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iPod Mercury Theater

Alan recently bought a great collection of old time radio shows. He let me copy them to my iPod and they are fantastic. One CD was of a show called Lights Out and it is one of the funniest things I've ever heard. It's billed as a half hour radio horror show and some of the plots are just awful. It was written and hosted by Arch Oboler back in the late '30s and a lot of the sound effects are really creepy, but the voice acting and plots are ridiculous. Except for Boris Karloff, who shows up in some of the later episodes. I love this quote from The Astounding B Movie:

Even as Welles shocked much of the nation with the unforgettable War of the Worlds sham, so did Oboler incite panic with an episode detailing the horror of a giant, undulating chicken heart.

Yes! Chicken Heart!

He also got an Orson Welles CD and these shows are incredible. They are basically hour long shows of famous books adapted for radio drama by Orson Welles and the sound effects and especially the voice acting is amazing. I've listened to The Count of Monte Cristo and Hell on Ice, which is a true story of a ship to the arctic getting stuck in ice for two years. They are extremely well done and it's sad that they only did it during '38 and not any longer than that.

I'm liking this stuff so much that I think it would be cool to do something like this as a podcast. Right now all the podcasts are set up as talk shows, but what about hittin' the old school and doing a radio drama. It would be easy to mix the voice and sound effects after you record it all onto and iBook and then convert to MP3 and release to the world! It'll also let me write more for real world consumption. And since I'm competing with Lights Out, I won't have to worry about anybody laughing at me. Nothing worse than this stuff.

Oh, sure. 'It's classic.' But it's classically bad.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 at 11:50 am by Joe and is filed under General, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Its a nack Joe. As with anyone growing up in the Television age, we have been used to the pictures being provided to us along with the dialogue. Book readers generally find it easier to get involved in a story because their imaginations haven't had that break. With Television, anything you miss in the dialogue is explained in your mind with the pictures provided by television. With books and Old Time Radio, you supply the pictures. I find it very interesting as I only discovered Old Time Radio 5 years ago but have been an avid reader all my life. I have watched my family struggle with listening to Old Time Radio.

    When I listen to Jimmy Stewart in The Six Shooter, I find it very easy to picture because I have seen Jimmy Stewart in hundreds of movies. How did people before movies, picture such characters? Where did their imaginations get the pictures? How different were the pictures? Interesting thoughts, or at least interesting to me :)

    Ian
  • Joe
    At the moment you are still listening as though it were an audiobook.


    Ah, interesting. I hadn't really thought about that before, but you might be right. I have noticed that the Mercury Theatre clips were always better at drawing me in though, because of the sound effects and better narration. I think I'm having a hard time getting into the world of Lights Out because it's lacking the narration part. I'll try getting deeper into why that is.

    The Clayborne show looks really interesting too. I'll check that out soon.

    Thanks!
  • The more you listen to Old Time Radio, you will find that you can sink into that time frame without the bias of years of Television and Movies. The shows will become less corny as your imagination takes over. At the moment you are still listening as though it were an audiobook. Become absorbed and let your mind provide the pictures and you will find that the spaces become filled by your imagination. There is a lot of treasure out there waiting for you to discover it.

    For a more modern radio drama of around 1998 vintage. This site http://clayborne.blogspot.com/ is podcasting a New Zealand Scifi drama of 96 episodes. The first 2 episodes have just been made available.

    Ian
  • Joe
    The Thing on the Fourble Board was a good one. Alan has told me that Quiet, Please is a better series than Lights Out. I'll be checking out more of those.

    With Lights Out, I've listened to The Little People and Cat Wife also. They are very ridiculous pieces. I can't say that Lights Out is my kind of thing. I'm not really into horror anyway.

    I've also been listening to Abbott and Costello. I'm really into goofy humor and word play and this stuff is the original.

    Thanks for pointing to those sites. I'll be scavenging those for a while. Alan might be interested though. I'll let him know about your collection.
  • Don't give Oboler and his friends too hard a time, friend. Remember that the media had totally different aspirations, influences and restrictions compared to today, and there are some truly wonderful old radio plays. The "Chicken Heart" one is ridiculous, granted (in fact, it was a bit of an inside joke), but he and his team did some amazing stuff over the years. For example, check out some of the episodes of "Quiet Please", especially The Thing on the Fourble Board. At lot of the ideas are cliched today, but at the time, they were no more so than the words of Shakespeare when he wrote his. (Not to compare Old Time Radio with Shakespeare in terms of quality, but in terms of setting a precident that lingers to this day.) If you're interested in learning more about OTR,
    drop me a line. I have about 4000 shows collected over many years, if that gives you any indication of my (former) degree of devotion to that fascinating old medium.

    (By the way, you'll find plenty of MP3s from the Mercury Theater and its successor --also Welles and team-- Campbell Playhouse, at http://www.unknown.nu/mercury/ .)

    dj
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