Radio Recap: The World Adventurers Club

The World Adventurers Club was a 15-minute syndicated program released in 1932. It was an anthology program in which the premise was that a group of world travelers would meet together at their club. Soon after the episode start (and some barbershop quartet singing around a piano) the club members would prompt one of their number to share a story about their adventures, whereupon the drama would begin in earnest.

The stories related in the World Adventurers Club were set around the world - in Africa, Russia, Europe, sometimes in the United States itself. The cast were never identified but you can recognize a lot of familiar early radio performers in the recordings, such as Hanley Stafford, Gale Gordon and Frank Nelson.

The program is hampered by being an early program, made before sound effects were fully utilized. Exotic locales on radio really depend on audio effects to bring them to life, but World Adventurers Club seemed only able to create the sound of wind or gunshots, precious little else.

But the program's biggest drawback is its very premise. The adventurers have an unmistakably colonialist air about them. The people in the places they visit are very much "the other." And there's plenty of stinky racism to be found all over the series. In the episode indicated as #1, "the Headhunters of Papua," the protagonist-narrator of the story declares early on, "We didn't have to depend upon natives and that was a blessing as I never can get black boys to work hard for me." In another episode the protagonist distrusts his guide because the man is only half-white and therefore treacherous - which, indeed, he is. Another episode is centered on how all Chinese men want to kidnap and control white women. It's noxious, even for its time. There are only a few episodes where the adventurers are pit against nature and the elements - usually they fight with whoever the locals happen to be. In one episode a black man sacrifices his life to save the protagonist, who goes on and on about how noble he was; the only way a non-white character gets any props in the series is by dying for his "betters."

I wanted to like The World Adventurers Club because I have a love for world-spanning adventure tales (Escape being radio's best such program). But I can't simply say the World Adventurers Club is a show "of its time." Even in 1932, it would have been recognized as encouraging racist old tropes.

You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers' collection of the World Adventurers Club at the Internet Archive.