Oh no you didn't...

The NBC mikes were a long
way from the days of playing
vaudeville for Jim and Marian
Jordan (Fibber McGee & Molly).

Oh yes we did.  XRB Radio said we needed another day of Christmas extravaganza, and the OTR Express was more than willing to comply, with 2 more shows from the vaults.

The first is a Fibber McGee and Molly program.  If there is such a thing as a homespun literate comedy, it would be FM&M.  From the bustling metropolis of Peoria, IL, Jim and Marian Jordan (FM&M) created these characters; latching on with writer Don Quinn turned this into one of the longest-running and best-loved comedies of all time.  Some remember it for the closet gag, but it was so much more than that. 

A rare photo of John
Brown, star of The
Damon Runyon Theatre

This Christmas show is no different from the show's other offerings; a great litany of jokes and characters that the McGees run into on the way to the post office.

Our second helping is a Damon Runyon Theatre show, called Dancing Dan's Christmas.  This syndicated program offered dramatizations of some of author Damon Runyon's famous characters.  Maybe you've seen Guys & Dolls?  Then you've seen some of Runyon's characters.  I love the DRT, though I warn you, if you listen to too many of them, you start talking in "dems" and "dozes".

What's Thanksgiving...

One avid listener sent this photo of herself,
after realizing that the much-anticipated
Thanksgiving episode was not to be.

...without a little snafu?  Your glamorous host sat in Studio C of the XRB Radio studios the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and recorded a beautiful show.  Unfortunately, what went out over the air was an Old Time Radio Express show from back in September.

But on the bright side, we get to all extend Thanksgiving for another week and soak up some more turkey-day OTR.  And your host gets a break this Sunday eve, as his work from last week is (should be) going out over the XRB airwaves.

Enjoy the fixin's!

Johnny Dollar, Schizophrenic

Edmond O'Brien shown in his
younger years, pre-Hollywood
success...

No offense, Johnny, but 6 different actors in 14 years (not counting the 2 audition shows by Dick Powell and Gerald Mohr)?  You had more personalities than Sybil.

This week, we compare 2 of the more famous Dollars - one by a Hollywood veteran who freelanced in radio (and did a better job of it than most movie actors can say) and one by a radio guy.

Edmond O'Brien, our Hollywood star (yes, he was a star back then), played in some of the great box office hits, like "White Heat" and "Wild Bunch" and some lesser-known gems, like "The Hitch-hiker". He also starred as Johnny Dollar for two years.  He was good, though Dollar didn't have a lot of character in his run.  

....and Mandel Kramer, shown much
later in life, in his TV years on
"The Guiding Light"

Exhibit B is Mandel Kramer.  Kramer, the radio guy, gave Dollar sort of a cheshire cat grin/devil may care attitude.  Kramer was allowed to have a little fun with the role, as folks were turning off their radios and turning on their televisions.  If no one's listening, you may as well enjoy yourself. 

Sounds like Kramer has adopted the motto of the Old Time Radio Express.  Hey, whichever one of my personalities said that, quiet down!

Old Time Radio Obscurities...

This week on the Old Time Radio Express, your host brings you a couple of old time radio related obscurities.

First is Words With Music, a show with words...and music.  In this episode, we hear "The Gift of the Magi".  It's an interesting story and presentation, and you'll learn a little about the story's author as well as confectionary history on the program.



The next obscurity is A Voice in the Night starring an "internationally famous stage, screen and supper club star".  I'll leaving you guessing as to who it is. 



Here's a hint of who your "Voice in the Night" star is...
What, still no idea?



It's a night of old time radio that even the most ardent OTR fan might not have heard before.  So click on the title above, and enjoy!

Criminals Beware...

For tonight, on the Old Time Radio Express, they will feel the sting of The Green Hornet...and be outsmarted by gentleman detective Philo Vance.

Just click on the title of this blog posting, for an hour's worth of old time radio.

The Green Hornet was once billed as the crime fighter who took down criminals that "even the G-Men couldn't catch".  G-Men, a forerunner of the FBI, didn't take too kindly to the perception that there were criminals that would elude them, so the intro changed.  However, the Hornet's effectiveness was not diminished.

This week, we have "The Hornet Does It", in which the Hornet is framed for a hijacking he didn't commit.

On Philo Vance, the organist gets a workout, as this program lives up to all the cliches of an old radio detective show (sharp organ interludes, a detective whose every deduction is spot on, cops that are incredibly daft, and the obvious suspects never being guilty).   And yet, "The Green Girls Murder Case" is just as enjoyable as it must have been when it was broadcast back in 1949.  Enjoy, and check back next week for more great old time radio...

The War of the Worlds - A Halloween Classic

No, it's not the 2005 Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise.  Nor is it the 1953 version starring Ray Bradbury.  Nor is it even a very faithful adaptation of the 1898 H.G. Wells novel.

No, this is the Mercury Theatre on the Air's original vision of "The War of the Worlds".  To understand the impact it had on American society, take a listen to last week's show after you hear this one. 

So, in what has become tradition - we celebrate Halloween by playing "The War of the Worlds", starring Orson Welles and his Mercury players, on the Old Time Radio Express.

Mercury Month - Week #3



The Old Time Radio Express rolls out of the station tonight with two more shows featuring the talents of members of the Mercury Theatre troupe - George Coulouris and Edgar Barrier.

Coulouris is great in the WWII thriller,
"Watch on the Rhine", with Bette
Davis and Paul Muni.

Coulouris plays the title role in the B-grade detective show, Bulldog Drummond.  Despite the fact that Drummond ran for 8+ years, it is much less remembered nowadays than The Adventures of Sam Spade or The Adventures of Philip Marlowe.  The preservation of the majority of those shows on tape probably has a lot to do with it.

The film noir, "Cornered"
is on DVD and features
Edgar Barrier along with
crooner turned dramatic actor
Dick Powell.

Barrier and his distinctive voice narrate a "documentary" on the Pacific situation during WWII.  It's an interesting bit of radio, but if it's a documentary, then the term is used very loosely.

Enjoy! 

Mercury Month - Week #2

Bea Benaderet and Ray Collins are our featured Mercury players this week on the OTR Express.

Benaderet is featured in an early episode of The Great Gildersleeve on this week's show.  She also had a role as Gertrude Gearshift, a telephone operator who gave Jack Benny fits on The Jack Benny Show.  There, she met her second husband, Eugene Twombly, who was the sound effects man.  Sadly, after Benaderet died in 1968, Twombly died on the day of her funeral - four days after her death. 

Ray Collins was at his best playing the white collar heavy on film - the man whose voice threatened violence, but who would never carry out the dirty work himself.  On this program from Suspense called "Marry for Murder", he plays quite a different role, and one that shows his versatility.  I don't know why, but I had to pick one actor from Mercury who you might call Welles' right hand man, I would pick Ray Collins.

Sit back and enjoy these two greats! 

Mercury Month - Week #1

It's Mercury Month on the Old Time Radio Express.  It's a celebration of that crucible of acting talent known as the Mercury Theatre on the Air.  Under the thumb direction of the great Orson Welles, this troupe created one of the most famous radio plays of all time - The War of the Worlds.  Individually, the cast had success as well.

This week we feature shows starring two of the more famous Mercury players, Agnes Moorehead and Everett Sloane.

Moorehead may be best known for her role as Endora on "Bewitched", but she conquered just about every medium she tackled.  She was a superb radio actress, and an equally good film star, garnering 4 Academy Award nominations.  (Though not one of her most famous, try her in "Dark Passage" to see her at her scheming best. Bogie and Bacall ain't bad either...)

Sloane had a fine radio career, with weekly roles on some of the best shows of the era - The Shadow, Cavalcade of America, and Inner Sanctum Mysteries.  If you want to get a glimpse of Sloane on the screen, he has a wonderful role in The Lady From Shanghai.  (And Rita Hayworth ain't too bad to look at either...)

The Adventures of Nero Wolfe and The Strange Dr. Weird

Sydney Greenstreet played Nero Wolfe
for one season on radio.

This week we feature a detective who was, at one point, voted as a finalist for best detective in an ongoing series - Nero Wolfe.  (He ultimately lost to Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot).

The creation of a Noblesville, Indiana author, whose "Some Buried Caesar" Nero Wolfe mystery was named Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library's choice for "One Book, One City", Nero Wolfe was a corpulent, orchid-loving "foodie" who disliked leaving his comfortable, custom-made armchair, even to solve cases.

Wolfe came to radio at least 3 different times, none of which author Rex Stout particularly cared for.  (This was typical of the detective writers of the time.  Others like Hammett and Chandler were only loosely associated with the productions of the Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe series, associating their names with the programs for the sake of royalty checks, but otherwise despising the writing and, occasionally, the acting). 

But of the Wolfes to be on the air, Stout most enjoyed the characterization of the star we hear from this week - Sydney Greenstreet. 

Stick around after the Nero Wolfe episode for a nice Strange Dr. Weird mystery called "When Killers Meet".

Show #42 - Singer, Comedian, Newscaster and Superhero

Yep, we have it all here this week on the OTR Express.  Dennis Day kicks off the program with his eponymous sitcom, alternatively titled, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day.

A Day in the Life of Dennis Day gave the boyish sounding Day a chance to showcase his vocal and comedic talents, and the show we picked out for you this week has no fewer than 3 songs performed by Day.

The comedy is purely of the situational variety, but that doesn't make it bad. 

We then turn  our attention to the news of the day, with a radio broadcast from H.V. Kaltenborn.  If you watch any news commentary shows nowadays, then you'll see the descendants of the Kaltenborn school of broadcasting.  A very interesting man, and you can read more about him here:  http://www.otr.com/kaltenborn.shtml

Lastly, we have the national debut of Captain Midnight.  'Nuff said.  So gather round the radio, gang, (after drinking some rich chocolately Ovaltine, of course), and enjoy a night of old time radio.

Adventures by Morse - Conclusion to "A Coffin For the Lady"

We end the suspense this week on The OTR Express with the concluding chapter of ‘‘A Coffin for the Lady’’ on Adventures by Morse. We end the suspense this week on The OTR Express with the concluding chapter of “A Coffin for the Lady” on Adventures by Morse. What nefarious plot is Obbit up to? Can Captain Friday stop it? How does Judith Wright fit into all of this?

All those questions are answered in the first half of the show this week – yes, we’re nice enough to not keep you in suspense for the whole hour.

But you’ll want to stick around for our second offering – it’s a bit of forgotten, but inspiring American history.

Show #36 - The Best of Benny and Adventures by Morse, part 1

We've got a good mix of laughs and chills here on the Old Time Radio Express.

What better way to kick off the month of August (or any month for that matter) with Jack Benny?  This week, we get right to the good stuff, with four clips from a collection called "The Best of Benny". 

This was one of my earliest collections and the punchline "DOFRB" is still engrained in my head.  Listen and find out...

Then we follow up with part 1 of "A Coffin for the Lady" on Adventures by Morse.  Adventures by Morse may be only the third or fourth most popular show by writer Carlton E. Morse, but it's perfect for the OTR Express. 

Yes, ideally, we'd love to share a 20 episode serial from I Love a Mystery with you, but it would take us nearly half a year to do so.  That's a long time to keep anyone in suspense.

So we settle (and I use the term loosely) for Adventures by Morse, a 30-minute serial format show, with plots that ran in alternating 3 and 10 episode arcs. 

"A Coffin For the Lady" is a 3 episode storyline, and great adventure like only Morse could do.  The beginning of the story finds our heroes on a desolate island somewhere in remote Canada...

Do you think any of the kids are watching The Clock while Our Miss Brooks is teaching?

This week on the OTR Express, we wrap up our 4th of July celebration by finishing up Our Miss Brooks, with the inimitable Gale Gordon (pictured to the left) and Eve Arden playing key roles in the last half of the show.

Our second offering is The Clock, an nice strange mystery/what-if program in the same vein as The Whistler.  The Clock's history is sparse, and generally misunderstood, but we scrape aside the sands of time and try to unravel the mystery on this week's show.

Back in Black...

Another hot summer day and we celebrate with the color of the shimmering pavement outside...BLACK.

The Black Museum was a 52 episode BBC production whose main attributes are its gimmick (stories based on artifacts related to famous crimes worked on by Scotland Yard) and its narrator (American genius Orson Welles).  Likely Welles found himself lacking money while working on the movie Othello in Europe and agreed to record The Black Museum series for a little extra cash.  That would have been Wellesian.

Beyond the gimmicks, The Black Museum is standard crime fare spiced up by British sensibilities.

The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen is the second of the shows on the Old Time Radio Express.  Enjoy the episode of the "Fang Rubies and the Black Siamese".  Captain Philip Carney captained the ketch Scarlet Queen around the globe, finding adventure and beautiful women in every port.  One of my favorite shows. 

A quick bit of trivia about this particular show - Elliot Lewis as Carney plays opposite his lovely wife Cathy Lewis, as the beautiful but proper sister of the dead man.  The Lewises often worked in the same show, and the shows were the better for it.  Enjoy...

Show #17 of the OTR Express - "The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show" and "Lights Out!"

One might think being a ventriloquist on radio was an added skill for a comedian to have - not only could you tell jokes, but you had a prop there with you, a built-in counterpart for witty banter.  In fact, as Edgar Bergen found, ventriloquism was seen by many producers and evaluators of talent as something to be overcome. 

Well, Bergen successfully overcame this deficiency, if one could call it that, for 20 years on radio.  Charlie McCarthy was (and is) one of the best-loved figures on radio. 

I, like I'm sure many other children on hearing Bergen & McCarthy, checked out a book on ventriloquism from the library and tried to learn the tricks of the trade.  As I quickly learned (and didn't have the patience to overcome), speaking without moving your mouth isn't that hard until you get to the "B", "M" and "P".  Those are a bit trickier.  Poor Bergen... everytime Charlie called his name, he had do the "B" sound. 

Show #6 of the Old Time Radio Express - A Christmas Carol

This week on the Old Time Radio Express, you get very little of me and a very much of Lionel Barrymore, Orson Welles and great old time radio, in "A Christmas Carol" on The Campbell Playhouse.

I know you listen for various reasons - some love the radio and want less chatter from the host, and some are hearing OTR for the first time and like the tidbits.  This week, I'm giving you the best of both worlds - this episode is 60 solid minutes of some of the best OTR has to offer.  As a supplement, for those who want it, I'm posting an internet-only mini-OTR Express show with my thoughts on this program.  I'll also be sharing a much lesser known Christmas tale that I think you'll like.  I didn't plan it this way, but Orson Welles figures prominently in both programs.

Link: Show #6 - A Christmas Carol (Having a little difficulty with the typical podcast source, so bear with me!)

Enjoy!

Show #5 of the Old Time Radio Express - Let's Begin Celebrating Christmas!

Sorry for the delay in posting this, the December 13th podcast of the Old Time Radio Express.  Been a busy week here in Brownsburg!

I've packed a lot of good old time radio nuggets into this hour, and of course I hope you'll like all of it.  But if you don't, it won't be a few minutes before something you do like pops up.

We've got some well-known performers, like Jack Benny and Bing Crosby, and then some of lesser renown, like Dick "Two Ton" Baker, the Music Maker.  When you hear Two Ton Baker, you realize that while the national networks certainly captured the top talent, there was a slew of fantastic performers in all of the local markets.  It's a blessing that Two Ton's recordings were pressed onto transcription discs and sent out nationally for syndication, or his talents would have been lost to the airwaves.  Unfortunately, we're not as lucky with many similar performers.

Radio was indeed very regional.  Before coast-to-coast programming, local stations needed to produce their own entertainment, and a lot of them were very good.  One only has to look at WXYZ in Detroit, which locally produced  The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet and The Challenge of the Yukon - all later became OTR classics, but started locally in Detroit of all places.  Talent and imagination knows no geography.

Well, with all that said, click on the the blog posting title & enjoy this week's show...