Halloween Radio Recap #3: Lights Out

"It... is... later... than... you... think...
Lights Out brings you stories of the supernatural and the supernormal, dramatizing the fantasies and the mysteries of the unknown; we tell you this frankly, so if you wish to avoid the excitement and tension of these imaginative plays, we urge you calmly, but sincerely, to turn off your radio... now."

Lights Out wasn't the first radio horror program - it had been preceded by the likes of The Witch's Tale - but it offered a new level of sophistication with an emphasis on sound effects and an isolating, first-person perspective to heighten the sense of danger around the show's cast. It originated on January 1, 1934 under the eye of Wyllis Cooper, who remained with the series up until 1936 when he moved on to Hollywood (a career move he later bitterly regretted).

Arch Oboler took over the series for the rest of its initial run in 1936-1939 and quickly made it his own; Oboler ran a 1942-1943 revival on CBS by sponsor Ironized Yeast and most of the surviving episodes of the show are from that era (many scripts from that era had been first performed during Oboler's 1936-1939 run). The show had brief summer revivals on NBC and ABC from 1945-1947, mostly featuring recreations from Cooper's 1934-1936 tenure. Much later, Oboler recirculated his shows with new introductions in the 1970s as The Devil and Mr. O; Oboler also produced a 1962 record called Drop Dead which featured recreations of old Lights Out scripts.

Scholarship on Lights Out is much better now than it was when I first got into old-time radio; many people simply called Lights Out as a show "created by Arch Oboler," ignoring Cooper entirely. There was also a lot of confusion around the series Arch Oboler's Plays, where fans circulated episodes from that series as episodes of Lights Out. Further, because scripts were recycled and recirculated so many times, figuring out when a recording originated has been an error-filled process - but, as I say, current scholarship has been fixing many decades-old errors.

We still have comparatively little of the show's history; those few examples of Wyllis Cooper's scripts (and the high quality of Cooper's work on his later show Quiet, Please) suggest there are many lost treasures in the show's earliest years. But Arch Oboler's particular talents were well-employed on Lights Out; he loved stream-of-consciousness storytelling, which was extremely effective on a horror series. Many of his dramas featured characters succumbing to delusions, repeating words ("got to get away... got to get away...") and a particular penchance for anti-fascism sentiment. While it means you pick up on Oboler's idiosyncracies quickly, when the man delivered a frightening scenario, the show delivered on chills.

Part of what set Lights Out apart from what came before - and much of what would come - was the lack of a horror host. There was no "Old Nancy" like on The Witch's Tale. The nearest the series came to such a host was Arch Oboler himself during the 1942-1943 series, in which he'd make banter with the announcer before, mid-drama and after. Of course, sometimes Oboler's remarks were there to reinforce the story's themes; I guess it's possible Oboler occasionally went over his audience's heads. Both Cooper and Oboler also enjoyed getting a bit meta, as Cooper's "Coffin in Studio B" and Oboler's "Murder in the Script Department" and "The Author and the Thing" are all examples of stories set during the production of Lights Out in which horror is visited upon the show's creative staff.

Beyond the lack of a horror host, the menace on Lights Out tended to be more subtle than on other horror shows. Often the creatures on the show didn't speak at all (such as on "Visitor from Hades"); in other instances, the point-of-view character is trapped somewhere and is driven insane while trying to escape ("Murder in the Script Department"). There were plenty of monsters on Lights Out - even the Devil himself a couple of times - but the terror tended to be psychological. In that way, Lights Out helped set the stage for television's The Twilight Zone.

I've recommended many episodes of Lights Out over the years and I can easily say, "just liten to them all." That is, if you like horror on radio, listen to them all! I most enjoyed Oboler's stories "It Happened," "Poltergeist," "Mungahra," "Come to the Bank," "Knock at the Door," "Meteor Man," "The Fast One," "Spider," "Bathysphere," "Murder Castle," "State Executioner" and "The Author and the Thing." From what we have of the Cooper era, the Boris Karloff episode "Death Robbery" is dynamite.

I've also blogged about an unusual episode of Lights Out that was re-dramatized on the Shadow in this blog post, and I blogged about the rare comic book adaptations of Lights Out in this blog post. I also had some thoughts about his story "Across the Gap" as an anti-fascism allegory in this blog post.

Lights Out had a TV show from 1949-1952 and a surprisingly large number of them are available - they're easily found on YouTube. Although the TV series had some adaptations from Cooper's radio work, there was just one adaptation of Oboler's work - Oboler hated television.

You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers Group's collection of 65 Lights Out episodes at this link.

Next Thursday: Quiet, Please!

Celebrating Jim Starlin on the Marvel Appendix!

It's Jim Starlin's birthday today and to celebrate, I wrote up a number of characters and items he co-created on the Marvel Appendix. Happy birthday, Mr. Starlin!

Barry Starr (Spider-Man character)
Laura Warmer (horror character)
Unisphere (Thanos device)
Thanos-Thralls (Thanos’ army of lackeys)
Captain Styx (Thanos-Thralls)
Sally (friend of the Cat)
Madame Renour (Nick Fury character)
Tony McKay (Fu Manchu character)
Rudolph Kriss (vampire, Dracula character)
Glagg (Rock Troll)
Anti-Gravity Chamber (Space Phantom’s device)

Halloween Radio Recap #2: The Mysterious Traveler

"This is The Mysterious Traveler, inviting you to join me on another journey into the realm of the strange and the terrifying; I hope you will enjoy the trip, that it will thrill you a little and chill you a little. So, settle back, get a good grip on your nerves, and be comfortable... if you can..."

The Mysterious Traveler was a half-hour horror/mystery anthology program that was heard over Mutual from December 5, 1943 to September 16, 1952. Maurice Tarplin was the titular Mysterious Traveler, a man who would greet the listener from his seat aboard a train, then narrate a story. There are early episodes where he took a part in the dramas, probably because Mutual didn't have a huge budget; but mostly, he kept to his role as a horror host.

The Mysterious Traveler was different from the other horror hosts in that he didn't enter cackling like Old Nancy in The Witch's Tale or the Hermit in The Hermit's Cave, nor with the puns of Raymond on Inner Sanctum Mysteries. Tarplin made the Traveler sound somewhat menacing, but he was extremely restrained next to the rest of his siblings.

When I first got on the internet, I found many OTR fans complaining about Inner Sanctum Mysteries and it's "cop-out" endings. They were referring to the lack of the supernatural on that program; Inner Sanctum Mysteries seldom committed to the supernatural. If that's what you want from a horror program, then The Mysterious Traveler would seem to be the program you really want, because there are plenty of episodes that embrace the supernatural head-on.

...I wrote "would seem to be," though, because that's not true of every episode of The Mysterious Traveler. For example, sometimes there are ghosts; in other episodes, the ghosts are fakes. But still further, not every episode of The Mysterious Traveler was a horror story - there are science fiction stories, mystery stories and crime stories. You can't always be certain what you'll get when you tune in.

The most talked-up episode of The Mysterious Traveler is "Behind the Locked Door" (November 6, 1951), in which a young man tells his fiancee about his expedition underground and the weird creatures he met there; it is indeed a very good episode. I'm also fond of (links to the Internet Archive files):

• "The Queen of the Cats" (July 2, 1944): A woman with a supernatural connection to cats haunts her lover.
• "Death Comes for Adolf Hitler" (March 24, 1945): Hitler takes an ill-advised submarine ride.
• "Death Is the Visitor" (August 18, 1946): A man tries to get rid of his mother-in-law for good.
• "If You Believe" (December 29, 1946): A scientist's experiments in protoplasm are hyped up as a menace by the media.
• "New Year's Nightmare" (January 5, 1947): After a drunken New Year's, a man discovers he lived an entire year under another alias.
• "The Woman in Black" (March 9, 1947): A reporter trails a woman in black who appears at the time of murders.
• "The Locomotive Ghost" (July 6, 1947): A killer is haunted by a ghostly train.
• "The Man the Insects Hated" (July 27, 1947): Exactly what it claims to be.
• "Murder Is My Business" (June 8, 1948): A radio writer wants to kill his producer.
• "Death Has a Cold Breath" (March 29, 1949): A talent agent plots his client's murder.
• "S.O.S." (May 2, 1950): A heist with a surprising finish.
• "Strange New World" (February 19, 1952): Giant radioactive crabs; 'nuff said?

The series was primarily written by Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan. They'd previously created the horror anthology Dark Destiny for Mutual in 1942, but only 1 episode of that show has survived. They also created the Mutual syndicated show The Sealed Book in 1945, which recycled scripts from The Mysterious Traveler but had to trim a few minutes to fit the shorter timeslot; we can compare some programs that exist in both The Mysterious Traveler and The Sealed Book formats and it does show The Sealed Book to be inferior, as the material they trimmed really enhanced the The Mysterious Traveler's scripts.

Robert A. Arthur had a lengthy career in radio and later television and he was never one to let a perfectly good script lie idle. He and Kogan also created the 15-minute show The Strange Dr. Weird in 1945 with Maurice Tarplin also as the host. I've long assumed stories heard on The Strange Dr. Weird were condensed from The Mysterious Traveler scripts but I've yet to prove it; anyway, Arthur went on gamely recycling The Mysterious Traveler into the latter-day of Suspense's radio run. The duo also wrote for Murder by Experts and ABC Mystery Time.

The Mysterious Traveler had a comic book that lasted just one issue in 1948; I blogged about it here. It ran its own pulp magazine for six issues in 1951-1952. Later, Charlton published a comic that lasted from 1956-1959 and featured a lot of early work by Steve Ditko; Ditko published his own reprint of those stories in 2016, which I blogged about here. There were also two Mysterious Traveler comics by Moonstone in 2003 and 2004 that were by Trevor Von Eeden; I blogged about those too.

Despite the show's 9-year run, there are presently only 69 episodes in circulation. It's also unlikely more will turn up, given most Mutual shows vanished into the ether. For that reason, do treasure the fact we have The Sealed Book to supplement The Mysterious Traveler!

You'll find the Old Time Radio Research Group's YouTube playlist of The Mysterious Traveler below:

Next Thursday: Lights Out!

"If there ever was a downfall, then it was entirely of your own doing!" The Giant: Orson Welles, the Artist and the Shadow review

The Giant: Orson Welles, the Artist and the Shadow is a graphic novel by Youssef Daoudi, published in English last year by First Second. It's a biography of Welles that focuses on his years in Hollywood. Much of the framing around the story is set in the 1970s while Welles was shooting The Other Side of the Wind.

There's a fun sequence near the end where Orson's shadow comes to life - explicitly reminding Orson how he used to portray the Shadow on the radio - and has a conversation about Orson's career. Orson's shadow basically argues that Orson has no reason to complain about how his career turned out. Orson's shadow parrots many criticisms made about Welles over the decades - Daoudi uses the shadow as a means of making these external remarks appear internal.

Since this blog is often concerned with old-time radio, I have to caution fans of The Shadow that the book doesn't actually spend more than a moment on that series; "the Shadow" appears in the book's title primarily due to the conversation between Orson and his shadow. Still, there is a fun homage to the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" in which a Martian tripod knocks Orson's cigar from his mouth, enraging him.

This is certainly a book for Orson Welles fans, who benefit from having a fuller understanding of his life and the events The Giant: Orson Welles, the Artist and the Shadow only has time to allude to. There are some very clever ideas in how Daoudi chose to tell Orson's life story, particularly the use of the quote which ends the book. The book is very critical of Welles, but we fans of Welles are also his harshest critics, so I have no hesitation in recommending this book.

Halloween Radio Recap #1: The Haunting Hour!

Every Thursday this October, I'm going to write a recap on an old-time radio horror program as we gear up for Halloween!

"No, stay where you are; Do not break the stillness of this moment; for this is a time of mystery, a time when imagination is free and moves forward swiftly, silently... This is: The Haunting Hour!

When I first bought John Dunning's book On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio in 1998, one of the first things I did was look up each of the horror programs I enjoyed so I could learn more about them. I was a bit annoyed that there was nothing in his book about The Haunting Hour; it was one of the first horror anthology programs I ever heard, but no one seemed to know anything about it; who produced, directed or starred in it? When did it air?

Thanks to the sorely-missed Digital Deli website, I finally got some answers. They identified it as an NBC syndicated program produced in Philadelphia. It was produced by Herbert Wood and featured Rosa Rio on the organ and music by Tilden Brown. Berry Kroeger was the show's narrator and it drew from familiar voices like Frank Lovejoy and Jackson Beck. According to the Deli, it ran for 52 episodes from June 8, 1945 to May 26, 1946.

In some ways the show reminds me of the Weird Circle, which was also from NBC syndication (1943-1945); I even wonder if The Haunting Hour were in some sense a continuation of that program - they featured many of the same actors. There's one episode of The Haunting Hour called "Revenge" that's inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" which reminded me of how the Weird Circle's stories were inspired by the works of Poe and others (although they usually made drastic changes to the original texts).

It's not entirely accurate for me to call The Haunting Hour a horror program because, taken as a whole, it was simply a mystery anthology. The word "haunting" invites you to think of an underlying supernatural menace to the stories, but the supernatural seldom looms that large. Some stories are simply detective tales; others are crime stories which delve more into suspense than mystery.

When The Haunting Hour was at it's best, it was pretty good; I highly recommend the episode "The Uptown Express," which concerns a woman who suddenly finds herself living five years into her future. I also recommend "Breakdown," about a woman who seems to be losing her grip on sanity.

The most interesting story to me is "Ptolemy's Grave," about a woman haunted by a mummy whose face resembles her husband. Amazingly, this is a story I knew from a 1943 comic book adaptation! I blogged about it before at this link; but when it appeared in Super-Magician Comics, it was introduced as an adaptation from Inner Sanctum Mysteries. I'm left wondering if this episode of The Haunting Hour recycled a script from Inner Sanctum Mysteries and if so, are other stories on The Haunting Hour recycled scripts?

The Old-Time Radio Researchers have 40 episodes of The Haunting Hour at this link.

Next Thursday: The Mysterious Traveler!

25 Years of the Marvel Appendix - wrap-up!

Today the Marvel Appendix wraps up it's 25-year celebration! I wound up covering nearly 400 characters for the event! As I promised at the start of September, I won't link to all of them, but there are a number I'd like to highlight...

Here are a few of the characters I profiled who had been the stars of their own (obscure) features: Arrowhead (western hero); Buzz Brand (war hero); Battleship Burke (naval hero); Billy Buckskin (frontier hero); Captain Daring (sci-fi hero); Captain Strong (Foreign Legion hero); Captain Terror (super hero); Blaze Carson (western hero); Combat Casey (war hero); Combat Kelly (war hero); Rick Davis (spy hero); Dave Dean (1930s deep sea diving hero); Sgt. Dix (war hero); the Falcon (Burgess) (super hero); Fighting Yank (war hero); Flying Flame (aviation hero); Flash Foster (football hero); Don Gorman (aviation hero); Gunsmoke Kid (western hero); Red Hawkins (western hero); Rex Hart (western hero); Jeep Jones (humorous war hero); Jungle Boy (jungle hero); Kid from Dodge City (western hero); Kid from Texas (western hero); Magar the Mystic (magician hero); Molly Manton (romance heroine); Monako (magician hero); Barney Mullen (naval hero); Cookie Novak (Combat Kelly's sidekick); Rusty (Defender's sidekick); Sailor Sweeney (naval hero); Rocky Steele (boxing hero); Sam Storm (war hero); the Thunderer (Carstairs) (super hero); Waku (jungle hero)

Here's some profiles I put in some decent research to create: ARCH-E-5912 (Planet Hulk); Blur (D.P.7); Cat People (Tigra characters); Sally Clark (Wyatt Earp cast member); Queen Esther (Bible); Joe Grogan (My Girl Pearl cab driver); Phil Kane (Yellow Claw); Komodo (Avengers: The Initiative cast); the Manatelli Brothers (tumblers and war heroes); Manchuria Mary (communist agent); Monolith (2001: A Space Odyssey); General Olga (communist agent); Powersurge (Avengers character); Raiders (Iron Man foes); Slippery Sam (My Friend Irma character); Peter Spalding (Machine Man character); Star Sphere (Galactus' vehicle); Queen Ursula (American Ace foe); Daniel J. Whittier (Semper Fi character)

And here's profiles of things I just think are neat: Captain Sin (captain of El Cazador); Cool Breeze (G.I. Joe); Dark Angel (Shang-Chi character); Deviant Raiding Craft (very cool vehicle); Preston Dudley (Mountie spoof); Johannes Fliet (Casey, Crime Photographer foe); Aloysius P. Jamesley (Christopher Priest expy); Phanto Band (Blackstone the Magician foes); Prowlers (Wakandan robots); Ricochet Mobile (very silly vehicle); Victor-101 (Halo); Philip Nelson Voigt (Ultimates character); Larry Windham (Suspense); Zero/One (Red Hulk foe)

Originally I just wanted to get in a few dozen profiles for the event; I wound up writing so many and became so deeply involved that I wound up reactivating my responsibilities as an editor for the Marvel Appendix. It feels good to be back with my old Appendix friends and no doubt I'll wind up profiling many more obscure Marvel characters in the years to come. Happy 25th anniversary, you wonderful old website!

Radio Recap: The Adventures of Jungle Jim

The Adventures of Jungle Jim was the 15-minute weekly syndicated program that replaced Flash Gordon in Hearst Syndication. It proved much more successful (under whatever terms Hearst considered successful) and ran from November 2, 1935 until July 31, 1954. Alex Raymond's Jungle Jim was the "topper" to his Flash Gordon on the Sunday comics page (meaning his adventures appeared on the top of the page above Flash Gordon; toppers were sometimes omitted in newspapers whose page size was smaller than the standard).

The role of Jungle Jim was played by a few people, with Matt Crowley apparently holding the role the longest (Gerald Mohr played Jim for a few weeks). Jim Bradley was a big game hunter, but the series seldom featured him hunting big game; instead, Jim would be hired out by governments to use his wilderness skills to investigate strange goings-on around in jungle climes, usually in Asia. Accompanying Jim was Kolu (Juano Hernandez), an Indian guide-- though he spoke in the type of speech radio usually gave to American Indians.

The initial storyline where Jim investigates the "Bat Woman" cult, which proves to be led by the criminal Shanghai Lil (Franc Hale), is a pretty darn good adventure serial. Shanghai Lil would turn out to be an undercover good guy who would renounce her criminal past and accompanied Jim on many of his adventures - a sort-of Burma to his Pat Ryan. But to complicate matters, Jim also wound up with his female sidekick Kitty St. John, who would make Lil jealous.

After Pearl Harbor, the show rapidly changed as Jim started fighting German and Japanese foes; he joined the Marines and was sent back to the States to ferret out undercover foreign agents (because when your speciality is hunting and tracking in Asia, obviously your greatest usefulness in World War II is to hang around stateside as a secret agent). By spring of 1942, the show's format was radically reinvented as, instead of the show's accustomed rhythm of lengthy adventures, it tended to feature Jim battling enemy agents and wrapping it all up within his 15 minutes; there were still some continued adventures, but typically they fell into no more than 2-part stories. My suspicion is that the radio show had stopped adapting the comic strip around this time. This version of The Adventures of Jungle Jim is an interesting change to witness, but it's inferior to what came before.

Because there are no shows from 1943 available I don't know when the series changed, but by 1944 Jim and Kolu (a new actor playing Kolu) were back in Asia, going on guerrilla missions against the Japanese in Malaya, which makes a lot more sense for their particular skills. They led an "Allied" team with members hailing from India, Australia, the Soviet Union and China, which meant the actors portraying those characters could use a variety of dialects.

After the war, the series shifted back into what it had been before; Shanghai Lil returned and joined Jim and Kolu on globe-trotting adventures that seemed to be based around Latin America.

Although the show didn't like to credit anyone (including Alex Raymond!) recognizable voices include Gale Gordon (who'd previously been Flash Gordon), Hanley Stafford and Elliot Lewis. The show's theme was taken from the William Tell Overture (a different part of the Overture than that used on the Lone Ranger). Up to 1942 the theme was played with a band, then it shifted to an organ.

Alex Raymond left Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon in 1944; the strip continued with John Mayo and Paul Norris and even spawned a series of movies starring Johnny Weissmuller, but the comic strip, movies and radio show ended in 1954; Weissmuller kept going with a TV show that only lasted 1955-1956. As I noted yesterday, Flash Gordon has transcended his humble origins and enjoys occasional revivals; Raymond's Flash Gordon is considered one of the greatest comic strips of all time. Jungle Jim, by contrast, is a historical artifact; today, it's mostly brought up when discussing Flash Gordon, not for its own merits. Flash Gordon had the last laugh.

The Old-Time Radio Researchers Library has 526 episodes of The Adventures of Jungle Jim; it's pretty much complete up into 1942, then gets a little spottier in later years. A clear sign that this series needs more love is that the OTRR Library files are badly missorted and misidentified. You can view their files at this link.