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:

Some Words About The ART Of Audio Drama

"In the late fifties it was decided that you couldn't broadcast dreams on the air unless you transmitted pictures with it. This, despite the fact that radio had become the most popular mass entertainment medium of all time. The basic appeal of radio drama was the fact that you had to listen if you wanted to follow it. It wasn't enough to merely "hear" it. You had to listen. The word listen implies a conscious effort to pay attention, to participate. Thus, all the senses are activated, the curiosity is sparked, the imagination is fired, and the listener finds himself participating. In a real sense, he is a collaborator. In his brain he matches a face and a body to the voice. In his mind, he sees the action. And this is the basic difference between radio on the one hand, and every visual medium on the other. A good movie, a fine stage play or television drama, an excellent ballet, all these require an appreciative audience - a listener who literally works with the writer, the director, the actors and technicians to give completeness to the creative process.
It can fairly be said that along about the same time that radio drama disappeared, there came about a general decay in the art of listening. If you don't believe it, "listen" to some of the nonsense that's being spouted in all fields of endeavor and in all walks of life. This kind of talk is being inflicted upon us, because, in my opinion, people aren't really listening.
The most popular word in our language is now Communication. We deplore the fact that we no longer seem to be able to communicate with our children, our parents, our allies, industry, labor, each other.
How can we communicate if we no longer listen? A radio show has listeners, a television show has "viewers". Listening is an activity. Viewing is an event. Of course, there is room and need for all the entertainment media - and happily, a regrettable error made some [time] ago is slowly and hopefully being rectified. To me, it was incomprehensible that a flourishing and, yes, a spiritually nourishing, art form should have been allowed to die."

These thoughts echo mine.

They are from the introduction to the book "Strange Tales From CBS Radio Mystery Theater", written by the indomitable Himan Brown. THIRTY TWO years ago. 1976. This radio revival series ran from 1974 to 1982, logging some 1,400 shows (!). Originally hosted by E. G. Marshall, of which, here is a pic:

The Man On The Radio Told Me To Save My Fat

Some cool wartime stuff, generally completely forgotten by today's generation. Look! Right there at 2:06 - Mickey's prepared to kill some nasty Nazis, with the help of Minnie's leftover bacon grease. Today the grease only kills by clogging our arteries...oh, well.

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:

More "Those We Love"

Okay, here's the rest of that rare script from the mostly-forgotten washboard weeper "Those We Love". Took me long enough, huh?!?

Anyway, here it is. What's nice about this script, besides it being terribly uncommon, is that it is evidently a very early draft - which shows the notes and changes that the author made. Since almost no audio of this series exists, these scripts are as close as we can come to hearing the show...

And all in all, not a bad show, either! For a soap opera, anyway...wait'll I break out the lost scripts to "Latitude Zero"!

"The Linkup" STINKS

Once upon a time there was an online filesharing/backup company called Streamload. It was good - offered quality service at a good price, even offered freebie filesharing.

Then the company changed into MediaMax. It was not as good - service was nowhere near as good as it was, MANY important files "backed up on secure servers" were lost, never to be seen or heard again, very poor customer service, but we paying customers still had hopes that it might return to it's former quality.

Now the company has changed into "The Linkup". It is just plain NO GOOD. Service is essentially NONEXISTANT. ALL the remaining files from MediaMax have been lost, absolutely nothing is accessable. No links to files work: the audio that you may try listening to on this blog is GONE, although I have PAID for a service that guarantees the files to be there.

While I am trying to get my money refunded from these thieves, I will also try to find another (quality) backup company to store my files, so that they can once again be shared with my blog visitors.

My apologies for the technical difficulties.

DO NOT USE "THE LINKUP". AVOID THIS SHADY COMPANY AT ALL COSTS. DO NOT DEPEND ON THEM TO KEEP YOUR FILES SAFE. BE SURE TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE.

Cincy OTR Convention!

Only six weeks until the Cincinnati Old Time Radio Convention! It's great fun! It's a very homey atmosphere with a bunch of friendly people. It's the place to go if you're looking for a particular show, or some inside information on what's cooking in the OTR community. Vintage stuff like comics and movie posters and Saturday morning serials on dvd. My sister and I never miss it - you oughtn't either! A splendid time is guaranteed for all! I even hear that there will be some OTRaoke: prerecorded radio shows with the star's roles open for anyone to fill in! Always wanted to be that hardboiled detective yourself? Now you can!

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!

Here we have a 1943 Lone Ranger "Cryptograph Decoder", all set for the 2007 audience (both of you!). Of course, since it was wartime in 1943, many homefront resources were reserved for the war effort...hence the disappearance of those substantial metal decoders, leaving reams of disappointing paper ones in their wake. If there were ever any rubber or beefsteak decoders, they would have gone away, too.

*Sigh*

Anyway, simply print this out (you could use CARDSTOCK if you'd like, to make it seem slightly less flimsy), cut around the edges and fold into a little booklet with the blue square to the front. Be sure to clip out that tiny slot, too, so you can tuck in the tab and keep the undesirables out. "Be sure to guard your Weber's Lone Ranger Cryptograph Decoder carefully so that only those in good standing with the Lone Ranger can decode his secret messages."

With the tab engaged, Butch Cavendish will be unable to decipher any important codes from L.R.

Rare Script "Those We Love"

"Those We Love" was a serial drama/soap opera somewhat similar to Carlton E Morse's "One Man's Family". It ran from January of 1938 to April of 1945 - that's seven years, and there's only a SINGLE episode out there for us to hear (anyone out there have it? I don't.)! So it's not a well-known series, by any means.

I have a short stack of original scripts from this show, and thought that it might be nice to share some. Click on the pictures for some LARGE scans of the pages. I made them SO BIG so you can see the actual notes made in pencil - my guess is that since the added lines are for several different charaters, they were probably written by the author, Agnes Ridgeway, rather than by a single actor in the show.

Evidently good enough to have a seven-year run (albeit somewhat sporadic), the melodramatic stories of the John Marshall family of Connecticut proved unable to overcome the unfortunate pitfalls of numerous day, time, and network changes. One of the actresses on the show, Jean Rogers, you may know: she played the beautiful Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon movies.

So, please, check these out. Still eight more pages to this script to go (I'll have them up soon). I'd love to hear some comments on the script - would you like to see more of these? I'd especially like to hear what you think the pencilled-in stuff is...some of it is awfully hard for me to make out. And this script is marked in dark blue ballpoint pen "1943" at the top of page one, but it also says "Episode 16" typed in the script...the 16th episode would have been some time in 1938. These pages were the oldest looking of all the scripts, I lightened them up considerably to see the pencil notes...the original paper was much tanner, almost brown (!). I think the "1943" was written by someone long after the scripts were done - hey, when did ballpoint pens come into general use? The late 1950's maybe? I thin that this is a VERY old script from 1938, not at all from 1943...

I LOVE A MYSTERY, DON'T YOU?

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT: click the blue word "COMMENTS" at the bottom of this post!

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.