Radio Recap: Think

Think was a 1953 ABC radio anthology program that featured science fiction stories. The series is also referred to as ABC Radio Workshop; it was produced by John Ippolito and hosted by Dave Ballard. Unfortunately that's about all that I know about it. 1950s ABC radio has not received much attention from OTR fans. No one has yet determined how many episodes there were; we have two episodes of Think and we'll just have to extrapolate something from them.

"You - live in a world made by you. A world of fact and fantasy. But where does fact end and fantasy begin? This is a program to make you: Think"

What's interesting about those two episodes of Think is that both are very familiar stories to old-time radio fans. First, we have a production of Arch Oboler's play "The Word." This one was first broadcast on his program Arch Oboler's Plays in 1939. The story concerns two people who descend from the Empire State Building to find themselves the last people alive. This is a concept Oboler really liked - beyond producing it multiple times on his own, his 1951 movie Five was basically an extended version of "The Word." Think's adaptation is about as good as any of Oboler's versions.

The other episode is an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story "Mars Is Heaven!" This one was also adapted for Escape and Dimension X, but Think's adaptation is a unique script, adapted by Morton Fine and David Friedkin. The script makes an odd addition to Bradbury's story (an early sequence where radiation causes an astronaut to age rapidly) but otherwise it's very faithful to Bradbury's original text, moreso than the other radio adaptations.

These two episodes are so strong that I wish we had more examples to draw from; heck, information on Think is so scarce I half-expect to learn these were merely pilots and the programs were never actually broadcast.

You can hear the two surviving episodes of Think using the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Library "Singles and Doubles" page at the Internet Archive; here's the file for "The Word" and here's the file for Mars Is Heaven!.