Radio Recap: Stand by for Adventure

"Stop! Don't move! I want to talk to you. Yes, you who remain in your hot little room, never venturing out beyond your neighborhood. Are you afraid? Are you afraid of the strange and turbulent things that happen in distant lands, in places outside your own ken? For example, are you afraid of the sounds that a South American swamp makes? Yes, a swamp does make noise, you know. A selfish noise. A sucking noise. As if it were anxious to draw you to it, and hold you there, forever. Or is the sound of a-- the sound of a knife, whisking across a squalid room in Baghdad? Or is the sound of the wind as it cuts through the snowy corpses kept company by a single rifle shot of a guerrilla fighter? Come now, tell me: what are you afraid of, that keeps you in your hot little room? Oh, you're not afraid at all. It's just that you haven't the time to travel, you haven't the time to become mixed-up in some adventure in Mesopotamia or Ecuador or even a county jail. Well, I can understand your not having time, but you don't have to travel, you know, to live through these adventures for they'll be brought right into your hot little room, your safe little room by means of: your radio. So, listen to a familiar voice, a voice you know well, a voice you can trust while he tells you how you can Stand by for Adventure!"

Stand by for Adventure was a syndicated 15-minute adventure anthology program. There's very little information about the series on the web, but Radio Goldindex identifies it as an NBC syndicated show from 1950; it also identifies 30 episodes that are known to still exist, yet only 16 are currently circulating online. I haven't seen a complete log of this program, but it appears there were as many as 68 episodes originally produced.

Arnold Moss was the series' narrator and it sounds like Parker Fennelly was the announcer. Otherwise, no performers were credited.

Stand by for Adventure is a lot like the World Adventurers Club in that each episode features a story of high adventure narrated amongst a group of adventurers. However, unlike that earlier show, Stand by Adventure had a rotating cast of just four men swapping stories amongst each other. The four men were: Major Gordon (a British officer), Captain Quigley (a sea captain), Richard Moore (newspaper reporter) and Dr. Avillo (a scientist and host to the others).

I found this show to be pretty good - an interesting mix of adventure, humour and the supernatural. This is a nice little diamond in the rough and I'm sure the surviving non-circulating episodes will eventually turn up online.

You can hear the 16 circulating episodes of Stand by for Adventure at the Old Time Radio Researchers Library. Note that their episodes are very disorganized; this series needs a little love from a willing and knowledgeable fan.