OTR Holiday Month Day 31: The Shadow

Here we are - the end of 2018 and the end of my OTR holiday theme month. What better way to end the year than with our friend The Shadow! In the January 1, 1939 episode "The Man Who Murdered Time", Lamong (Bill Johnstone) and Margo (Agnes Moorehead) are taught in a temporal loop as New Year's Eve repeats itself again and again. Lamont's great mental powers allow him to avoid repeating the same events over and over, but it's a strain on his mind; can he find the person responsible for replaying the day's events before his resolve fades?

You can hear "The Man Who Murdered Time" on archive.org here.

I hope you enjoy your New Year's Eve celebrations today and I look forward to interactions on the blog in the New Year. 2019 will definitely see some changes in how this blog functions...

OTR Holiday Month Day 30: Lights Out

Unfortunately, we don't know too much about what the show Lights Out was like when Wyllis Cooper was the writer/producer. We have a lot of shows from when Arch Oboler led the series, but precious little of Cooper's. We do, of course, have most of Cooper's show Quiet, Please intact. And we have a very interesting Lights Out episode from December 22, 1937 called "Uninhabited."

Following the first World War, a French soldier, Australian soldier and black American soldier share a train cabin together. The three men have never met before, yet they have a strange sense of deja vu... three men journeying together...

You can hear "Uninhabited" on archive.org here.

Come back tomorrow for the end of this theme month (and 2018!).

OTR Holiday Month Day 29: Jack Benny

I've said many times that I enjoy the Jack Benny Program. One of my absolute favourite broadcasts is the New Year's Eve broadcast from December 31, 1939. In this episode, Jack is stood up by his date after he's gone on at considerable length to his friends about what an amazing woman she is. The eventual reveal of who his date is leads to one fantastic laugh, but over all Jack cuts a very pathetic figure in this episode. Alone on New Year's, Jack ends up at home. Seeing how lonesome his boss is, Rochester cancels his plans to spend the night supporting Jack. Awwwwww...

This is a fantastic program; listen to it at archive.org here.

We're almost done the theme month, come back tomorrow!

OTR Holiday Month Day 28: Inner Sanctum Mysteries

Yesterday we heard from The Mysterious Traveler, so here with another New Year's-themed program is Inner Sanctum Mysteries and the episode "Between Two Worlds" from December 20, 1948. On New Year's Eve, the police hear the story of a repentant criminal who didn't want to die without doing one good deed and, through supernatural means, got his chance.

You can hear "Between Two Worlds" on archive.org here.

OTR Holiday Month Day 27: The Mysterious Traveler

Okay, we've had a lot of good warm-hearted Christmas shows with a bit of comedy mixed in up until now, but now we're nearing New Year's and radio shows were a little more cold-blooded about that holiday. Take, for instance, "New Year's Nightmare", an episode of The Mysterious Traveler from January 5, 1947. It features a man who loses a year's worth of memories and finds himself married to a different woman. What with the amnesia aspect, it's very much like an episode of Inner Sanctum Mysteries, which resorted to such devices pretty often.

You can hear "New Year's Nightmare" on archive.org here.

OTR Holiday Month Day 26: Mister President

Happy Boxing Day!

A short-lived show called Mister President would feature Edward Arnold in dramatic tales where he would be called "Mister President", challenging the listeners to guess which real US President he was portraying before the revelation in the closing minutes. This kind of restricted what kind of stories the series could tell, but at Christmas time they broke with the show's normal format for something quite different - a fiction about one of the Wise Men. The story is called "The Man at the Gate of the World" and while it takes some liberties with the Gospels, it certainly means well.

Mister President isn't as well-archived as the other shows I'm featuring this month, but I found the episode on this webpage here.

OTR Holiday Month Day 25: The Greatest Story Ever Told

Merry Christmas!

After World War II there was an increased focus on Christianity in US culture which spilled over on to the radio as Christian groups organized programming such as Family Theater and The Greatest Story Ever Told. The latter program began in 1947 and would retell stories from the Bible in the style of contemporary dramas. It was so popular that it became a book (a book based on a radio show based on the Bible, which is a book) and later on a film which wasn't too well-regarded.

The adaptation of the story of Christ's birth was told over several weeks on the program, so I've brought them all together here from archive.org. You can hear "And Her Name Was Mary" here, "Blessed Among Women" here, "Go and Be Counted" here, "No Room at the Inn" here and "Flight into Egypt" here.

I hope you're having a marvelous Christmas!