by the time of Bob Bailey, his integrity was unassailable.
An audition program from December 7, 1948 still exists but although the script would turn up on the eventual series, the production is quite different from the eventual series; it was produced by Anton M. Leader (Words at War, Murder at Midnight, Suspense) and starred Dick Powell (who was in between Rogue's Gallery and Richard Diamond, Private Detective at the time)! It's even more surreal hearing Bob Bailey as the bad guy in the 2nd version of the pilot (which was Charles Russell's audition)! Leader didn't stick around past the original pilot, with Richard Sanville producing the series in its early days.
Richard Diamond seemed to haunt the series at times; in "Murder Ain't Minor" (August 7, 1949), Dollar quipped to his client, "There's any number of good licensed private detectives that you could have gone to: Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Richard Diamond-- and he would not only have solved your case he would also sing you a song; why did you come to me?" In a final, strange connection, a script from Richard Diamond, Private Detective was recycled with Johnny Dollar as "The Shayne Bombing Matter" (July 14, 1953)!
The series was sustained by CBS for most of its run but Wrigley's served as their sponsor from 1950-1954.
Early episodes had very typical titles but as of "The Abel Tackett Matter" (May 2, 1950) the series set itself apart from others by using "Matter" in the title of every episode. At times in the John Lund era the show would play like a police procedural; "The Dameron Matter" (April 21, 1953) for example, featured Johnny working alongside the police to solve a crime connected to his insurance company.
Music in early episodes was by Leith Stevens, who was also scoring Escape at the time - and indeed, the two shows had very similar organ music then. Wilbur Hatch took over the music when it shifted away from the organ to orchestral; music was mostly canned by 1955 but the series did at least have its own unique music bridges and themes (unlike NBC where every dramatic show used the same music library).
Bob Bailey's initial tenure on the series saw a switch from the half-hour format to a 15-minute Monday-Friday format in 1955. In this era, Johnny would usually solve a single case over 5 days (but some cases ran into 2 weeks). The serialized Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar is probably the most-beloved version of the series (it was my introduction to the program) and these days some fans have edited them into uninterrupted dramas that run about 1 hour each. But this format change only lasted for a year before reverting to the half-hour version.
The Bob Bailey years also included the one time Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar featured a guest star - Vincent Price, who portrayed himself as Johnny's client in "The Price of Fame Matter" (February 2, 1958). It's a fun episode for us Vincent Price fans. On the completion of Bailey's fifth year as Johnny Dollar the program celebrated with "The Five Down Matter" (September 25, 1960), with appearances by most of Johnny's supporting characters.
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar didn't have a supporting cast in the way most detective programs did. There were all sorts of recurring characters but they didn't appear in every episode; in the Bailey years, Johnny had a girlfriend, Betty Lewis (Virginia Gregg, who previously starred opposite Bailey on Let George Do It), but she only appeared when it suited the plot. Similarly, Johnny had all sorts of insurance company representatives who would send him on his assignments, such as Pat McCracken (usually played by Lawrence Dobkin), but as Johnny was a freelancer he took his assignments from a variety of different companies. There were recurring clients as well, such as the wealthy eccentric Alvin Cartwright (Howard McNear).
The series was produced in Hollywood until 1960, when it moved to New York (costing them Bailey as their lead). It had benefited from CBS' terrific cast of Hollywood radio regulars, including William Conrad, Lawrence Dobkin, Parley Baer, John Dehner, Georgia Ellis, Virginia Gregg, Joseph Kearns, Howard McNear and Raymond Burr. In New York, it drew from the likes of Jackson Beck, Santos Ortega, William Redfield, Raymond Edward Johnson, Luis Van Rooten and Maurice Tarplin -- the same voices heard on Suspense in its own twilight years.
I count myself as a typical Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar fan in that I prefer the Bob Bailey years. The Edmund O'Brien years have some interest, particularly as they have longer stories (the Baily half-hours used lots of commercials), but I don't have much interest in the New York years - I found Mandel Kramer in particular to be an uninteresting Johnny Dollar.
The Old Time Radio Researchers have a YouTube playlist containing 721 episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar! It includes all the audition recordings and, where the broadcast versions haven't been found uses what are clearly rehearsal versions (particularly in the Edmond O'Brien era).
"Dead men's wills are often strange; we cannot attempt to understand them, or try to find the answers; we can but tell the story."
Strange Wills was a syndicated program from Teleways that was hosted by Warren William. It was apparently aired from June 8-December 7, 1946. The show was produced by Robert Webster Light, directed by Albert Ulrich and featured the music of Del Castillo (of Escape).
Warren William had a long career in films that mostly peaked in the 1930s; I thought he was great in Employees' Entrance. He mostly starred in Warner Bros. films and played a lot of detectives, including Perry Mason, Philo Vance, the Lone Wolf and, uh, the not-Sam Spade in Satan Met a Lady.
Some of the dramas were the story of how an unusual will was written, with the will not entering the drama until the climax. In others, the will's reading would set off the drama as the inciting incident. Frequently, the emphasis of Strange Wills was on romance, only occasionally on mystery or thrills.
The episode "Madman's Diary" (August 17, 1946) features the diary of a scientist who claimed he could send people's minds backwards in time to their past lives; it plays out like an episode of the Mysterious Traveler -- it's nothing like the rest of the show!
Warren William usually portrayed a character in the drama in addition to his role as narrator; the cast included the likes of William Conrad, Lurene Tuttle, Howard Culver and Peggy Webber.
Strange Wills is a bit of odd fare; if you want to experience something well-made but off-the-wall, it might fit the bill.
You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers' collection of Strange Wills episodes with the YouTube playlist below; it opens with the show's audition and pitch, which features a variety of clips from episodes:
