Old Time Radio Shows

At first thought, it would seem like comic strips and radio should not work together, but they turned out to be a terrific fit. The younger set was the target audience for most of the comic strip shows. The serial nature of comic strip stories kept the kids coming back every afternoon to hear whether or not their heroes escaped trouble. While they were finding out the fate of Little Orphan Annie , Red Ryder , Dick Tracy , or Terry and the Pirates , they would happily sit through commercials for breakfast cereal, candy, even gasoline for Dad's car! When we got back from our break, we saw that the Cat had left us a message on the white board: "What about Mary Worth?" The younger staffers were curious about how the Cat could write on the board when he doesn't have thumbs, but the question itself was worth consideration. Of course, Mary Worth is not the only popular comic to be snubbed by Radio; we have often wondered why Batman never got his own radio series. Th...

Everybody has a birthday, and everyone's birthday is a special day. Diversity is a wonderful thing. The things that make each person and culture unique and different are special, important, and worth celebrating. By celebrating diversity, we acknowledge that no single group is any better or worse than another, that everyone is special in their own way. As important as diversity is, it should be just as important to celebrate the things we all have in common. Things like Birthdays! Your Birthday is the anniversary of your birth, which leads to the distinction between birthdays and birthdates: hopefully, you will be able to celebrate many, many birthdays, but everyone just gets one birthdate. Recording birthdates is a relatively recent innovation. When Ancient China developed bureaucracy, one of the important records that were kept was the registration of births, even among the peasants. In medieval Europe, birth records in the form of baptismal records became the purview of the Ch...

  We wanted to write this blog post for a long time, but we kept putting it off. Procrastination is often the reason we are late to get things one, but sometimes we are late for reasons which are beyond our control. Simply being late has led to some interesting situations in the plot of the episode, but keep in mind that many of the broadcasts during the Golden Age of Radio were broadcast live, so being late was a real possibility which happened on many occasions. Fred Allen , who was in seemingly constant warfare with the network and his sponsors anyway, was notorious for allowing his show to run over its allotted time slot. This happens on live programs because of the actor's timing or because the studio audience laughs longer than the writer and director expected. Sometimes the actors and director can pick up the pace, or the program might be allowed to run a few seconds over, but in Fred's case, given his reputation with the network, when it was time to ring the NBC Ch...

  Although a short-lived anthology, The Radio City Playhouse stories and production were a match for anything from the Tiffany Network The competition between the NBC and CBS Radio Networks was one of the great rivalries of corporate America, on par with Ford vs Chevy, Pizza Hut vs Domino's, Marvel vs DC Comics, McDonald's vs Burger King, or Coke vs Pepsi. It is a story of innovation, imitation, strong personalities, and more than a few lucky breaks for each side. It is difficult to determine which network came out on top as the competition evolved into the broadcast TV market, but we can state that the overall winner was the audience. One huge programming victory that the "Tiffany Network" enjoyed was in Anthology Programs. Although NBC's University Programs put out some great dramas, they could not match the artistic or commercial triumphs of CBS's Columbia Workshop , Escape , or Suspense . However, as TV was beginning to cut into Radio's domina...

Ma Perkins was not the first radio program to use continuing story lines to build a loyal audience. It was not the first serial drama to be directed at housewives during daytime broadcast hours, it was not the first show whose characters dispensed "country wisdom", it was not even the first show of the sort to come from the " Hummert Radio Factory ". It was, however, one of the very first radio shows sponsored by a Proctor & Gamble product, Oxydol, and Oxydol was, that's right, soap. Formed when a candle maker and his soap maker brother in law realized that they were competing for the same resources in 1837, P&G was one of the first American companies to realize the value of branding and advertising. One of the company's major successes was supplying soap and candles to the Union Army during the Civil War. They made it a point to stamp the crates carrying their products with their 'moon and stars' logo, and soldiers from around the country...

 Have you listened to every episode of Dragnet ? Here's some quick facts you can draw from the show. Joe Friday ... lived with his mom carries a badge was an avid smoker takes his coffee black WWII veteran liked to date a policewoman (SHE makes the first move), but his mom gives him the third degree... relationship progresses ... unknown loved talking about weather [its often "cold in Los Angeles"] was something of a sports fan including baseball and football gave his Alma mater a speech about how booze and drugs turn kids bad loves dogs, but has two cats given to him by Ben Romero asks people to repeat what they just said [maybe he is hard of hearing because or maybe just a slow writer to write down what they said in his notebook?] familiar with San Francisco and Phoenix is a total city boy. In a episode where Friday and Romero go to a farmhouse in the Valley one night, they walk behind the house and enter a darkened...

 Radio listeners got to know a pretty important geography of important addresses over the years. There was 79 Wistful Vista , Dodge City , The Big Town , The B-Bar-B Ranch, the Melody Ranch , 6121 Sunset Blvd (CBS Columbia Square in Los Angeles), 30 Rockefeller Center (NBC Radio City, New York ), Maybeland (home of the Cinnamon Bear ), and the little town of Summerfield (where Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve serves as water commissioner). Few addresses were as exclusive or was well listened to as Allen’s Alley . Fred Allen was one of many vaudeville veterans to make the transition to from life on the road to life in front of the microphone. Allen was also one of the first to realize that even though the vaudevillians were getting the majority of the laughs in the early years of commercial radio, radio was not and never would be vaudeville! He could not understand why some of his fellow radio comics would perform while wearing funny hats or costumes, the audience at home couldn...