Radio Recap: My Friend Irma

My Friend Irma was a half-hour CBS sitcom that ran from April 11, 1947 until August 23, 1954. It had a number of sponsors over the years, including Pepsodent toothpaste, Swan soap ("Our friend Swan!") and Camels cigarettes. The series starred Marie Wilson as Irma Peterson, an extremely blonde and extremely dim-witted young woman who shared a New York apartment; despite her humble, small-town origins -- and, let's face it, ineptitude -- she was determined to make it in the big city.

Irma's best friend and roommate was originally Jane Stacy, played by Cathy Lewis (Joan Banks substituted for a time). Jane would narrate each episode, hence the titular "My Friend." John Brown played Al, Irma's shiftless boyfriend. His pet name for Irma was "Chicken" and he loved her -- not for her mind or her body -- but for her paycheck so he wouldn't have to work. He'd often enter the episode talking up a new idea he just had for a product (occasionally his new idea would set off the episode's plot). Although he had sharp wits, he hated to work for a living.

The girls' best friend was Professor Kropotkin (Hans Conreid), a Gypsy (re: Romani) violinist who lived in the same apartment building (when I first heard the show, I thought Conreid was using a Jewish accent). In the pilot episode, it was claimed Kropotkin only communicated using his violin, but I think someone realized how few jokes could be plucked from that concept. The apartment's Irish landlady was Mrs. O'Reilly (Gloria Gordon); initially she had an (unheard) husband but very quickly it was decided she was a widow, her husband having died many years prior. Mrs. O'Reilly was infatuated with Kropotkin and would often hint he could have an easier time in the building if he'd be a little nicer to her. Kropotkin would frequently date Mrs. O'Reilly but seldom missed an opportunity to insult the quality of his apartment or to insult his landlady. Apparently at some point CBS tested a pilot for a spin-off about Kropotkin and Mrs. O'Reilly!

Jane's wealthy boss and boyfriend was Richard Rhinelander III (Leif Erickson). He seems to have been dropped from the series at some point. I'm not entirely certain why Jane didn't just marry Richard, since their occasional troubles always seemed to be ironed out by each episode's end; they were in love and Richard's family liked Jane, yet they never married (obviously, because then Jane would have to leave the apartment). Irma's boss was the lawyer Mr. Clyde (Alan Reed), who would often explode at Irma's bungling in that manner Reed did best.

Apparently Arthur Kurlan thought Cy Howard had ripped-off his play and film My Sister Eileen, which he'd been trying to bring to radio; he sued CBS over My Friend Irma. I can't quite see it... in My Sister Eileen, there's a beautiful blonde woman and her plain sister (or "Hollywood plain" anyway; Rosalind Russell played the film role and she was hardly "plain") share a New York basement apartment in a building filled with eccentric characters who wander through the apartment uninvited. While the sisters came from a small town, just like Irma, neither was dim-witted. Anyway, Kurlan won his lawsuit.

But what Kurlan couldn't have appreciated was the unique comedy Marie Wilson brought to My Friend Irma. Wilson had been in movies since the mid 1930s yet had never broken out with a truly memorable role. She had regular work as various dim-witted blondes, but with radio, she finally landed a career-making role -- pretty much the only role she'd be remembered for. She'd done well in movies in part because of her looks, but the endearingly innocent way she had of delivering dialogue make her a natural for radio comedy.

I think it's interesting to note the post-war shift in comedy, which seems to have been a move away from the "M.C." type of shows (Jack Benny and Bob Hope were still enormously popular, but audiences didn't seem to want new talent that followed their formula) and toward sitcoms. Obviously, shows like The Aldrich Family and The Life of Riley had been around during the war, but there's a definite boom in those kinds of shows. It also seems noteworthy that My Friend Irma was about two single women who struggled to pay their bills, very much a blue-collar show like The Life of Riley; there was an attempt being made to reflect the lives of ordinary people.

Much like Cy Howard's other hit sitcom for CBS, Life with Luigi (which, come to think of it, also featured Alan Reed and Hans Conreid), My Friend Irma had a pretty firm formula, with familiar set-ups for jokes by each of the regulars in the cast. Each episode would begin with Jane narrating about Irma, leading in to one of Irma's typical well-intentioned blunders. Then there'd be a knock at the door: "It's only me, Professor Kropotkin." Kropotkin would tell a "My two little..." joke about Jane and Irma, prompting "Why, professor..." from Jane. Soon, Mrs. O'Reilly would arrive and Kropotkin would begin interjecting barbed comments at her, mostly to do with her age, alongside his complaints about the quality of his room. Al would arrive and make mention of his latest scheme, which Jane would try to anticipate: "What is it this time, Al?" But after Al and Irma hear about Jane's troubles, they decide to involve themselves in an attempt to fix it. When they later realize their attempted solution was a mistake, Jane wonders, "Why are you looking at each other like that?" Prompting a smart response from Al. After Al and Irma's attempted fix is discovered by Jane, she's mortified and takes Irma's apology with, "Sorry, you're always sorry! You were sorry the time..." But in the end all would come out well, either despite Al and Irma's actions or because of them.

Still, early on the formula wasn't entirely set. There's an early episode where Al pressures Irma into giving him the money she was supposed to pay Mrs. O'Reilly so that he can place a bet. I think Cy Howard and the other writers must have quickly realized that while it was fine to make a lot of jokes about Al being a shady character who was often running hustles, it didn't do for him to intentionally draw Irma into a life of crime.

Later on, a number of changes hit the show. The first was the loss of Hans Conreid; Professor Kropotkin was simply written out of the show for a while and his cousin Maestro Wanderkin (Kenny Delmar, sounding very Russian) took his place; they continued to mention Kropotkin from time to time and eventually recast the part in the show's final year, although I can't tell who the 2nd Kropotkin was. Next up was the loss of John Brown, who was replaced in the role of Al by Sid Tomack (both on radio and TV); Al also took a job as a mechanic; it's so different from how Al was portrayed before that I wonder if Cy Howard was no longer involved in the program at that point. For the show's final year, Al was simply gone, replaced with Irma's bland boyfriend Joe Vance (Hal March). Finally, Cathy Lewis exited and Jane was replaced with Kay Foster (Mary Shipp). Without Al's schemes causing problems and the less-interesting Kay, the series' plots were driven almost entirely by Irma's mistakes and blunders.

It's amazing that, in its day, My Friend Irma appeared in so many different mediums - I think it's fair to say it was a phenomenon in its time. I mentioned the TV series (1952-1954), which utilized most of the radio cast (except for Conreid and Brown). The show's also remembered for two motion pictures, My Friend Irma (1949) and My Friend Irma Goes West (1950). Both films added Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (in their film debuts) to the cast and the studio basically treated the radio characters as a backdrop to sell Martin and Lewis to film audiences, which is annoying; Marie Wilson was very good in the films, but badly sidelined, considering she was the title character.

Marvel comics made a My Friend Irma comic book through their deal with CBS (which also produced comics of Suspense, Junior Miss and Casey, Crime Photographer). Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo created the comics, which ran from 1950-1955. At the same time, the Mirror Enterprises Syndicate ran a comic strip version of My Friend Irma which ran from 1950-1951, initially by Jack Seidel, but Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo eventually took over the comic strip too. Here's a Hogan's Alley post about the Stan Lee/Dan DeCarlo comic strips. Lee and DeCarlo were apparently so put-out at the end of the My Friend Irma series that they decided to keep it going as My Girl Pearl, a series which Marvel owned; it ran just 6 issues across 1955-1957 and recycled scripts from Lee and DeCarlo's My Friend Irma comics; DeCarlo simply shifted his character designs on to new names, as Pearl's boyfriend looked pretty much the same as he'd drawn Al. Then in 1960, Lee brought My Girl Pearl back, but with Stan Goldberg as artist and the entire series altered as Pearl was made a high school student; Lee kept recycling My Friend Irma scripts into this new environment, pretty much up to the end. My Girl Pearl ended its bizarre run after 11 issues total.

The Old-Time Radio Researchers have a YouTube playlist of 90 My Friend Irma episodes.

Happy Remembrance Day

Today is Remembrance Day and I hope you find time to observe a moment of silence for those who perished in armed conflict.

Today I prepared what I thought was an appropriate profile on the Marvel Appendix to observe the day: Louis Pernot, a Canadian character who served in World War I and whose biography included a lot of details about the start of the war.

Radio Recap: Calling All Cars

Calling All Cars is a historically important radio series, one of the first attempts to recreate stories about true-life crimes. It was a half-hour show and presented over CBS from November 29, 1933 to February 10, 1940. It was sponsored by Rio Grande gasoline and written and directed by William N. Robson; it was the series that built Robson's reputation. Rio Grande promoted the series heavily, even handing out a free "Calling All Cars News" at their stations.

William N. Robson went on to write, produce and direct for many of radio's greatest programs, including Escape, Romance and Suspense, the Columbia Workshop and the CBS Radio Workshop; other programs of his include: the Adventures of Christopher London, Beyond Tomorrow, Have Gun, Will Travel, Luke Slaughter of Tombstone, The Man Behind the Gun, Request Performance and T-Man.

The show's cast largely went uncredited but you can recognize voices like Joseph Kearns, Lou Merrill and Gale Gordon. John Gibson was in a lot of episodes, sometimes as a cop, sometimes as a criminal. The show made use of real police officials to narrate their "crime doesn't pay" message at the start of each show. Their performances weren't exactly good, but it added credibility to the series; one certainly sees the influence on Phillips H. Lord's Gang Busters, which mimicked Calling All Cars structure, although it's never struck me as being as authentic as its predecessor.

Calling All Cars was the first police program to strive for authenticity, the sort of details that would later be expanded on by Dragnet. Robson prided himself on reacting swiftly to crime news; they adapted the death of John Dillinger to the radio just 72 hours after he was killed. Probably Robson's finest hour was "The San Quentin Prison Break" (January 22, 1935) which he dramatized just after the escapees had been captured. Robson later appeared on the Columbia Workshop on September 5, 1936 and explained how that episode came to be, a real rarity in radio!

But I think the death of Dillinger showed up a weakness in Calling All Cars' format; the kind of infamous public enemies like Dillinger were dying out; there were always crimes to adapt (even with the show's restriction on covering crimes in California) but fewer and fewer sensations. Which is a good thing! But when you consider that at the time Calling All Cars began it was trying to promote the goodness of police officers as an antidote to the Depression-era worship of criminals like Dillinger, you can see in this series the start of the trend towards what's derisively called "copaganda" programming.

The bad news about Calling All Cars is that although there are almost 300 episodes still circulating - including the earliest episodes - the first few years have often terrible audio quality, with surface noise, skips and muddy dialogue. But the quality generally improves as the series goes along. There are definitely a few episodes I can recommend, such as "The Corpse in the Shack" (June 23, 1936), which has an interesting dramatization of the killer's trial where accounts of the murder are given by the defense and the prosecution, with different details in each version, and "Three Faces West" (December 30, 1938) with a teenager who falls in with two other boys who are killers. I also truly enjoyed "The History of Dallas Egan" (February 1, 1938), in which Gerald Mohr portrayed a criminal who kept digging himself deeper and deeper; "The Shanghai Jester" (December 21, 1937) about a conman with a mania for sugar; and the very unusual "The Case of the Black Cat," (September 22, 1938), with a suspect named Markheim who invokes the famous Robert Louis Stevenson story!

You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers' collection of Calling All Cars through the playlist below:

Steve Ditko's birthday on the Marvel Appendix!

One last special day on the Marvel Appendix - it will be a little quieter for a while! Today is the anniversary of Steve Ditko's birth and we're celebrating at the Marvel Appendix with a lot of new profiles. I wrote 29 new profiles; I hope you enjoy them!

X-4 (spy, Captain America ally)
Wogu (extraterrestrial bigot)
The Vulture (pirate ghost)
Jason Trump (mad scientist)
Star Raiders (space pirates)
Spider-Wave Transmitter (Doctor Doom's device)
Deputy Police Inspector Rudd (Human Torch ally)
Ozarr (genie) Norris (spelunker, met ancient men)
Midtown Business Executives Club (J. Jonah Jameson and Norman Osborn's social club)
"Masked Killer" (Speedball foe)
Warren Mace (old west outlaw)
Lords of the Netherworld (Doctor Strange characters, extra-dimensional despots)
Lewis (World War II soldier)
Lemar (Madcap foe) Mr. Karamatsu (toy executive, Micronauts character)
Maggie Jones (Delmar Insurance, Machine Man cast member)
Gamma Grenade Bomb (Bruce Banner's weapon)
Experimental Energy Labs (research facility, Human Torch setting)
Professor Egen (time traveler)
Monica DeLuise (senator's daughter, Speedball's date)
Muffy Cuddle (Tony Stark's date, actress)
Centauron (Changelings, Hulk character)
Jaime Cabo (discovered Fountain of Youth)
Arnim Zola's Biocraft (Zola's flying ship)
Atom-Web Suit (Fantastic Four technology)

Inner Sanctum Mysteries: The Recommended List!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

In my earlier recaps about Lights Out and Quiet, Please, I could easily recommend the series in general; episodes of those programs do not vary drastically in quality from one to another. I have my favourites, but there are few episodes of either show I'd recommend listeners skip.

Not so with Inner Sanctum Mysteries; there are some episodes that creak worse than their famous door. For that reason, I'm going to recommend what I think Inner Sanctum Mysteries sounded like when it was at its best; if you like these, then by all means sample the rest of the program. All of the links below lead to mp3 files at the Internet Archive's Inner Sanctum Mysteries - Single Episodes page run by the Old Time Radio Researchers Group.

"The Judas Clock" (April 17, 1945) which I've blogged about in the past, has my vote as the single greatest episode of Inner Sanctum Mysteries; it's the tale of a clock -- an evil clock -- and the death it brings with it. Other episodes I recommend are:

• "Death Is a Joker" (June 10, 1944) Peter Lorre plays a man who commits a murder and tries to alibi himself.
• "The Color-Blind Formula" (December 6, 1944) After a scientist disappears, a blackmailer goes after his assistant.
• "No Coffin for the Dead" (February 20, 1945) The trail of a murderer leads to a bedridden man who couldn't have done it.
• "The Bog-Oak Necklace" (April 10, 1945) An unearthed skeleton wearing a necklace dredges up an old love triangle.
• "Song of the Slasher" (April 24, 1945) A police detective thinks a killer is one of his neighbours.
• "The Girl on the Gallows" (May 1, 1945) A fortune teller predicts a woman's death on the gallows - just before her own death!
• "The Black Art" (May 15, 1945) A seemingly-supernatural woman offers aid to a murderer.
• "Musical Score" (May 29, 1945) After murdering a couple aboard a lifeboat, a survivor is haunted by the song they sang.
• "Death Across the Board" (June 5, 1945) A maniac plays a game of chess using live people as the game pieces!
• "Dead Man's Holiday" (June 19, 1945) A man awakens from a wreck to find he has a new face and a new life he doesn't remember.
• "Dead Man's Debt" (June 26, 1945) A lawyer gets his client off from a murder charge but thinks his client is guilty of a different crime.
• "Terror by Night" (September 18, 1945) A female motorist is alone on the highway while an escaped killer is looking for a ride.
• "The Lonely Sleep" (September 25, 1945) A window dresser uses a dead body to complete his masterpiece.
• "The Wailing Wall" (November 6, 1945) Boris Karloff plays a man who kills his wife then is haunted by the sound of her moans.
• "Skeleton Bay" (February 5, 1946) A vacationing mystery writer meets a killer and offers to be his accomplice.
• "Elixer Number Four" (February 12, 1946) Richard Widmark plays a man who'd kill to be immortal.
• "Death Is a Double-Crosser" (March 26, 1946) An ex-con becomes a diamond cutter's apprentice in the hopes of stealing his latest commission.
• "Make Ready My Grave" (April 23, 1946) Richard Widmark plays an heir who's due to succumb to a family curse of murder.
• "Tempo in Blood" (January 12, 1948) A jazz pianist meets a man who seems determined to arrange his death.
• "Murder by Prophecy" (September 27, 1948) An heir follows a strange prophecy in the hopes of claiming a hidden treasure.
• "Death of a Doll" (October 18, 1948) A reporter investigates a woman's death and it leads him to someone claiming to be the Devil!
• "Between Two Worlds" (December 20, 1948) A gangster wants to make amends for his awful life; a ghost offers him his chance!
• "Mark My Grave" (January 17, 1949) A reporter visits a family who are being killed one at a time by a ghost!
• "Only the Dead Die Twice" (March 21, 1949) A woman in a taxi cab discovers a corpse seated next to her.
• "Death on the Highway" (June 6, 1949) A motorist kills a hitchhiker, then suffers blackmail.
• "Deadly Fare" (July 18, 1949) A taxi driver picks up a murderer who intends to kill the cabbie once he's done his work.
• "Death's Little Brother" (August 29, 1949) A drifter murders an heir then impersonates him, but he makes a huge wrong assumption.
• "The Devil's Workshop" (October 10, 1949) A wax sculptor meets a man with no face who proposes an alliance.
• "A Corpse for Halloween" (October 31, 1949) A man is hunted on Halloween night by a man he left for dead years before.
• "The Hitch-Hiking Corpse" (January 23, 1950) A driver meets a woman who seems to have a supernatural hold over him.
• "Birdsong for a Murderer" (June 22, 1952) Boris Karloff plays a husband who kills to protect his wife from some unpleasant business.
• "Death Pays the Freight" (July 6, 1952) Everett Sloane plays a bum who kills a man in a boxcar and steals his identity.
• "Murder Off the Record" (August 3, 1952) A weight machine offers a man prophecies about his fortune.
• "Strange Passenger" (August 31, 1952) A motorist keeps seeing the same female hitchhiker and keeps hearing "Star Dust" on the radio.
• "The Meek Die Slowly" (September 7, 1952) A cemetery caretaker adds fresh bodies to the premises.

I hope my articles have helped you find some appropriate listening material this Halloween season. Happy haunting! Good night... pleasant... dreams... hmmm?

Another memorium for Ronald Byrd

Over at the Marvel Appendix, we're celebrating the life of our deceased colleague Ronald Byrd by completing a number of profiles he'd researched but hadn't completed. All of them are characters from the Anti-Registration Underground group seen in Civil War: Front Line. Back when those comics were published, writer Paul Jenkins gave Ronald permission to create backgrounds for all of them; Ronald wrote entire biographies for each character, but very little of what he wrote wound up in print. To celebrate his passion for these extremely obscure characters, many of us at the Marvel Appendix are completing Ronald's work; for my part, I finished the profile for Johnny Justice; there are many more available today, with others planned for tomorrow.

Halloween Radio Recap #5: Inner Sanctum Mysteries

Inner Sanctum Mysteries ran from January 7, 1941 until October 5, 1952, appearing on NBC Blue, ABC and CBS. It had a lot of sponsors, starting with Carter's Little Liver Pills (1941-1943). They also had Bromo-Seltzer (1946-1950), with the talking train (why didn't they sponsor The Mysterious Traveler?), Mars candy bars (1951-1952) and, perhaps most memorably, Lipton Tea and Lipton Soups (1945-1946). The series was produced and directed by Himan Brown; the writers included Milton Lewis, Emile Tepperman and Robert Sloane. The series seldom adapted scripts from other sources, it was generally original scripts (even their rare adaptations, such as their version of Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" were only dimly inspired by the original stories).

Inner Sanctum Mysteries had what is genuinely one of the best and easily most memorable openings in all of old-time radio - the sound of that immense, creaky, squeaking door opening. From within this Inner Sanctum, the show's host (Raymond Edward Johnson, 1941-1945 and Paul McGrath, 1945-1952) would invite the listener inside, sharing a few morbidly bad puns about murder before starting the night's drama.

When I first got on the internet, it was fashionable in old-time radio fandom to call out Inner Sanctum Mysteries for it's "cop-out endings," which I saw referenced time and again on OTR fan pages. To this they were referring to the lack of the supernatural on the program; frequently, it would seem as though a character were threatened by a ghost or a demon or a witch, yet the climax would insist that no, they weren't. If the plot were about a dead man having come back to life then he probably faked his death to begin with, or his return was being fabricated by someone to elicit a confession from the killer.

Now, there are plenty of OTR shows where the supernatural is present - just look at Dark Fantasy - or maybe don't, because it's not a very good program. Inner Sanctum Mysteries never promised its listeners ghost stories and, although the show occasionally let the listener wonder "maybe it was a ghost" the bulk of shows landed on "maybe not." Why then, were OTR fans circa late 1990s so upset with Inner Sanctum Mysteries? My theory is that it's that creaking door's fault; it's such a terrific noise, you think it must surely belong to a supernatural program. Inner Sanctum Mysteries was a horror program, sure, but not a supernatural horror show.

Instead, the way I describe Inner Sanctum Mysteries is a "nightmare show." In this series, everything is off-kilter - no one is reliable. Now, I get truly frustrated at the episodes with unreliable narrators, which I think is an even bigger "cop-out" than the lack of a genuine ghost. But generally, on Inner Sanctum Mysteries, everyone is suspect; the casts tend to be reasonably small (usually around 5 people) and nearly all of them deliver their lines with some underlying menace, even if they aren't the episode's villain. This isn't like Suspense, where if a character enters a diner, there might be a few lines from a waitress just to establish setting and mood; on Inner Sanctum Mysteries, if a character enters a diner and the waitress has dialogue, that waitress will probably try to kill or blackmail (or be killed or blackmailed by) the lead character. Inner Sanctum Mysteries inhabited a nightmarish world of sin, crime and murder; frequently, even the police were shown to be corrupt; there were precious few authority figures one could turn to for help when they were in an episode of Inner Sanctum; if you weren't crooked, you were probably about to be murdered.

The series got its name from an imprint of books which the Sanctum's host would often promote during the show's outro (the cover to the left is one of many such examples). Mr. Host also had a lot of banter with one Mary Bennett, the spokesperson for Lipton Tea and Lipton Soups. Fans of the show bring up Mary so often, you'd think she was a major part of the series, but Lipton only sponsored the program from 1945-1946 for about 18 months; we just have so many episodes from that era that her minor presence forms a large sample of what remains. Fans are split on Mary, who would often break the tension of the play at the half-way mark ("Gracious, Mr. Host!") before launching into her Lipton commercial.

Maybe Mary's presence made the show more palatable to audiences who, in those days, got pretty upset about violence on the radio; it's why Lights Out could only get a laxative to sponsor them. I see Mary's gentle, polite banter with Mr. Host as a compromise that helped keep the show on the air, even when extremely bloody episodes were being aired under the Lipton banner ("The Judas Clock," for example, is possibly the show's goriest episode - and Lipton sponsored it).

As well, I think Mr. Host's jokes and banter at the start, middle and end of each broadcast are interesting as a kind of defensive measure taken by horror; there's a curious link between comedy and horror (just look at how many horror films of the same era had comic relief or how many comedy films of the era involve ghosts or haunted houses). In the case of Inner Sanctum Mysteries, it's a way of relieving the tension, to let the listener know, hey, they're all right, it's just entertainment. I think as well, making jokes about horror is a way for grown men to help defend their love of the genre, which is seen as either too childish or too morbid by outsiders. If you can claim it's all "camp," then you have an acceptable justification for your love of the genre.

One unusual aspect of the program is that they sometimes repeated scripts but swapped the lead character's gender (along with some other details) which made those stories come across quite differently. Compare "Dead Man's Holiday" (June 19, 1945) to "The Unburied Dead" (May 16, 1949) or "Death Demon" (July 5, 1948) to "The Magic Tile" (August 10, 1952).

Himan Brown later produced The CBS Radio Mystery Theatre (1974-1982) in the "new time radio" era. He brought the creaking door with him, but it's always deflating when instead of hearing a revolting joke by Mr. Host on the other side of the door, one hears the grandfatherly E. G. Marshall. Although he hosted some genuine ghost stories on that show, as an announcer, he did not match the door. At least Himan Brown was a faithful producer who gave work to old Inner Sanctum veterans like Paul McGrath, Larry Haines and Mason Adams.

I wrote a blog post about an Inner Sanctum Mysteries comic book from 1943; strangely, the story turned out to be a one that was told on The Haunting Hour, suggesting those two programs have a link. I've also reviewed Ernie Colon's Inner Sanctum graphic novel which was inspired by the radio shows.

There was also a series of six Inner Sanctum movies at Universal, each one starring Lon Chaney Jr., but they were trading on the name of the book series, not the radio show, which makes those films a bit disappointing to watch as a fan of the radio program (if you want to watch them, Weird Woman is probably the best). In 1954, Inner Sanctum Mysteries became a television series complete with the creaking door, Paul McGrath's voice as Mr. Host and a number of stories adapted right from the radio show! There are still four of these shows in existence and they're easy to find on YouTube.

I have a lot of affection for Inner Sanctum Mysteries; the plots didn't always hold up to much scrutiny but they told sensational stories that I find entertaining to this day - even the few truly bad episodes have their charm.

Here's the Old Time Radio Researchers' YouTube playlist of Inner Sanctum Mysteries:

On Halloween: My recommended listening list of Inner Sanctum Mysteries!