The Nemesis
Semper Tyrannus
AUGUST RELEASE: "The Classics of 'Western' Civilization"
We're back on track at the start of the month with the 4th (is it the 4th? I think i've lost count already) iteration of radio collection
For the uninitiated, here is a spoiler-tagged version of the original preamble from previous iterations of this project, including instructions on how to download the files. If you're not new then you can safely skip all of this.:
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?
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:
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.
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.
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
(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
) 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.
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.
www.winamp.com
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.
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
) 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.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.
www.winamp.com
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
As always the Google Drive is located here:
Nem's OTR Collection - Google Drive
This month's release is a two-track combo that stretches the use of my not-so-clever punny title, marrying some legitimate western literature classics with some western genre classics:
1) A personally collected anthology of various adaptations of Shakespeare plays from a variety of different series over the years, encompassing both straight renditions of the works to modified and quirky re-imaginings of the bard's work. Collectively I have named the album Bard on the Air and it takes from broadcasts that were part of such series as Mercury Theatre On the Air, Lux Radio Theater, and the CBS Radio Mystery Theater as well as a couple of dedicated Shakespeare series that were broadcast in the 40s and 50s
2) Two of the multitude of adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, including the most prolific entry, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from the mid 1930s starring Basil Rathbone, and one of the most star-studded, Sherlock Holmes from the mid 1950s with the legendary Sir John Gielgud as the master detective and featuring a guest spot by Orson Welles as Professor Moriarty.
3) A portion (125 episodes) of the long-running pop culture landmark The Lone Ranger. The show lasted for over 3,000 episodes (mostly airing 3x per week over like a decade) so I can't provide all of it now, but this should be enough to keep you going for a while
4) The first two seasons from the 9-season run of Gunsmoke before it found its way to television. This version of the show featured William Conrad as Marshall Matt Dillon as the lawman of Dodge City, Kansas and paved the way for a collection of more mature westerns in the dying days of radio's pop culture dominance.
5) The complete, single season run of Luke Slaughter of Tombstone, spanning 16 episodes in which 50s character actor Sam Buffington stars as the eponymous cattle rancher trying to make his mark in Arizona.
6) The complete, single season of Frontier Gentleman starring John Dehner as J.B. Kendall, a British army veteran assigned by a London newspaper to witness and report on the happenings of a town in the American frontier. The series ran for 39 episodes plus two audition shows (one featuering Dehner, the other having the same plot but with Ben Wright in the lead role)
7) The 1953-54 adventures of drifter Britt Ponset in the old west in The Six Shooter starring Jimmy Stewart. Available here is the complete run of 41 episodes plus the audition show.
Oh, and I left the Star Wars Trilogy since I had space remaining and it might be something that hooks random people.
Now, in a bit more detail, what are you getting in each show? (along with a YT episode preview):
Bard on the Air: The Collected Adaptations of William Shakespeare
(The Mercury Theatre on the Air presents Julius Caesar)
This collection is a bit of an anomaly for me. Normally I have striven to keep my collection correct in terms of keeping distinctive series and releases separate except when there is clear lineage between them. For instance the Saint or Burns & Allen release I have done were actually technically a variety of different shows on different networks, but since they were functionally the same in their content and only really differed in terms of network, sponsor, or in some cases cast, it seemed pointless to keep them separate. However for an array of interconnected works such as those of the Mercury Theatre Company, I chose not to consolidate them into a single album as they were different shows with unique names and directions.
This collection of Shakespearean plays tosses all of that away and instead gives you a single album of 11 "discs" that represent what I believe is as complete a collection of adaptations of Shakespeare as I can muster, spread across over 50 years of radio and nearly a dozen different series. This includes a pair of short-run series specific to the bard's work, a set of releases that were made not for air over radio, but recorded onto record collections for distribution to schools, and one-off plays that were done as parts of anthology series that adapted all manner of stage and screen works. Naturally most of these are going to be on the short side for most plays as your average Shakespeare stage play probably would've clocked in, relatively complete, at 2 to 3 hours whereas most radio shows ran for 30 minutes or an hour and only in a few instances did they attempt to cover a play across multiple episodes. So the result might be a bit stripped down in order to convey important sections or the gist of the entire plot of a work within the available time frame, but it is sufficient to see the intent of the work and is, if nothing else, interesting to see how they manage to strip down a play to make it manageable within the boundaries of a radio time slot.
Also contained within this collection is a small number of spiritual adaptations that take the basic concepts and themes of a play and twist them into a new work. I haven't listened to everything in the album, but Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre was famous for producing a stage version of Julius Caesar that was set in (relatively) contemporary fascist Italy with minimalist stage dressing. Included in this collection are a couple of Mercury performances of that particular title, but I can't say for certain if they are the updated adaptation they were famous for or simply a straight telling of the Shakespeare original version. Of a slightly different vein are a set of entries from the CBS Radio Mystery Theater from the 1970s and 80s (by far the most recent program included in this month's releases) that twist and re-tell a Shakespearean standard in a radically different way, from Romeo & Juliet to Anthony & Cleopatra, the stories may be familiar but the content may not.
The Sherlock Holmes Radio Canon
(Gielgud/Welles)
Once Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic detective became a literary institution, it was perhaps not surprising that he would cross into the realm of radio for a new generation to be exposed to his deductive efforts. The first instance of Holmes on the radio occurred in the 1930s, mere months after Doyle's death. And over the next 60+ years there would be dozens of series, specials, or short-run collections that starred Holmes and Watson, either in adaptations of the literary Holmesian canon or in brand new stories in the Holmes tradition and spirit. In the interests of keeping things organized but distinct, I have collected each unique series that aired into a separate "volume" as its own album, sharing a relatively uniform title (so that they are collected in the correct order within a media library) and having their own internal chronology split across "discs" representing seasons for the handful of series that ran long enough to embrace that format. In particular here I am providing two volumes from two of the earlier series in the Holmes radio canon:
the 2nd Holmes show to air, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939-1946) is one of the longest running and most recognizable, starring iconic Holmes actor Basil Rathbone as the great detective for most of its run, before giving way to Tom Conway (already heard a couple of months ago when I released the collected episodes of The Saint). In total there are 104 surviving episodes (67 with Basil Rathbone, 37 with Tom Conway)
and the 6th series, an English/American co-production that ran for only a short time (and has only a handful of surviving episodes, 6 in total) but is noteworthy for the star power it attracted, as the lead role was filled by English stage and screen legend Sir John Gielgud and in an early-series adaptation of iconic Holmes tale "The Final Problem" the role of Professor Moriarty is taken up by Orson Welles.
The Lone Ranger
(Ossage Bank Robbery)
An enduring and iconic piece of pop cultural history, the Lone Ranger began his quest to right the wrongs of the American west with this radio show in 1933. Created by George Trendle (manager of WXYZ radio in Detroit, who served as the original home base of The Lone Ranger before its syndication) and writer Fran Striker, the character's radio adventures would last until 1956, largely overlapping with its equally significant television version (which began in 1949 and went for a year longer than the radio series, wrapping in 1957).
The story is familiar to anyone with knowledge of the character in its many incarnations: a Texas Ranger with the last name of Reid (his given name was never spoken in many iterations including this radio series, though it's long been accepted as "John")is, along with a deployment of fellow rangers that include his brother Dan, betrayed by a guide and ambushed by the gang of notorious outlaw Butch Cavendish. All of the rangers save our protagonist are killed, and the gravely wounded Reid is found by Tonto, a native tracker and scout (who in many versions has an intersecting history with Reid). Saved from death but desiring revenge (and/or justice) against Cavendish, Reid and Tonto fake his death as part of the ambush and the lone surviving ranger fashions a mask from the vest of his deceased brother as a means of concealing his identity as he sets out to track down those who were responsible for the death of his friends and family.
Over the next 23 years The Lone Ranger would air on WXYZ and in syndication three times a week for much of its run, totalling nearly 3,000 episodes and making it one of the most prolific radio dramas of all time. However it was't until the late 1930s that the syndication deal took hold and required distributable recordings of the episodes. Previously all episodes were aired live and have no surviving recordings. still, over 2,000 half-hour episodes remain in circulation.
Interestingly enough, while the show was ostensibly made for kids, market research of the time found that up to half of the listening audience for each episode was actually adults and not simply families listening for the sake of their youngest members. This would help eventually pave the way for some of the other shows we're going to talk about, and demonstrates that even back in the 30s and 40s there was a healthy segment of the public that just wanted quality entertainment regardless of age, and this "shocking" popularity would eventually repeat itself with cartoons, superheroes, comic books, video games, and any number of other diversions meant specifically "for kids". Because age is nothing but a number.
Now obviously for reasons of available storage space I can't give you the entire run of the series. So instead you are being provided with approximately 125 episodes from the earliest surviving recordings in 1938 through to the end of that year.
Gunsmoke
(Billy the Kid)
While westerns have often been identified as one of the most significant genres of mid-20th century entertainment and the so called "golden age" of post World War II American pop culture, it might be surprising to find that the genre's impact on the radio was somewhat minimal. This is likely because the western boom didn't really take hold until the 1950s thanks to television's successful usurping of radio as the dominant home media. Western films had been popular back into the 1940s, but that never really translated into the radio arena except for what was deemed to be kids fare or family-oriented listening such as the Lone Ranger (which we just talked about). However in radio's waning days in the 50s, things shifted and at long last westerns with an eye on the adult audience found their footing.
Before it was one of the longest-running primetime shows on television, Gunsmoke was a long running radio series for CBS that helped to usher in the idea of westerns geared towards an adult audience instead of simply being kids' fare. Notable radio voice William Conrad was cast in the lead role of Marshall Matt Dillon, charged with maintaining law and order in the frontier town of Dodge City, Kansas. Interestingly there was a major push to retain the radio cast in the transition to television, but studio executives thought that Conrad wasn't right for the appearance of Marshall Dillon, which led to his replacement with James Arness and the swapping out of every other character. But in spite of the radio cast not getting their television due, it was a murderer's row of radio talent of the era. Beyond Conrad in the lead, the regular cast included Howard McNear and Parley Baer (both of whom would later become regulars on The Andy Griffith Show), and a cast of repertory supporting actors including John Dehner, Vic Perrin (aka the "control voice" from The Outer Limits), Larry Dobkin, Barney Phillips, Jack Kruschen, Ben Wright (notable as one of the human leads in the original 101 Dalmatians, Pongo's owner Roger, and as Herr Zeller in The Sound of Music) and extremely prolific radio actresses Jeanette Nolan and Virginia Gregg.
Due to its sprawling, 9 year run I couldn't give you the whole series, but I have included the first two seasons, which totals over 120 episodes spanning April of 1952 to August of 1954.
Luke Slaughter of Tombstone
(Duel on the Trail)
One such example was this series, not terribly popular in its time, but well-regarded now for its plotting and polished production.
Airing starting in February of 1958, a little known but rising character actor named Sam Buffington was cast in the title role, a former civil war calvaryman turned cattle rancher in untamed Arizona.
The series aired for four months and a total of 16 episodes before it wrapped up in June of that same year. Though there appears to be no strong, confirmed reason as to why the series only went for a short half-year run though it can be speculated that the decline of radio as a viable competitor in home entertainment, the cost of the series' quality production, or the expanding work demands of its lead actor may have played a role.
Regardless, and somewhat tragically, its own short run and success mirrored that of its lead. Sam Buffington appeared in over 50 television shows in the 50s, including a great many westerns, but unbeknownst to anyone he suffered secretly with apparent feelings of inadequacy and a belief that his career was unsuccessful. In 1960 he would end up tragically taking his own life, leaving a note that apologized to his wife for failing to provide sufficiently for her (in spite of making over $20,000 the previous year (the equivalent of over $200,000 in today's market)) Whatever the reasons for his death, his career was a brief but bright and promising mark in hollywood just as this show was on the radio.
Unlike many earlier series which have seen some or all of their episodes lost to the mists of time, the complete 16-episode run of Luke Slaughter survives in good quality for your listening enjoyment.
Frontier Gentleman
(Remittence Man - Audition (John Dehner version)
Produced in 1958 and running concurrently with Luke Slaughter (to the extent that they were often paired together in consecutive time slots) until the point at which the other series went off the air, Frontier Gentleman was another one-year wonder in the waning days of radio. It ultimately lasted from February to November of '58 for a total of 42 episodes (including a pair of audition episodes), all of which survive to this day.
In spite of their links, this show could not be more different from Luke Slaughter if it tried. Instead of a rough-and-tumble cattleman, this show starred John Dehner (no stranger to the western as he had numerous guest roles on almost every series that aired on TV in the 50s) as a somewhat effete Englishman named J.B. Kendall, who had taken a job with the London Times and tasked with providing first-hand accounts of the settling of the american west. This sort of 'fish out of water' concept was unique, but in a landscape where the medium was slowly dying out it simply wasn't enough to attract an ongoing audience and the show took its final bow after its one and only season on the air.
The Six Shooter
(audition)
Quick, when you think of Jimmy Stewart what roles do you think of? It's a Wonderful Life? Of course. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? Sure. Vertigo? Makes sense. Rear Window? Another classic. But what about James Stewart: Cowboy hero?
It seems at odds with the usual pop cultural portrayal of him as a somewhat nervous, nebbish, suttering nice guy but given that he was a real life war hero (as an air force pilot and squadron commander in WWII) it's perhaps not too outlandish that he might find his way to the grittier, grimier world of the old west. In fact he acted in a number of westerns in his film career, including a trio alongside John Wayne. But in 1953 he got behind the microphone for one season to portray Britt Ponset, a cowboy drifter looking for work in the last days of the old west and finding trouble and adventure in most of the towns he ended up in.
It can be a little difficult to wrangle the usual image of Stewart and his archetypal characters with the fact that he's playing a serious and dangerous gunslinger here but the show boasted solid production values and an array of different stories over its one season of 39 episodes (plus one audition show), all of which are preserved and available for you in this album.
The Star Wars Trilogy (& extra single)
Last but not least we have the one thing that has nothing to do with anything San Francisco related (unless I'm right about screwing up with Jeff Regan. But that's neither here nor there at this point)
In 1981 National Public Radio used its NPR Playhouse program to produce and broadcast the first of what would become three series that dramatized for radio the entire original trilogy of Star Wars movies. 1981 saw the release of the original Star Wars (now usually differentiated by its "A New Hope" subtitle), 1983 had the release of The Empire Strikes back just as Return of the Jedi was coming into theaters, and after a bit of delay 1996 eventually gave us the conclusion to the trilogy with Return of the Jedi.
What makes these releases interesting is that as they take place over several half-hour episodes they ultimately run for much longer than their source material. ranging from nearly 6 hours (13 episodes) for the first series (A New Hope), to 10 episodes totalling 4 and a half hours for Empire Strikes back and finally 6 episodes running a combined 3 hours and 15 minutes on Return of hte Jedi. As a result the shows often had to fill time with extra material not included in the original movies. This was often taken from draft scripts or production notes that featured cut or modified content that never made it into the final screenplay. Examples of this include: a meeting between Han and an agent of Jabba the Hutt in the Tatooine docking bay (which was based on a scene restored for special edition versions of the film in which Han actually spoke to Jabba himself), or preludes to the film's main action including Luke spending time with his friends on Tatooine (which gives context to his relationship with eventual fellow rebel pilot Biggs Darklighter) or Leia on Alderaan before the mission to deliver the Death Star plans begins.
Obviously some of these scenes are incompatible with canon as it was subsequently established since the radio plays were never meant to be official on the same level of the films, and subsequent official fiction (such as Rogue One or the various 2000s TV series such as The Clone Wars, Rebels, or Obi-Wan) have rewritten some parts of this. But it's still interesting to experience a broader vision of what the story could've and would've been in the 80s, complete with George Lucas providing access to the sound effects library and John Williams' score for a nominal fee thanks to the relationship between NPR and a radio station at his alma mater.
The cast of the 3 major productions is a mix of Star Wars veterans, notable character actors, and unknown radio workers. Anthony Daniels as C-3P0 is the only movie actor to play his character in all three productions. Mark Hamill plays Luke for the first two series before being replaced in Return of the Jedi, while Billy Dee Williams performs Lando in Empire Strikes Back but is replaced for Lando's smaller Return of the Jedi role.
Elsewhere you'll find notable "hey it's that guy!" Brock Peters (perhaps more well known in sci-fi circles as a Star Trek regular, having played an admiral in a pair of films and Captain Sisko's restaurateur dad in Deep Space 9) taking over for James Earl Jones as Darth Vader, John Lithgow as Yoda (no, really), Ed Asner speaking only Huttese as Jabba the Hutt, Ed Begley Jr as Boba Fett, and David Alan Grier in numerous supporting and background roles.
For semi-completionist's sake I have also included the mostly non-canon (especially now that disney has chucked everything that came before it into the "legends" universe of "this doesn't count unless we like its stuff, in which case we'll just do it ourselves" (like with Grand Admiral Thrawn) 30-minute single episode release "Rebel Mission to Ord Mantell". Starring none of the original actors (but with veteran voice actors including Corey Burton (who played Spike, Shockwave, Sunstreaker and Brawn in the original Transformers and would later get back into Star wars as the bounty hunter Cad Bane in The Clone Wars and The Book of Boba Fett) as Luke. Based on a line early in Empire Strikes Back where Han tells Leia that he's leaving the rebels after an incident on Ord Mantell, this story fills us in on that mission, potentially providing some context to the scene.
Unlike most of my other releases, these series are not part of the broad umbrella of public domain broadcasts. Clarifications of public domain laws around radio have meant that anything produced prior to the early 1970s for radio is considered public domain, hence why I'm able to freely share them without concern. However while these are newer, NPR famously has made basically everything it's produced available for download free of charge in intervening years, and it's doubtful that the publishing company (if it still exists as an arm of Disney) cares much for a half-hour non-canon radio play from the 80s. So they should be pretty much free and clear as well. Additionally all of this has been available on Youtube for years without any action from Disney. But in the unlikely event that there is an issue with any of it I may end up taking it down.
Since this is releasing at the start of the month it will be up for all of August. Thanks to @LadyStanley for the western theme suggestion. If anyone else has any ideas for content types or specific shows let me know. I have an idea for September but it's not something I'm married to so I'm open to change. October is pretty set though.
