Showing results by author "Radio Shows of the Past!" in All Categories

Screen Directors Playhouse (sometimes written as Screen Directors' Playhouse) is an American radio and television anthology series which brought leading Hollywood actors to the NBC microphones beginning in 1949.The radio program broadcast adaptations of films, with original directors of the films sometimes involved in the productions, although their participation was usually limited to introducing the radio adaptations and taking a brief "curtain call" with the cast and host at the end of the program. During the 1955–56 season, the series was seen on television, focusing on original ...

Arch Oboler's Plays is a radio anthology series written, produced and directed by Arch Oboler. Minus a sponsor, it ran for one year, airing Saturday evenings on NBC from March 25, 1939, to March 23, 1940, and revived five years later on Mutual for a sustaining summer run from April 5, 1945, to October 11, 1945.Lewis Titterton, an executive at NBC, originated the program's title. Titterton was described as a man who "thought the future of radio depended on the vision of the writer." With the launching of Arch Oboler's Plays, Oboler became "the first writer accorded name-in-the-title ...

Quiet, Please! was a radio fantasy and horror program created by Wyllis Cooper, also known for creating Lights Out. Ernest Chappell was the show's announcer and lead actor. Quiet, Please debuted June 8, 1947, on the Mutual Broadcasting System, and its last episode was broadcast June 25, 1949, on the ABC. A total of 106 shows were broadcast, with only a very few of them repeats.Earning relatively little notice during its initial run, Quiet, Please has since been praised as one of the finest efforts of the golden age of American radio drama.Professor Richard J. Hand of the ...

The program shows us just how fragile liberty and justice can be. These stories of everyday events are still interesting, even after 50 years. Stories of criminal liability, legal wills, buying on installment, and leasing an apartment. Each story is well written, and the acting, though dated and a bit hokey by today’s standards, still manages to achieve the desired effect.Not much information is available for this series, it was apparently broadcast on a limited basis, and originated on WMAQ Chicago, an NBC station. It was comprised of thirteen episodes, twelve of which are currently ...

The play involves several elderly Jewish men from the old country, Russia, all members of a small synagogue in Mineola, Long Island. The play opens with the hapless Sexton's daily quest to gather ten males to constitute a minyan required in Jewish tradition to conduct a religious service. This search has suddenly become critical as the granddaughter of one of the men has apparently become possessed by the spirit of a dybbuk, an evil spirit. The grandfather leaves the girl sitting in the office of the temple's young rabbi, who is progressive and not likely to believe in the existence of ...

Rocky Fortune is an American radio drama that aired weekly on NBC Radio beginning in October 1953. The series ended its run in March 1954 after 25 episodes. The program was created by George Lefferts. Frank Sinatra voiced the title role of Rocky Fortune for the entire series.Rocky Fortune aired Tuesday nights on NBC at 9:35 pm Eastern, immediately following Dragnet (and a five-minute John Cameron Swayze newscast). It was a sustaining series, meaning that NBC presented the program without corporate sponsorship. The premiere episode, "Oyster Shucker", originally aired on October 6,...

Murder by Experts is a 1936 mystery thriller novel by the British writer Anthony Gilbert, the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson. It launched her long-running series featuring the shady London lawyer and detective Arthur Crook. Although she had been writing since 1926 this was her first major popular success. The plot revolves around collectors of Chinese antiques.

The period 1948-1950 brought major changes to network radio, as CBS hired a number of stars from NBC in what some have called "talent raids". Some of the top performers who changed networks were Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Edgar Bergen, and the husband-and-wife duo George Burns and Gracie Allen. One result of the changes was that 12 of the 15 highest-rated radio programs at the end of 1949 were on CBS. Harold Peary did not find such success, however. Peary switched to CBS, while the program in which he had starred, The Great Gildersleeve, stayed on NBC. Those changes resulted in a new ...

The Campbell Playhouse (1938–1940) is a live CBS radio drama series directed by and starring Orson Welles. Produced by Welles and John Houseman, it was a sponsored continuation of The Mercury Theatre on the Air.The series offered hour-long adaptations of classic plays and novels, as well as adaptations of popular motion pictures.When Welles left at the end of the second season, The Campbell Playhouse changed format as a 30-minute weekly series that ran for one season (1940–41).

Counterspy was an espionage drama radio series that aired on the NBC Blue Network (later ABC) and Mutual from May 18, 1942, to November 29, 1957. David Harding (played by Don MacLaughlin) was the chief of the United States Counterspies, a unit engaged during World War II in counterintelligence against Japan's Black Dragon and Germany's Gestapo. United States Counterspies was a fictional government agency devised by the program's creator, Phillips H. Lord after Lord "had a certain amount of difficulty with J. Edgar Hoover over story content in Gang Busters."[3] Mandel ...

The Buck Rogers comic strip had been commercially very successful, spawning novelizations and children's toys, and King Features Syndicate decided to create its own science fiction comic strip to compete with it. At first, King Features tried to purchase the rights to the John Carter of Mars stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. However, the syndicate was unable to reach an agreement with Burroughs. King Features then turned to Alex Raymond, one of their staff artists, to create the story.One source for Flash Gordon was the Philip Wylie novel When Worlds Collide (1933). The book's themes ...

The Big Show was an American radio variety program featuring 90 minutes of comic, stage, screen and music talent. It was aimed at keeping American radio in its classic era and making it robust against the rapidly growing television tide. For its year-and-a-half run (November 5, 1950 – April 20, 1952), the show's quality made Their ambitions seem plausible.

Webb, who had previously starred on the Mutual detective drama, Johnny Madero, Pier 23, played the title character, a private investigator working for Anthony J. Lyon (originally Wilms Herbert, later Herb Butterfield) at the International Detective Bureau. In the first incarnation of the series, Lyon was played by Wilms Herbert, while Webb's future Dragnet co-star, Barton Yarborough, played his co-worker, Joe Canto. This format continued until the end of the year, when Webb left the program. According to writer William Froug, Webb was fired for asking for too much money.[3] Police ...

The series was a Ziv Production, produced at RCA's New York studios and licensed by the Mutual Broadcasting System, and later, NBC's Red network. It lasted two seasons, 39 shows each (78 total) consisting mostly of radio adaptations of classic horror or supernatural stories written by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens. A few scripts were written specifically for the series. The production values were modest and The Weird Circle featured very little music.

Philo Vance is a fictional amateur detective originally featured in 12 crime novels by S. S. Van Dine in the 1920s and 1930s. During that time, Vance was immensely popular in books, films, and radio. He was portrayed as a stylish—even foppish—dandy, a New York bon vivant possessing a highly intellectual bent. "S. S. Van Dine" was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright, a prominent art critic who initially sought to conceal his authorship of the novels. Van Dine was also a fictional character in the books, a sort of Dr. Watson figure who accompanied Vance and chronicled his ...

This is the fascinating story of Dantro, The Planet Man, troubleshooter for the League of Planets organization, the law enforcement body for peace and justice in the celestial world -- whose headquarters and center of operations are situated on the capital of all planets, Planteria Rex. From Mercury to Pluto, where ever danger threatens the universe, you will find Dantro the Planet Man fighting for fair play. The Planet Man was a juvenile science ficton series of the 1950's transcribed and syndicated by Palladium Radio Productions. The stories are campy and predictable, but silly fun none ...

Originally portrayed by a white male actor, Marlin Hurt, Beulah Brown first appeared in 1939 when Hurt introduced and played the character on the Hometown Incorporated radio series and in 1940 on NBC radio's Show Boat series. In 1943, Beulah moved over to That's Life and then became a supporting character on the popular Fibber McGee and Molly radio series in March 1944.On July 2, 1945, Beulah was spun off into her own radio show on CBS, The Marlin Hurt and Beulah Show, sponsored by Tums.Hurt was still in the role of Beulah, and also played the voice of Beulah's boyfriend, Bill ...

As the name implies, Hollywood Star Playhouse featured movie stars, as did a number of other old-time radio programs. A news brief announcing the premiere broadcast noted that the program would feature "a different top screen personality each week in original stories of mystery and adventure by leading Hollywood writers." Those stories were what distinguished this program from others, according to radio historian John Dunning. He wrote that the stories were "tense, original suspense plays well suited for the half-hour." Writers usually created scripts for specific stars. One story, The ...

This is a 13 episode radio show that aired in 1952. it telss the tales of important events in the history of growing and expanding the American continent.

Fire Fighters was a syndicated series produced by Cincinnati’s William F. Holland Productions, Inc. in 1948. It was aired in various markets from coast-to-coast, including Portland, OR, Omaha, NE, and Washington, D.C., into the early 1950s. It followed the adventures of rookie firefighter Tim Collins and fire chief Bob Cody. Written by Frank Jones, Fire Fighters starred Cameron Prud’Homme and Lyle Sudrow.