OTRaoke - "The Voice Of Death"

So - what is "OTRaoke"?

Well, of course, "OTR" is an acronym for Old Time Radio.

"Karaoke" is a portmanteau of Japanese kara "empty", and okesutora "orchestra" - a form of interactive entertainment in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music using a microphone and public address system. The music is typically a well-known pop song minus the lead vocal. It is also a term used by recording engineers translated as "empty track" meaning there is no vocal track.

The acronymical-portmanteau "OTRaoke" means an entire Old Time Radio show (including music and sound effects) recorded without the star. Performers read the role of the star from a script, and their performance is superimposed on the recording, creating a show in which THEY ARE THE STAR. They take home a recording of their performance on cd, play it for friends and family, and become stars themselves! And for whatever reason, I thought that OTRaoke had a better ring to it than KaraOTR...

The Theatre Of The Mindless group has made up a handful of OTRaoke shows, which will be featured at this year's Cincinnati Old Time Radio Convention. Here is an excerpt from one of those shows - you can give it a try right now! Simply play the audio file, and read the lines labeled "Blanche". Blanche has been killing people at a ski resort (even though Blanche is evil, she's the star...and who doesn't like to play the villain?), and now she is feeling menaced by the ghost of one of her victims! You may want to right click and choose "Open In New Tab" or "Open In New Window" so this page remains active (so you can read the script below!)...

Link to file: Sample-VoiceOfDeath

You can stream directly from the player at the link, or download the file from the spot just below the player. If you download it, and open up the file info, you will see that the lines of the script are embedded within the mp3 file.

Here is the script for the sample:

**************************

DR WEIRD:
When the fifth day dawned bright and clear, Dan suggested a long ski run, and Blanche eagerly agreed. After skiing a few minutes, she called out...

BLANCHE:
(nervous) Dan! Dan, we - we aren't going through the canyon, are we?!?

DAN:
Why, of course we are.


BLANCHE:
D - Dan, let's go around it this time.

DAN:
That's three miles further on! What's wrong with going through the canyon? Oh, uh, is it because that's where Gerald died?

BLANCHE:
Yes, I - I can't do it Dan.

DAN:
Now, look, I - I hope you aren't brooding about Gerald's death, Blanche. You mustn't brood.

BLANCHE:
I - I - I'm not brooding, but I – Dan, have you heard a voice calling outside the house the last few nights?

DAN:
A voice?

BLANCHE:
Yes! I've waked up several times thinking I heard Gerald's voice, calling out in the storm!

DAN:
Oh, Blanche, look - you - you heard the wind howling. Now come on, will you? We've got to get through the canyon, that's the only way to counter your nerves.

MUSIC:
(Transition)

DAN:
That a girl! Now only another couple of hundred yards and we'll be out of the canyon.

BLANCHE:
Oh, let's hurry Dan! This is where it happened.

DAN:
Come on along, then, if you want to hurry.

GERALD:
(Ghost voice) Blanche...Blanche!

BLANCHE:
It's Gerald...it's Gerald's voice!

DAN:
(a little distant) Blanche, come on.

GERALD:
(ghost voice) Blanche...Blanche...this is where you killed me!

BLANCHE:
Oh no! No!

DAN:
(further distant) Blanche, why have you stopped? Come on!

GERALD:
(ghost voice) I'm dead, Blanche...you killed me!

************************

Please be aware that this version of OTRaoke at the convention is to be headphones-only: no P.A. speakers, no audience. Your performance will be recorded to cd, and you get the cd. Maybe in the future it will turn into more of a real karaoke style event, where an audience can listen and cheer and jeer (fun, right?).

So there you have it - a mixture of mid-century entertainment with 21st-century technology! Hopefully, it will be an interesting addition to the convention! Please drop by the booth, say "Hi!", and give it a try!

Little TOTM'ers

SO - after months of no posts (sorry!)...

My previous post was regarding some work we did at a local middle school, getting some of the youths a bit acquainted with a nearly-extinct artform: "Old Time Radio".

During the summer, we did another OTR class/demonstration for students who were lucky enough to be taking summer classes - and again, as before, almost none of youths knew what on earth Old Time Radio was. Well, as it turned out, there actually WAS one kid there who knew about OTR, and was a pretty big fan. But as for the rest of the class...absolutely no idea. Well, we fixed that! Now they know a Radio Orphan Annie decoder from a hole in the ground (which is where you can find ROA decoders, if you dig in the right places!).

Well, long story longer, I'd carted my equipment (microphones and scripts and sound effects and decoders and so on) home, and didn't quite get to putting it all away immediately. And one Friday night, when my nieces and nephew dropped over to the house for a sleep-over, that "pile of stuff" got some interested looks...

Talk about different art projects to keep the kids busy!

They enjoyed digging through the mountain of sound effects objects (trying all of them along the way, of course), and picking out the ones that would be used in the goofy horror show we'd picked out - "The Strange Doctor Weird - The Voice Of Death!". After I did a little coaching about using different voices, turning pages quietly, and microphone technique, we picked out roles, highlighted the scripts, did a single read-through, and then recorded this (which includes editing and added music and extra pre-recorded sound effects):



WOW! I actually got the kids to read! And act! And learn a handful of new vocabulary words! And have fun! And they even helped me put away my sound effects stuff, too! What a bunch of good kids.

There's no reason for OTR to ever die. It just needs to keep being introduced.

To Make A Long Story Longer...

There were only five issues of the "Mysterious Traveler" magazine, based on Mutual's famous radio program. Each digest-sized issue had a wonderfully horrific Norm Saunders pulp-like cover with a damsel in distress (that's putting it lightly!).





There they are, scanned right from my own set. Click on them if you'd like to see them big. So now for the long story with the ultra-wispy tenuous thread barely connecting things: When I was but a boy, in the early 1970's, I had a favorite book titled "Ghosts And More Ghosts". It was filled with about a dozen tales that scared the living daylights out of me. I held on to that book, and the oddly pleasant creepiness that I felt every time I read the stories inside.

Flash forward to my thirties, getting together with friends and starting an audio performance troupe called Theatre Of The Mindless... we needed some different stories to perform along with the OTR recreations...maybe some adaptations of existing stories? "Ah hah!" I said to myself, "Maybe something from that great old book 'Ghosts And More Ghosts'!"

So I flipped through my well-worn copy, searching for a suitable tale to mold into radio drama. I stopped at "The Rose Crystal Bell", a haunting story about a magical bell that brings the dead back to life, with the delightful twist that another life must fill the void immediately thereafter. Somebody gets to live, somebody else must die. Oooooh, creepy.

I got right to work on my adaptation, surprised at the relative ease at which I translated the book's text into radio script form. "I guess I really have a knack for this!". M-hm. We performed the show, and it was received pretty well...better than one might expect, coming from a junior-high-level book of ghost stories, anyway.

Flash ahead a little further to a point where I have the internet and a more serious interest in the history of OTR. I happen to do a search for the author of my old book, Robert Arthur Jr. He happens to be a rather prolific writer, creator of the 1960's series of chapter books "The Three Investigators", plenty of mystery and ghost stories in detective pulp magazines...he also paired up with David Kogan, and the two of them wrote TONS OF EPISODES (500 or so!) of several classic radio programs: "The Strange Doctor Weird", and (you guessed it) "The Mysterious Traveler".

No wonder it wasn't that hard to "adapt" his story to radio. It probably CAME from a radio script.

Synchronicitous.

Serendipitous.

Diplodocus.