Gangsters, Rabbits, and Radio.

I am a fan of Old Time Radio, usually known simply as OTR. (This is part of the same silly trend of using initials that has turned the venerable old, bourbon-swilling Kentucky Colonel-led, Kentucky Fried Chicken to become simply known as KFC. Pretty soon KFC will just be another acronym no one understands, kind of like LASER or LHS. But I digress.)

Anyway, OTR is easy to find. Go to eBay and do a search and you’ll find tons of cheap discs full of hundreds of MP3’s for about $1 each, so it isn’t what you’d call an expensive hobby. Unless you don’t want to listen to hours of scratches, pops, and hiss, in which case you’ll go to Radio Spirits and spend $30 for a digitally remastered set, about 10 hours.

Bonnie (whose MySpace page is cleverly hidden under the name “Bonnie”) once told me that I remind her of her father. I never met her father. If I did I may have a serious question or two. (But I digress again.) This hobby may be a reason why.

I’ve got a lot of OTR. There’s first and foremost Superman, with nearly 1,200 episodes available. Sadly, most of the WWII episodes were wiped so the reels could be reused- wartime rationing was worse than kryptonite, I guess. This is too bad, because the wartime episodes were pretty over the top, propaganda-wise, with Superman managing to find “Jap” spies in the basement of The Daily Planet, dynamiting Metropolis’ vital harbors, putting listening devices in Jimmy Olsen’s bow tie, and so on and so on. (Maybe it is better that these remain missing, now that I read that back.) And it seems like every twelfth or thirteenth episode featured a dam bursting. Why would anyone live in a city surrounded by so many dams? Sounds like a deathtrap to me. Good thing Superman was always around. Too bad he and Clark were never in the same place in the same time. Some “investigative reporter” Lois Lane was. However, Lois could afford to be thick as a brick. This show aired in the 40’s and 50’s so the toughest assignment she was given was to find out why the Metropolis Annual Flower Show had no daisies. (It was a Japanese plot.)

There are thousands of episodes of various detectives, tough guys with tough-sounding names, like Richard Diamond, Johnny Dollar, Hollywood Russell, the Saint, and Sam Spade. (One of you will appreciate that. 99% of you will not get that joke. But it is an in-joke and somebody is getting a nice chuckle right now.) They were tough guys, rough guys, and nothing-else-rhymes-with-tough guys. They carried big rods in their pockets (and big guns too). Real man’s man types who never seemed to have serious girlfriends for some strange reason. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but if you spent all day in an old office with nothing but a bottle of whiskey I might want to come home to more than just my P.I. manual.

Spooky narrators abounded- The Whistler, the Hermit, The Old Witch, The Mysterious Traveler. These guys (And they were nearly always guys. Even the Old Witch from The Witch’s Tale seemed pretty butch.) didn’t seem to do anything. The Hermit lived in a cave. The Whistler hung around and whistled. God only knows what the Mysterious Traveler did but if I ever sat next to him on a long flight I’d parachute out because everyone he knows seems to die under strange circumstances. (Sort of like Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote. No matter where she went someone died. “Hey, it’s my old friend Jessica! I haven’t seen you since- urk! Argh! (Thud.)” “Oh no, it happened again.” And that show went on for like a decade. By the end of the run everyone from her pizza delivery guy to her grandchildren kicked the bucket. In the last season she investigated the death of a guy she saw across a crowded theater in 1973, there was just no one left.)

Here’s a useless nugget of information. “Soap operas” got their name from the fact that they started on the radio and were sponsored by soap companies. Now go on Jeopardy, champ!

There were comedies too. There was the one with the guy who opened his closet and everything fell out. There was the guy whose neighbor was an undertaker. There was the Irish guy whose wife beat him. Ha ha, not a fan.

Old time radio was full of detectives, crime solving corpses, old women with pet sheep, stately underwater mansions, downtrodden husbands, over-the-top narrators, doctors recommending certain brands of cigarettes, and most famously, an invisible man with a celibate girlfriend.

I refer, of course, to The Shadow, perhaps the most famous show OTR ever produced.

“Years ago in the Orient, The Shadow learned a strange and mysterious secret, the ability to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him” Or “using advanced techniques that may one day be available to law-enforcement, The Shadow fights crime as invisible as the wind, as inevitable as a guilty conscience.” In his everyday identity, The Shadow is “Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town.” Or an amateur criminologist. Or sometimes he was the best friend of the police commissioner. Usually he was just some rich guy who stumbled into plot to rob a bank, or spent the night in a haunted mansion, or ran into his double, who just happened to be newly released from prison and planned to frame Cranston for war crimes, or something. The show ran for almost three decades so the quality depends on when the episode was made. It could be a supernatural show with ghosts one season, a show where Cranston foils attempts at art forgers the next season.

But it doesn’t matter. An invisible man is the perfect character on radio- everyone is invisible. It’s radio, everyone is a disembodied voice. No special effects were needed. All they did was give his voice some echo and poof! He’s The Shadow.

BAD GUY 1: We got the Cranston locked up in the vault. No one can get in or out, see?
BAD GUY 2: Hey! The vault is empty! What happened?
SHADOW: Ha ha ha, Cranston is gone, I am the Shadow!
BAD GUY 1: How did you get in? And what happened to Cranston? He was here just one second ago.
SHADOW: Heh heh heh!

Many of the poorer shows are kind of like Scooby Doo. Cranston would investigate rumors of bootleggers, or saboteurs, and at the climax he would turn into the Shadow for no particular reason and trap the crooks when it would so much simpler to just stay visible and call the cops. There was one episode where Lamont and his chaste girlfriend Margo were the only passengers on a hijacked train. Then Lamont disappeared and The Shadow hit the bad guy over the head with a wrench from behind.

Which also just goes to show how stupid the police commissioner was. Commissioner Weston would go to lunch with Lamont. Lamont would excuse himself and slip over to a phone. Weston would get a call.

WESTON: Hello?
LAMONT: Hello commissioner.
WESTON: Oh, it’s you Shadow. I’m having lunch with Lamont Cranston, you just missed him.
LAMONT: I know. I’m the Shadow!

Now remember- Lamont and The Shadow sounded exactly the same. How did the commissioner know who he was talking to over the phone?

WESTON: Hello?
LAMONT: Hello commissioner.
WESTON: Lamont? What kind of a game is this? I thought you went to the bathroom.
LAMONT: I am The Shadow!
WESTON: Stop fooling around, Cranston. This is silly,
LAMONT: I am The Shadow! Can’t you hear the slight echo on the line? (mysterious laugh)
WESTON: Fuck you. (Click.)

Once you suspend a ton of disbelief, this is a really good show. (Please discount the story where the guy thought he was a gorilla simply because he was hairy, thank you very much.)

His alleged girlfriend was “the lovely Margot Lane, the only one who knew to whom the voice of the mysterious Shadow belonged.” (I can only dream of working with grammar like that. Proper use of “whom,” improper placement of “belonged.”) She was always referred to as “his constant friend and companion.” That is the first clue. Whenever they went on a trip they stayed in separate rooms, and at least once in separate hotels. In nearly three decades on the air they never even exchanged so much as a kiss. A lot of times they would go on big shopping sprees. Can it be any more obvious? She was his beard.

On the radio, The Shadow was played by a whole lot of actors, but the first one was the best, Orson Welles. He only stayed for one season but he is the voice everyone remembers. There is a story I heard once about Welles, or maybe I read it, or maybe I overheard it, or it could be that I am just imagining this. Any way you look at it, I’m going to tell the story and totally get it wrong, probably.

Welles was an amateur magician and liked to show off. One time he was invited to a party and anticipated being asked to do a few tricks. This was the 1930’s where guys would wear top hats and tails to buy a Big Mac at McDonalds. So he decided he’d really wow the crowd- when asked to perform a trick he’d pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Orson Welles got dressed and damn if he didn’t put a real live rabbit under his top hat. He went to the party and rudely never took off his hat. He waited and waited and no one asked for a trick. No matter how often and how suavely he tried to steer the conversation in that direction, no one took the bait. (“Know that Houdini? I bet I could pull a rabbit out of my hat just like him.” Yeah, he was that unsubtle.) So hours passed and he never took off the hat. He sat through dinner with the rabbit gnawing at his head. A couple of people wondered why his hat sometimes seemed to hop around on his head a bit, but they were too polite to ask.

Welles got home and took off his hat, and damn if his hair was not full of rabbit shit. Oh, and the rabbit had died. So there was Orson, hair full of rabbit shit and a dead rabbit on his head. Not his finest hour, but one that perfectly summed up his career.

The Shadow was so popular they made a series of movies about the character. For some reason they never turned him invisible. He was just a silly looking guy in a hat that was too big for him and long black cape that he almost tripped over. Why he didn’t turn invisible is anybody’s guess. Roll film, stop film, actor walks off set, start film, hey! He turned invisible!

The Shadow on film was played, I swear I am not making this up, by a guy named Rod LaRoque. A better porn name is difficult to find. “Rod LaRock.” I suppose Long Cockman comes close. And while we are on the subject, the radio Margot was first played by Agnes Moorehead.

As the series went on it became harder and harder to be original. By the 1950’s The Shadow had foiled the 137th attempt to set New York on fire and it was getting pretty repetitive.

WESTON: Shadow, we have to give gangster Big Jim Johnson $20,000 or he’ll kidnap the mayor.
SHADOW: Didn’t we just give Big John James $20,000 last week not to kidnap the mayor?
WESTON: Who writes this shit?

Radio today has a lot of characters. There is Rush Limbaugh, who just signed a kazillion dollar contract to be loud. There is his democratic counterpart on Air America. (Aren’t they bankrupt again? Are they still in business? Who is doing drive time this week? Ha ha, I’m just teasing. Air America is only heard by out of work liberals hanging out on the Boston Common. Take that Philadelphia!) You’ve got your Howard Stern (who is pretty much irrelevant nowadays) and your Don Imus (and I do a great Imus impression but you have to actually hear me. Just typing “get in here McCord, you weasel” doesn’t work.) Modern radio has lots of characters but no real character. Say what you want about OTR, it was full of it.