I fell down a rabbit hole with this. An empty rabbit hole.
Me too, surprised we didn't cross pathsI fell down a rabbit hole with this. An empty rabbit hole.
haha, we might have. Lots of youtube-ing and googling.
Yea I didn't get that one lol. Was she expecting him to pick up something she dropped?
Her pen. She dropped it and then expected him to pick it up. I got the sense that her clicking it was annoying him even tho I couldn't understand what she was saying. (I don't speak French) But tone was annoying, I'm guessing.
) It will take a few seconds to compress the content into the requisite files and begin the download and then *boom* you've got the stuff on your computer. Open the compressed download files with Windows' innate ability to read zip files or with a program like WinZip or WinRAR if you have it and extract it and you will have a folder full of MP3 audio files of all the episodes that were available.
www.winamp.com
).
Alright, let's see how this goes. I'm going to have to upload the image to every single post I make because it turns out that I'm somehow 13MB over whatever limited amount of image storage space is now allotted to people in HF's image gallery section even though I haven't uploaded anything in years. But whatever.
Welcome to the first in what I hope will be a monthly series of classic radio files to share for everyone's listening/enjoyment.
I'm going to compress a lot of stuff into spoiler tags so this post doesn't run on forever.
WHAT IS THIS POST?
As I've discussed previously in this thread, at the end of the regular season there was some discussion that started from an off-hand mention I made of listening to some old radio shows that turned into posting a few youtubes of such shows that in turn became multiple posters expressing interest in classic radio content.
Thus was born this idea where once a month I'm going to post a google drive link with maybe 3-7 GB of Old Time Radio (OTR) content from my collection free to download and listen as you see fit.
Yes I realize that actually loading content onto a device has somewhat gone the way of the dodo in favor of streaming directly from services like Spotify or even just Youtube, but I have actual files here because a) I like archiving stuff in case the streaming platform goes *poof* one day, b) I like not being tethered to internet access for times where I might be too far away from a stable wifi network or not want to use my phone data/might not want to use my phone itself (like when I'm cutting the lawn. If I drop an old MP3 player that I bought cheap off Amazon and it gets eaten by the mower that sucks but life goes on. If I do it to my phone that's a big loss), and c) having actual files gives me greater control over their info and sorting in terms of stuff like being tagged with correct info or having album art or whatever.
So below you will find a Google Drive link to a folder, which should be accessible to anyone. In there will be sub-folders for the shows I am sharing
WHY MIGHT YOU WANT TO GIVE THESE A LISTEN?
Because essentially these are no different than a modern dramatic/comedy podcast in terms of how they're delivering content. It's a 20-60 minute story or series of sketches or whatever that you can enjoy. The fact that these were a thing going back into the 1930s or beyond makes me laugh because I remember when podcasts started and they were all just "people talking about stuff" until someone hit on the idea of recording audio shows in podcast form and it was like this revelation of unexplored new content. Meanwhile there was anyone who's ever listened to OTR content saying "that's not new. That's how mass media entertainment first evolved beyond books. Contained audio dramas or comedy shows were a thing a century ago and only died out en masse into the 50s with the rise of television as the dominant home entertainment delivery vehicle.
Yes, it's a fair point that some of the acting is going to be a bit hammy. If you've ever watched old movies from the 30s to the 50s or 60s, when the school of acting was still largely driven by stage performances, you know what it's like. People emote hard, sometimes over-state things that could be left to subtext, and occasionally deliver hackey or cringey lines that sound ridiculous. And yes on occasion there's going to be some stuff that's a bit inappropriate or insensitive given the progression of racial or gender sensitivities in the last 80+ years. But there are also plenty of examples of relatively positive (or at least positive-for-their-day portrayals and some fun and interesting stories or legitimately hilarious jokes and comedy bits.
Basically if you ever find yourself in a place where you need some entertainment while driving/traveling, working outside, exercising, or any other time where you can't necessarily watch a screen, then this might be for you. An if it turns out this month isn't, maybe next month will be. It's a wide world of content out there.
HOW TO GET/USE THE FILES (& INFO ABOUT THEM)
Each month my available files will be placed in a google drive folder called Nem's OTR Collection, located here:
Nem's OTR Collection - Google Drive
drive.google.com
(I believe spoiler tags are missed by search engines and webcrawlers, so I'm hoping that this might help keep the link a little more focused to the direct audience here on HF)
In it you will find folders corresponding to each show I have made available, all formatted as "[OTR] <name of show> <years of production>"
The name structure is just so that when I have the folders in my content library they are grouped by type and easier to find. You're free to rename them however you want once downloaded.
If you want to download a whole show in one go, at the end of the subfolder name (exact positioning varies based on what view you're in, folder or list) is a little icon of 3 vertical dots. Click it and from there you should be able to select a "download" option.
View attachment 701204
I believe google drive portions out folder downloads in chunks no bigger than 2GB at a time, zips them up into a compressed folder and then downloads that to wherever your browser downloads go on your computer (the dedicated download folder or you have to specify or whatever. I don't know, I'm not you
If you just want individual episodes or a few at a time, double-click the folder to open it up to its contents and from there you can pick and choose what to download, taking just a selection of episodes at a time.
From there it's just a matter of loading them into the player of your choice. You can copy them onto a device like your phone or an iPod/MP3 player, simply locate them in an audio player program/app like iTunes or Winamp, link them into your digital assistant/home audio system if it supports that (I don't have one, I don't know) or whatever you want.
If you don't have a player on your computer I recommend Winamp. It's free and historically has been pretty good for this sort of stuff.
Downloads - Winamp
Looking for the current version of Winamp? While we’re working hard on the new Winamp, we recommend downloading the latest desktop version here, as we guarantee it is safe for you to use.
If you're having any issues with making any of this work, let me know and I'll do my best to help
As for the files themselves, I have done my best to update their internal tags that would be used by most audio players and programs so that the will sort and display in a logically consistent way with appropriate information. Just to quickly run down how things should be formatted (I may not have been totally consistent on this):
Show/series titles are listed as the "album". For shows that existed with multiple titles over the years, or were titled with the sponsor in the name and changed each time the sponsor changed I default to a general, all-encompassing name. Ditto for shows that had multiple distinct runs separated by months or years and possibly the network they were on.
The "artist" for a show is usually the star or stars and will change as the primary role is recast (for example any episodes of The Saint not featuring Vincent Price will be credited to the actor playing Simon Templar for that episode instead of Price)
The "album artist" is a complete listing of the radio networks that broadcast the series across it's time on air. The individual network at the time for an episode is listed as the "composer" (because iTunes at least separates albums by album artist even if the album title itself is identical)
The "disc number" field is used to separate broadcast runs or seasons that have breaks in between if they exist.
Track Numbers are, wherever possible, set based on actual broadcast episode #s. so you may find that you play a show where the track numbers go 1, 2, 4, 6, 23, 45, etc. This is because the 3rd, 5th, 7th-22nd, 24th-44th episodes are all missing and unavailable. This won't always hold true though as some shows make it prohibitively difficult to source episode numbers.
The genre is always set to "Old Time Radio" to make the shows easily searchable in your library by genre.
Each album and episodes also have custom album art by me.
THIS MONTH'S THEME/SELECTION & SHOWS
For our first month's content I've got about 7 GB of material across 4 shows plus one extra special episode of another show. As for a theme, you could almost say that it's heavy on detective fiction even though at least one of the series only fits that mold in the most generous of interpretations. Instead our content is linked by a very silly and twisty series of coincidences and connections. This is almost certainly going to be the longest pre-amble of connections I'll have for any set or shows, so maybe grab a sandwich or something. We'll be here for a bit.
We begin with The Saint, the character created by Chinese-British author Leslie Charteris for the 1928 novel "Meet the Tiger." Often referred to as "The Robin Hood of Modern Crime", Charteris' novels tracked the adventures of Simon Templar as he fought against criminals, mobsters, and other shady characters that threatened people or Simon himself. For the next 60 years Charteris wrote or oversaw the creation of more than 100 novels, novellas, and short stories featuring The Saint and his adventures, and also watched as the character expanded into other media.
In 1938 the first venture into new media came with RKO Pictures commissioning the start of its line of Saint films. For the second film in 1939 the studio had to replace the original actor due to a prior commitment and the role was passed to English actor George Sanders, who would continue the role for 4 more films until 1941. Yes, this seems irrelevant to radio shows, but it'll be key to everything eventually so maybe just put a pin in this fact.
Anyways, after the films became a success, attempts were made to also break the character into the radio sphere. There was an Irish series made in 1940 and then a couple of American attempts in 1944 and 1945 which all ran for a few months before coming to a close. Unfortunately none of these series proper have survived to this day, with the only thing remaining from this era being a 1944 pilot/solicitation episode starring an actor named Dennis Greene (not the former football coach,
In 1947 CBS stepped up to the plate and successfully launched their first incarnation of The Saint on radio starring Vincent Price as Simon Templar. Though their iteration only lasted for about a year, it was successful enough to spur a pair of revivals, first by the Mutual Broadcasting System and then by NBC. Ultimately the character would run on the radio for most of the next 4 years, wrapping up in 1951 with Price having guided the character through most of that time before stepping down in late 1950 and being replaced by Brit Tom Conway for the final 20 weeks or so of the franchise's radio run.
And now comes the twists and turns. Because when the Saint went off the air it was replaced in its time-slot by a long-running detective program called The Adventures of the Falcon. That series began in 1943 and would take the Saint Spot for 3 years before it too came to a close. So obviously it had to be popular to survive for a decade on the radio. But looking at where it came from is how things get kinda weird.
Remember how I talked about the Saint films from RKO inthe late 30s and early 40s? Well after 6 total Saint movies, 5 starring George Sanders, RKO decided that they didn't want to pay for the Saint license and instead launched a series of films about a gentleman adventurer that would cost them significantly less money. It was still about a "robin hood" type who fought for the little guy and still starred George Sanders, but instead of Simon Templar he would be Gay Lawrence, alias The Flacon. But in spite of the name change they were pretty much Saint movies in all but name, still starring Sanders, still following similar plots, and even bringing over Sanders' frequent leading lady from several SAint films, Wendy Barrie, to play recurring major supporting roles. It was so obvious that these movies were naked attempts to be The Saint without the name and license that Leslie Charteris was quite miffed and sued RKO over the plagiarism (to the best of my sleuthing I can't find any record of the case, suggesting it was dropped or settled before it reached the courts).
Now I can see the gears turning about the name of these movies and the Adventures of the Falcon radio show. And I get where you're trying to go. But if you ask me what these things have to do with each other, the answer is both "nothing" and "everything"
The Falcon movies that were transparent Saint ripoffs were "adapted" from a short story written by Michael Arlen in 1940. However that and the character's given name are about all the similarities they share as the story starred Gay Stanhope Falcon (thus explaining the "Falcon" sobriquet, something the movies apparently never did) before RKO changed them. Meanwhile the radio Falcon starred a character named Michael Waring, with the explicit alias of "The Falcon" that were from a series of short stories written between 1936 and 1938 by a Drexel Drake (a pseudonym for another author, believed to be a man named Charles Huff). The two stories are not related in any way, though it's largely suggested that the Falcon Radio series featuring Drexel Drake's character made it to the radio to piggyback on the success of films. So the Falcon that replaced the Saint radio series got onto the radio in the first place thanks to the unrelated Falcon movies that were actually knockoffs of Saint movies while being loosely based on a short story from the 1940s that was pre-dated by the mid-to-late-30s novels that created the characters adapted in the Falcon radio series.
Yes, it's a like a media snake that's eating its own tail.
But because we can't stop here, there's even more fun: Remember when I said to put a pin in the name of Saint-cum-Falcon lead actor Geroge Sanders? After his third Falcon adventure (and after like 4 or 5 Saint adventures) he grew tired of playing pulpy b-movie heroes and asked to be retired from the role. So in the fourth Falcon film, released in 1942 and titled "The Falcon's Brother", we're introduced to Gay Lawrence's brother Thomas, who at first appears to be murdered only to show up alive and wrapped up in a nefarious plot that ends with Gay making a heroic sacrifice that costs him his life and inspires Tom to take up the Falcon mantle in his stead to continue the fight against evil (and the fight at the box office as the continuing Falcon adventures featuring Tom Lawrence as the lead character would spawn 9 more movies over the next 3 and a half years).
In a fun twist, Tom Lawrence was played by Thomas Sanders, the real life brother of George Sanders who was, of course, playing the character's brother and previous Falcon. Thing is that you might not recognize English actor Thomas Sanders. But if you've been paying attention to my rambling you will now know him by the stage name he used:
Tom Conway.
That's right, The man who succeeded Vincent Price and played out the final radio adventures of The Saint, only to see the show wind down and be replaced by The Falcon, himself inherited the role of a different Falcon from his brother, who had played the Falcon after it replaced The Saint in the movies.
Confused yet? Well there's one more twist:
See, the 3rd Falcon movie, the last one with George Sanders as the sole lead before he ceded the role to his brother was "The Falcon Takes Over". It was an adaptation of a novel. But not a novel about the Falcon or by Michael Arlen. Instead it was taken from a 1940 novel called "Farewell, My Lovely" written by Raymond Chandler.
Yes, "Farewell, My Lovely" was a Philip Marlowe story. But for reasons that have never really been made clear when the studio optioned the rights to the story they decided not to retain Marlowe as the principal character nor Chandler's iconic pulp/noir style. At least not at first. That's because in 1944 the novel was adapted to film again, but this time it did stay a Marlowe story and true to Chandler's tone, in the process becoming one of the first examples of film noir. The only thing it didn't keep was the title as test audiences thought "Farewell, My Lovely" sounded too much like the kind of musical romantic comedy that was popular at the time, especially the kind of movie that the actor playing Marlowe in this movie, Richard Powell, had become known for (Powell being cast as the the gritty detective in this movie after cutting his teeth as a musical/rom-com leading man was seen as a controversial choice) and so to avoid confusion and better portray what the actual tone of the movie was, it was rechristened "Murder, My Sweet." The resulting film helped to usher in the film noir revolution and rebranded Dick Powell into a credible dramatic actor.
Now I can't show you these films because a) this is a classic radio thread and b) they aren't public domain like classic radio of the era is. But we do have a workaround in the form of the special bonus this month, an episode of Lux Radio Theatre, which was a series fronted by legendary hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille which focused on adapting notable stage or screen scripts to condensed, 60-minute radio stories, often with the source material's original cast members reprising their roles. So included here is the 1945 episode adapting "Murder, My Sweet" starring Dick Powell once again as Marlowe.
This little branch of our confusing trip through radio history now opens things up to 1947, when the success of Marlowe in film led to the creation of a radio version of the famous detective, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. The first attempt starred character actor Van Heflin in the role as a summer replacement for Bob Hope's show. A year after it ended the series was revived with a different actor, Gerald Mohr as Marlowe. He carried the show for 2 years plus another summer run a year after that, becoming one of the most iconic detective radio series, even if it wasn't one of the longer runs.
But what of Marlowe film actor (and Lux Radio Theatre adapter) Dick Powell? Well after successfully transitioning to dramatic roles thanks to his Marlowe turn, he found himself attracted to multiple gritty detective roles in film and on the radio. I'm not including all of them in here, though I do have more than one in my collection, but as an example of a different kind of detective show and as the longest-running of Powell's radio adventures, I've added the surviving episodes of the 4-year run Powell had in Richard Diamond, Private Detective.
It actually turns out there are more branches and quirks in this web of classic radio, but I've kind of hit the file size limit so we'll stop here for now and revisit it in the future. This might be old time radio's version of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
The short version of the above, if you couldn't follow the whole way is the following series are included thanks to the following connections:
1) The Saint (adaptation of Leslie Charteris' famous works)
2) The Adventures of The Falcon (Inherited The Saint's timeslot upon its final run ending. Was created to piggyback on the success of a film series branded as The Falcon in spite of being inspired by different original novels and the fact that the film series was a shallow knockoff of the studio's previous Saint movies. Also the eventual lead actor in most of the Falcon films (after taking over for his brother, who oversaw the transition between playing The Saint and The Falcon) would be the final radio voice of The Saint after replacing Vincent Price.)
3) Lux Radio Theatre episode: Murder, My Sweet (adaptation of film based on a Raymond Chandler novel that starred Philip Marlowe. The story was first adapted to film not as a Marlowe story, but as the 3rd film in the series of Falcon films noted above)
4) The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (the multi-year radio series spawned from the film success of Chandler's stories, including Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell, My Lovely)
5) Richard Diamond, Private Detective (a 4-year detective drama starring Dick Powell, the first actor to play Philip Marlowe on the silver screen)
THIS MONTH'S SHOWS (The short version without all the rambling & with a preview youtube episode)
The Saint
(This recording has a weird recording issue where it interrupts the show's theme with a rewinding/fast forwarding artifact before transitioning into the sponsor ad and then back to the theme again. The included MP3 has this same error)
The collection contains 57 episodes starring mostly Vincent Price, with Barry Sullivan as a temporary fill-in and later Tom Conway as the permanent successor to Price.
Estimates put the total number of episodes that were produced at possibly 191, meaning that this collection has a survival rate of about 30% of total episodes produced.
The Adventures of the Falcon
The collection contains 88 episodes of the series, though some sites suggest as many as 97 episodes may exist. It also estimates that there were at least 486 episodes of the series produced, meaning that possibly 18 to 20% of the series has survived depending on how many examples are out there and how many episodes were actually made
The Adventures of Philip Marlowe
The collection contains 106 episodes, though a small number may be rehearsals or slightly incomplete recordings. This is out of a total of 127 episodes broadcast, meaning that about 83% of the series is surviving. That's a pretty high bar for a classic radio show of this length.
Richard Diamond, Private Detective
The collection contains 108 episodes out of a projected broadcast total of 164, meaning that about 66% of the series has survived (though one site suggests there may be as many as 127 episodes "in circulation" whatever that means. The site has an obvious issue with tone and combativeness with other sites and groups in the old time radio hobby and smugly promises transparency in its work, but also doesn't always explain everything it does even though that's its chief complaint about everyone else.
I'm not providing stats on Lux Radio Theatre since its inclusion is just as a single special addition and not the series itself. However here is the preview:
I expect that these episodes will remain available until approximately NOON PT on May 31 in order to give me time to remove these and upload June's run.
Also future post will likely push the folder link to the top of the post so that it's more easily found. I just wanted to make sure some of the preamble was covered in this first post before we got to the link.
You ok, Nem?No problem. Happy to share some of this stuff with other people who might enjoy it. And hopefully future releases won't take this long as I hadn't intended that much blather on about the history and connection of everything. It just happened that I started with wanting to put up The Saint and Philip Marlowe (as two of my 3 favorite series I have. The Gerald Mohr episodes of Marlowe are mostly great. There's even an episode in there that is legitimately heart-breaking, though I can't its name at the moment) and when I was reading some sites' discussion of the production history of The Saint I stumbled down the rabbit hole of how it connected to all these other shows and I was hooked on the insanity of it all. And like I said that's not even the half of it. I don't want to give the others stuff away, but there's actually a link buried in there to another detective property that got a radio adaptation and its own separate set of films that starred, of all people, Hugh Beaumont (aka the dad on Leave It To Beaver). I never liked Leave it to Beaver in reruns, but my dad always used to watch it because it was his favorite show as a kid, so I'm familiar enough with it to be totally unable to picture Ward Cleaver walking into a seedy bar to interrogate a shifty lounge singer who's also a gangster's moll.
Also just as an aside your post has an edited by a mod tag on it. That's my bad. I meant to edit my own post to do some spelling corrections but wasn't paying attention to the fact that I was looking at your quoting of my post and not the post itself
Glad you're ok. This part made me wonder who you were talking to. So that prompted my question.Also just as an aside your post has an edited by a mod tag on it. That's my bad. I meant to edit my own post to do some spelling corrections but wasn't paying attention to the fact that I was looking at your quoting of my post and not the post itself
I've got a pretty short ignore list. 
I just realized maybe you're quoting someone I have on ignore?
sports.yahoo.com
sports.yahoo.com
sports.yahoo.com
