OTR Halloween Day 14: Lights Out

The heyday of Lights Out is considered to be the era produced by Arch Oboler... primarily because that's almost all we have left! Obviously, most fans know that the series originated with Wyllis Cooper and many of us wonder what the earlier version of the program was like, considering the quality of Cooper's later program Quiet, Please.

Fortunately, there's a handful of Cooper's productions still around, mostly from post-war Lights Out revivals. I'm not sure which might have been new scripts and which were from Cooper's 1930s broadcasts, but it is at least a valuable glimpse at what was. Such a program is "The Ghost on the Newsreel Negative" which aired August 10, 1946. Two reporters go to interview a ghost and record its actions. The ghost seems quite willing to accommodate them and for a time it all seems quite light-hearted. Then they bring the negative back to the lab...

You can hear "The Ghost on the Newsreel Negative" at the Internet Archive.