Old Time Radio Shows

  The radio waves of the Golden Age were filled with starlets who dreamed of making it big on the silver screen but turned to radio acting as a way to pay the bills until they got their big break. Paula Winslowe , one of the most successful, however, hardly fits the definition of starlet. A starlet is usually a young lady with dreams of making it big in the Hollywood Star system. The hard truth is that for every movie princess, there were hundreds, if not thousands of beautiful girls who wanted their shot. Paula would have been perfectly content to remain in the North Dakota prairie town where she was born, eventually raising a family and supporting the ambitions of her childhood sweetheart. Her sweetheart, John Sutherland, had ambitions far from the prairies, however. Entranced with the flickering images he saw in the local movie palace, John dreamed of one day sitting in the directors chair and creating pictures of his own. Soon after they were married, the couple m...

--> A counter part to the Smart-Aleck Kid, a staple character in Family Sit-coms, is the Big-Hearted Blue Collar Oaf. Both are interesting characters to build a show around. The SAK is typified by the long time comic page regular, Dennis the Menace, and immortalized on Radio by such favorites as Henry Aldrich , My Son Jeep, and Leroy from The Great Gildersleeve . The modern incarnation of the SAK is Bart Simpson. Fox TV's The Simpsons is unique in that it features the adventures and misadventures of both a SAK and a BHBCO. Fox made a minor splash on Sunday nights beginning in the late 1980s with a pair of BHBCOs, Both Homer Simpson and Al Bundy from Married With Children . Married pays backhanded homage the original BHBCO, Chester A. Riley from Radio's Life Of Riley . While Married With Children often pushed the boundaries of bad taste, Life of Riley was wholesome family fun. Riley was originally intended as a radio vehicle for Groucho Marx (the Riley ...