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!

War Of The Worlds (excerpt)

Here's an excerpt of "War Of the Worlds", done at the Waukegan Public Library a few years ago. This one was received very well - in fact, since we played period music before the show to help set the mood, and we "interrupted" the music with this newscast, we stayed very much in character with the original broadcast...and keeping in mind of our original TOTM goals, we slipped in a tiny bit of historical truth along with the entertainment.

ENJOY!

Kazoo Factory

Here's the ol' TOTM'ers doing a bit of Bob and Ray - Wally Ballou visits a kazoo factory!

Thethethe Planetanetanet Mananan...

Here's one of our takes on the excellent "Planet Man"...juvenile radio scifi adventure just doesn't get any better than this stuff!

TOTM Shoe, er, Show

Okay, so after TOO LONG a hiatus (so please don't HATE US! Har har!), there will be a Theatre Of The Mindless show at the Waukegan Yacht Club, on May 15th, at 7pm. Tickets are $12 at the door, they should also be available online at the Waukegan Community Players website, here. I also hear that the dinners at the Yacht Club are excellent - you may want to call ahead for dinner reservations, and have a bite to eat before the show. Best to watch this space for any further information or changes...we hope to see you there!

Dave Warren Award

This past weekend at the Cincinnati Old Time Radio Convention, I was the very proud recipient of the Dave Warren Award. Given to "those who preserve Old Time Radio by bringing it alive through re-creations", this award means SO much to me - that is what this is all about: OTR and audio drama are ARTFORMS...granted, they can be entertaining, but how amazing is it that waves of compressed air can travel to your ears and create pictures, characters, intrigue, laughter, thrills?

I never got to meet Dave Warren, I wish I had. Evidently, in addition to his OTR re-creations from the '70's on, he was quite a good artist. If you had bought any of a number of OTR cassette collections from Adventures In Cassettes, you had seen his work. And he did tons of black and white covers for the Old Time Radio Digest. And, of course, he was managing director for the Dave Warren Players, an OTR group that continues to this day.

I barely know what I said when I accepted the award. I know that I thanked my father, for introducing me to Old Time Radio in the 1970's.

Big HUGE thanks to all of the past and present members of the Theatre Of The Mindless group: no single person could get an award for re-creations without being surrounded and supported by enormously talented people...so THANK YOU Jason Clark, Heidi Feldkirchner, Shawn and Virginia Fitzgerald, Laura Jansen, Bob Jeunger, Mark Kettner, and Chris Wild! And to the two old guys, Hank and Jim, who are there for every one of our rehearsals and shows, sitting next to each other, enjoying the perfomances, proud that they passed the artform down to us, so that we can do the same for others...

And THANKS to all who have come to see our shows - hopefully, we have either re-lit an old sputtering flame (for you old-timers who remember OTR), or begun a fresh warm fire (for you newbies who were just born too late). This is all for you.

Thanks again.

The Farther Adventures Of CRIMEBUSTER

Is that a banana in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?

Waaaaaaaay back when (in 2001 or 2002) we did a fundraiser for the NARA News. NARA (the North American Radio Archives) had a quarterly digest in which they would print radio scripts by a funny fellow named Ken Weigel. Mr Weigel passed away in 2001, so as a sort of tribute, we strung a bunch of these scripts together and "performed" them on cd.

The disk had seven short adventures of the bumbling-forgetful-idiotic-lovable gumshoe named CRIMEBUSTER ("Oh, I DO have gum on my shoe, darnit...Hmm...mmm...Mm. Spearmint."), plus a few other humorous oddities.

Now some collectible items are made as Limited Editions, with runs of thousands, or maybe even only hundreds. Be advised that this cd is BEYOND RARE, as it's print run was only in the range of "several". Doesn't mean it wasn't good, though!

Click the player below to hear "The Case Of The Strange Waiter"!

Stiffman's Selection

Another advertisement from our sponsor, Earl Stiffman, of Earl Stiffman's Just Caskets..And More. He's nothing if not..."accommodating".

Click HERE, or use the gigantic player below:

Our Sponsor, Earl Stiffman

So since it's our TENTH year performing, we figgered it was high time we gave props to our seemingly eternal sponsor, Earl Stiffman (of Earl Stiffman's "Just Caskets...And More"). He's been hawking his wares with us for so long, it seems like HE'S ONE OF US.

Where would we be without you, Earl? Thanks so much!

Click the Texan salutation below to hear one of Mr Stiffman's distinctive TOTM advertisements.

"HOW-DEE!"

Or try out the new H * U * G * E Humyo player:

Another Paper Premium!

Here's a shot (taken at a remote spot on the lunar surface, obviously!) of the 1940 Buck Rogers Rubber Band Gun! Originally offered by Onward School Supplies, this is a parody version offered by TOTM. Although I printed this onto cardstock and reinforced it with a layer of clear packing tape, it is still pretty flimsy. If you intend to use yours more than a few times, I would suggest printing it on regular paper and then gluing the paper to heavier stock (like a cereal box, or a comic book backing board). And even though this probably wasn't a radio premium (just a local business premium), Buck Rogers was on the radio. And I thought it was cool. So there. Try it out!

Last Calendar THIS YEAR...

Here's your nifty-keen super-spiffy tongue-in-cheek smoking-Santa December calendar! Who else but TOTM would give away such pop-culture two-for-one American Social Icons as Santa Claus and Lucky Strike in such a thought-provoking non-revisionist manner as this handsome useful calendar?

That thoughtful card reads: "A gift of pleasure. My spirit - the spirit of Christmas giving - is abroad in the land. A gift that expresses that spirit, and brings pleasure to every home, both great and small, is rare indeed. Such a gift, my friends, is Lucky Strike. (signed) Santa Claus"
A carton of smokes makes the perfect Christmas gift for anyone!

As Bender's old man said in "The Breakfast Club":

"HEY, SMOKE UP, JOHNNY!"

Four Mugs

"Four Mugs" - No, not a set of coffee receptacles...a so-so promo photo in slo-mo of Jojo, Bobo, Coco, and Toto. HOHO! Alright, then...seriously: here's a shot of four of the five male TOTM'ers. Let's see, there's Shawn Fitzgerald, Bob Juenger, Christopher Wild, and yours truly, Stephen Jansen (I'm the one wearing the hat). Where's Jason Clark? Probably behind the camera.

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.

More TOTM Audio

Okay, better late than never, right? Here's some newer, pseudo-original Theatre Of The Mindless audio buffoonery for y'all! This one is just a few months old, and we've only done it a few times. Hopefully you will enjoy it!

I say this one is pseudo-original; quasi-original; original-ish; original-like; original-esque; a pastiche of an original, if you will...okay, what it is, is an adaptation of a groovy old comic book story. Also, it ain't "buffoonery", it's HEAVY DRAMA and HORROR. I'm not kidding. It's creepy.

We did this live on stage for about 120 people, they are extremely quiet throughout, until the end when they "get it", and the very end with the applause (of course, we probably prompted that a bit with the "APPLAUSE" sign, but that's beside the point...). We got a very good recording from this live show.

I spent a bit of time going through the secondary mixed-down recording, deleting a few vocal double takes, removing a few coughs and page turns, and so on...then a bit more time adding a few sound effects here and there to accent the ones we had already done on stage (they seldom have the same punch "on tape" as they have live). I call this "tarting it up". That's not the professional term, it's just what I call it.

Listen to the finished product by clicking HERE.

Or the giant player here:


And we're looking forward to hearing your comments (click the word "COMMENTS" at the bottom of this entry to leave one) - THANKS!

November Calendar

Here is the November calendar - no TOTM shows this month (yet), so there's none listed (yet). Feel free to hire us, the contact info is hidden somewhere near the bottom in very tiny print. Whew. Got this one in just under the wire(less)!

This is Burns and Allen. George and Gracie. George Burns. And. Gracie Allen. She actually did run for President (sort of) in 1940, as a member of the "Surprise" party.

Okay, here's a bit of TOTM history for you - an original piece that we did our first year (izzat NINE YEARS AGO?!?). Be forewarned: this is NOT one of the newer, mindblowing pieces that we're working on right now, but a rather flawed amateur production...there's plenty wrong with this one, but there's also plenty that's cool.

"The Seven Dogs Of Death" was written by Shawn Fitzgerald, and features several of the current TOTM members, plus Heidi Feldkirchner and Mark Kettner (full credits at the end of the show...and I still wince because I badly mispronounced Heidi's last name - sorry!). Done in the harder-to-edit analog tape days, this horror tale hasn't been heard (live or recorded or otherwise) for many years.

Give it a listen. Leave a comment. Use it as a way to measure how much we've improved, once you hear the newer stuff.

It was tons of fun to do. Now I'll have to dig up "Dear Old Dad", a horror monologue that we did before this one. That one's so bad it's good. Yeah, man, where'd I put that cassette? What do you mean, "What's a cassette?"?

CLICK HERE to hear it, or right click and "Save Link As" to save it.

October Calendar

Here's the brand-new calendar for the brand-new month! Be sure to check out Saturday the 13th - that's our next show! A fundraiser for the Waukegan Public Library! Waukegan being Jack Benny's home town, you can check out the bronze statue of him just a few blocks from the library, right across the street from the now-fabulously-redone Genesee Theater. Click HERE for a few pics of the statue from the Hughes family - hmm...somehow Karen has made Mr Benny's ghost appear, and he doesn't look a day over thirty-nine!

HERE is a map to the place, in case you didn't already happen to know where this internationally famous library sits.

This is early enough in October to NOT be completely classified as a Halloween show. There will be some scary stuff, and some funny stuff. And maybe some cool historical stuff...and possibly some literary stuff, but don't worry, we'll crush it up and mix it with some honey in a spoon so it's more palatable.

Print this calendar and put it up on the fridge so you don't forget to come to the show - THANKS!

Building Better Bickersons

We prefer to present a relatively true-to-life Old Time Radio experience when we perform - utilizing real-world music (that's the multitalented Virginia Fitzgerald on the keyboards) and live sound effects wherever possible (not pre-recorded). And although the major impetus of our shows is that the audience has FUN, a secondary objective is that we actually educate - presenting little-known information and dispelling common myths about these great shows from the past.

Although sometimes we will make some changes to the old shows: for instance, a typical television comedy of today is paced with something like two laughs per minute. The typical OTR comedy had much more space between laughs, something like two to five minutes, depending on the show. For a Jack Benny Center fundraiser years ago, we decided to do a Drene Time "Bickersons" recreation. Now, the Bickersons (starring Kenosha, Wisconsin native Don Ameche and Frances Langford) are some of the funniest radio comedy shows ever done, especially since just about all of the adults in the audience can sympathize with both John and Blanche Bickerson, the snappily-married couple. But we thought that the pacing seemed to be just a tad slow for such hilarious bits to go over as well as they could. So our resident actor/scriptwriter Shawn Fitzgerald went ahead and created a hybrid episode, editing together the funniest bits from a dozen or so Bickersons shows. He somehow made these handfuls of unrelated comedy situations flow together as if they were originally written that way, even throwing in a few zingers of his own.

So what our audience heard that night was not actually a standard Bickersons episode, as they may have thought. It was (dare I say it?) BETTER - it had that one-two punch of multiple repeated laughs, one after the other, through the entire show...much more akin to what today's television-minded audience is used to.

So we broke our own rules a bit, to improve the show. Please don't be upset. We did it for you...you did enjoy it, didn't you? Thought so.

Doctor WHO?!?

Here is an example of why the word "MINDLESS" is part of our name. My sister, Laura, had some trouble with the line: "...just like Doctor Watson with Sherlock Holmes." This is a tiny excerpt from our recent recording sessions, from the upcoming adventure serial "Enigma, Incorporated".

The serial is definitely NOT a comedy like this blooper might suggest, but a science-based mystery/adventure for the grown-ups: think a mix of Doc Savage, I Love A Mystery, and Pat Novak (gosh, that IS setting the bar pretty high!). We're shooting for some REAL science, along with heavy mystery and action, and some smart-mouthed characters to lighten the mood along the way.

COMING TO A BLOG NEAR YOU SOON (this one, of course!)

Some Audio

Okay, now I'm cooking with gas - I've got a little tasty TOTM audio tidbit for you all! One of our short original ads from one of our shows at the Jack Benny Center For The Arts in Waukegan...done in (*gasp*) 2006! This one has Christopher Wild as the announcer, and stars versatile Virginia Fitzgerald (she plays live keyboard AND acts up a storm) as "Mom" and Laura Jansen (my sister who also acts up a storm, and writes up a few nice cloudbursts) as "Dottie". I'm even in there at the end for a quick line as "Dad".

Click Here for LyeCo Ad

Enjoy!

COMMENT!