Tag Archives: old time radio

The Saturday Comics: The Shadow

4 Jun

June 4, 2011

Who Knows What Evil Lurks In the Hearts Of Men?

The Shadow Knows!

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

So who was The Shadow?

“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 forgery 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 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!

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.)

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 his is the voice everyone remembers.

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 of dirty-sounding names, the radio Margot Lane, The Shadow’s assisstant, was first played by Agnes Moorehead.

The movie Shadow is a very different character than the radio Shadow, and for a good reason. Like the comic books and strips, the movie Shadow is based on the pulp fiction version of the character. While an invisible man is perfect for radio, it is kind of boring to watch. In print, The Shadow was a man in a dark cloak and hat. He carried a pair of guns and often used them. There was no invisibility for him, this Shadow had to rely on a perfect skill of disguise. And this Shadow wasn’t even Lamont Cranston, he just pretended to be. Confused?

There was a Lamont Cranston in the pulps and the Shadow did claim to be him but he wasn’t. It was a disguise. The real Cranston was a wealthy playboy. He was usually travelling around the world or away at some glamorous resort. His high-class connections were just what the shadow needed to open doors so while Cranston was away, The Shadow would assume his identity.

The real identity of the Shadow, and you didn’t hear it from me, was Kent Allard, a World War One Aviator.

In addition to the pulps there were many comic book versions of The Shadow, and one of the best was put out by DC in the 1970’s, written by the legendary Denny O’Neil and often illustrated by the equally legendary Michael William Kaluta. And since this was a DC comic, he even met Batman. In fact, Batman claimed it was The Shadow who influenced him to fight crime.

But this is a Saturday Comics installment so let’s tear ourselves away from the comics (which I have a complete set of, including those Batman issues) and look at the rarely seen newspaper strip.

These are pretty hard to find. The strip began in 1940 and ended just two years later when World War Two broke out and the strip’s creators were drafted. Examples are hard to find online but luckily I have my own collection.

Some years ago in the 80’s the strips were collected in comic book form. the paper they were printed on was cheap even by comic book standards and my issues are all very, very yellow, much worse than other comics from the same era. The pages were even printed crooked!

I can’t vouch that the strips are formatted the same way they were as originally printed. Compare the dimensions to the strip above and you’ll see why I have doubts. I am also afraid some panels, like the title panel in the strip above, have been removed totally. At any rate, the odds are you have not seen these strips so sit back and check out an OTR legend and comic strip rarity, The Shadow!

As a bonus, I’m including what may be the most famous single broadcast of OTR, the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast starring Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater.

Special and extreme thanks to Jim of Relic Radio for providing the War of the Worlds. Check out his site for tons of great- and free! radio shows.

More special and extreme thanks to Peter Church of the wonderful Radio’s Revenge podcast for finding the music that opened this page, The Shadow theme.

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The Old Time Radio Convention: Old Folks Enjoying Reruns.

27 Oct

October 27, 2010

Recently I attended the Old Time Radio Convention in beautiful Newark New Jersey. This convention boasted the most octogenarians per capita of any hotel outside of Florida. I was there as the token young man. I was the only one there under forty. In fact, I may also have been the only one there with laces on my sneakers instead of Velcro.

The hotel was located by Newark airport and directly adjacent to the Newark prison. In fact, the only way to the prison was a narrow road that was also the only way to the hotel. I drove past the hotel entrance because it looked closed, which it wasn’t, and went past the next turn because it looked like the hotel exit, which it was. My plan was to make a U-turn and go back to the entrance, but the only room to do it was about 20 yards down the road. I pulled ahead and wondered why there were large orange barrels blocking half the road. Then I saw the low brick buildings, barbed-wire fences, and angry man with a large rifle. So I slowly backed away from the prison, only then noticing the large KEEP OUT- NEW JERSEY DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTON sign that I totally missed.

I was at this same convention in 1994, sixteen years ago. All this time I’ve had a magnet on my fridge from the event with the year on top. I took it with me and when I paid my admission I pulled out the magnet and showed it to the old gent running the convention. I told him that I was last there with my father, now deceased, all those years ago. It was a heart warming anecdote, or so I thought. The guy looked at the magnet, and totally seriously, even a bit angrily, sneered “so where have you been all this time”? I took back the magnet and walked in. BTW- there were no magnets this year, but I did get a pen.

The convention attracted about one hundred people, and many of them were blind. It makes sense. Radio is for the ears, for the imagination. All of the blind people, except one, seemed very interested in the events of the day. There were many discussions of various old radio shows and people involved in OTR. One blind woman, however, was a total loudmouth who must have thought she was at Yankee Stadium.

PRESENTER: “So it was back in 1942 that I met Bruce Freedkin and-“
LOUDMOUTH: “Yay! Bruce Freedkin! We love you!”
PRESENTER: “Right, yeah, well, Bruce Freedkin and I were mixing tapes in the Brill Building when-“
LOUDMOUTH: “Brill Building!”
PRESENTER: Sigh “It’s going to be one of those days.”
LOUDMOUTH: “Yay!”

The days events were broadcast live over internet radio. Right in the back of the main hall was a table set up with broadcasting equipment manned by a guy who looked like he took some time off from following the Grateful Dead around and a young woman who may have had a date once in her life. She had a strange, almost alien looking face, with makeup that seemed to simply accent the alien-ness. Her T-shirt, reading, I brake for MGTJSPE didn’t help. And I have no idea what that meant. Over the course of the day I lost track how many times some old codger shuffled over and asked “what station are you from?”

So I sat there through interesting panels about old radio shows, punctuated by the occasional “Yay! Radio!” from the blind woman. There were demonstrations of sound effects, clips from old shows, discussions of how radio influenced the comics, and more. If you like adventure, the Scarlet Queen panel was for you. Like mystery? The Shadow discussion was up your alley. If you get a laugh out of white men pretending to be black men, the Amos and Andy panel was for you. Not for me, mind you, for you.

Eventually I left the old folks remembering their youth when they sat around and stared at radios the size of today’s refrigerators for awhile. I went to the dealers rooms, all eight of them, and if you went into one you didn’t need to bother going to the other seven.
They all sold nothing but bootleg old time radio show CD’s. No longer did fans of Phil Harris or The Whistler have to get their OTR fixes in dark alleys. Buck Rogers addicts and Little Orphan Annie junkies alike could get well with all the OTR they could imagine in one place. More than one Mysterious Traveler fan overdosed on $2 bootleg discs. TV wasn’t forgotten either. Every single lousy cartoon you remember from the 50’s or 60’s was there too, all cheesy off-the-air broadcasts, complete with static, bad editing where the tape was paused for commercials, and tons of picture degradation as copies were copied from copies of copies of copies copied from copies that were bad to begin with. On the other hand, who could pass up the complete Gigantor for $5?

The highlight of the day was the live performance of an old radio show and it is not as interesting or exciting as you may be imagining. Oh, I know it sounds so glamorous, but trust me, it is an actor’s wet dream to do this and get paid. Imagine a play. Now imagine you don’t need sets. Or costumes. You sit on a comfy chair until you have to speak, then you walk over to a mic and read your lines, then sit down again. Yes, I said “read” your lines, as this is radio so no one needs to memorize the script when you can just read from it. We all did the same thing in third grade.

Of course, there was a catch. The loud blind lady sat right behind me, just to the left, so that during the introductions she cackled out “we love you!” to every performer- right in my left ear- and screamed at every joke “that was a good one! HA HA HA!” Yes, she laughed just like that, HA HA HA.

The day ended and I left. The old folks stayed behind, as there was a buffet and more recreations to come- all at an extra charge, which I declined. I had already had my share of overpriced food- $2.50 for $1.25 bottle of orange juice, and a bag of fruit snacks for $3.25 that even my local newsstand is embarrassed to charge $1.75 for. I also later had a thin $6.50 tuna wrap and a $4 bottle of Pepsi. This is why there is a fence between the hotel and the prison- there is nothing the felons could steal in the area worth more than the Pepsi sold at the hotel. I’m sure it is a tempting target.

By 5:30 I was driving home, the hotel in the rearview mirror, some CD’s in the backseat, and half a bottle of soda that I was not throwing away at those prices right beside me. I had a good time, the shows were enjoyable, and the people who weren’t laughing in my ear were nice and friendly, if a bit dusty. I look forward to the show next year, where the people will be another year older and the blind woman a few decibels louder.

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