Using modern technology, audio dramas can be downloaded in a way that fits with our changing entertainment lifestyle. And, it offers a new way to market products and services.

The mission of Vermont Audio Drama Podcasting (VTADP) is to translate the literary works of authors into audio drama presentations suitable for broadcast over the Internet or other audio communication channels. Initially, we are working to convert the Vermont-based Joe Gunther mystery novels by Archer Mayor into audio dramas.

Even for those who didn’t grow up during radio’s golden era, mention radio drama to most Americans and it culls up the image of a family huddled around the radio anxiously on a Saturday night waiting for a program to come on. Most are familiar with the furor over War of the Worlds, and can bring names like “The Shadow” and “The Green Hornet” to the tips of their tongues. These same people are astonished to learn that Orson Welles started (and may have produced his best work!) in radio, and that “The Lone Ranger” existed long before its television debut.

Audio book sales continue to grow. Audio drama allows “readers” used to single-voice narrator stories to the allure of full dramatizations. The Wall Street Journal in an article about us makes this point.

A classic story about the power of audio drama:

A little girl who, when asked whether she preferred television to radio, answered,

“I prefer radio.”

“Why?”

“Because the pictures are better.”

There are some great examples of radio theatre sponsorship from the Golden Age of Radio up to the 1980s:

The General Mills Radio Adventure Theater, which last aired over thirty years ago, was produced with a young audience in mind but only lasted a year. It attempted to capture the success of CBS Radio Mystery Theater that continued to air until 1984.

Hallmark Playhouse, which aired from 1948-1953, was geared to family entertainment and was the basis of the long-running TV series.

Maxwell House Coffee Time, which aired for over two decades, beautifully combined print and radio campaigns with the message that “Maxwell House Coffee is part of the American Scene.”

Ten years ago, Richard Fish predicted “…the invention of the internet and the World-Wide Web has brought a new channel of distribution for audio theatre, “broadcasting on demand,” if you will. Many websites now feature OTR programming available to the properly-equipped browser via RealAudio, MP3, or other software. More and more websites offer brand new audio theatre productions, either in part or in whole. The audio theatre art form is having a renaissance of major proportions, and it is now proper to speak of the “audio theatre Industry.” Kept alive for decades by a few devotees and funded by grants, audio theatre is being weaned off the dole and coming back into the marketplace…”

Charles Osgood, noted broadcaster, said:

No television set that’s made,
no screen that you can find

Can compare with that of radio:
the theatre of the mind

Where the pictures are so vivid,
so spectacular and real

That there isn’t any contest,
or at least that’s how I feel.

Using modern technology, audio dramas can be downloaded in a way that fits with our changing entertainment lifestyle. And, it offers a new way to market products and services.

If you are interested in collaborating on this idea, send me an email.

(Squeaking door opens. Dramatic music starts.) “Come in. Welcome to the Macabre. I’m E.G. Marshall.”

Hearing something like that on your radio would seem normal in the 1940s, but in the 1970s? Himan Brown, who created the original Inner Sanctum Mysteries series in 1941, recycled his classic opening sequence for his 1974 brainchild, CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Brown seemed to have achieved the impossible when he convinced CBS to set aside an hour every night for radio drama nearly a quarter of a century after its hay day. Of course, CBS didn’t do it to be nice. They were reacting to Mutual radio network’s Zero Hour which launched a radio drama revival of sorts in 1973. But CBS Mystery Theater had the staying power that Zero Hour didn’t. It lasted for nine years and 1,399 episodes! (If you include repeats, it lasted 2,969 broadcasts!)

The series was a mystery anthology, with the occasional hint of the supernatural (usually explained at the end as some sort of trick to scare the victim to death). It was advertised as “the fear you can hear.” E.G. Marshall was very serious and somewhat disquieting. Gone was the trademark black humor of Inner Sanctum’s Raymond. But Marshall grabbed our attention and held it though the breaks. It wasn’t an easy task, considering the series was an hour long (less 8 minutes for ads) every night and competing with the eye candy of TV. E.G. Marshall has been around a long time before and since the series, but for listeners of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, it is almost impossible to see or hear him without reliving some of the chills he caused listening to his show.

Read rest of essay by clicking here.

By Florangela Davila

“You’re in a dark room you’ve never been in before. And it’s very late at night.”

Larry Albert is casting a spell. Cue up the sound of a creaking building and suddenly, you’re transported to a slightly terrifying place.

Albert is one of the behind-the-scenes talents of Jim French’s “Imagination Theater,” which produces old-time radio dramas.

It is a misty march morning in 1959 and while most of Seattle is having a second cup of coffee, the SPD homicide squad is already tending to business.  – The Adventures of Harry Nile

For decades, the production studio has created mysteries and stories of suspense in weekly broadcasts and sent them out over the air. In a studio behind a Bellevue home, a cast of professional actors stand at microphones and record the stories.

Four times a year, they tape the show before a live audience, like they’ll do Nov. 21 at the Kirkland Performance Center.

From piano to voice

Jim French has been working in radio for 50 years, as a broadcaster, writer, producer and actor.  And he’s considered broadcast royalty. For years, he could be heard on KING, KIRO and KVI.

As a teen, French got a job playing piano for a radio show, but all along he had been practicing his broadcast voice.

“I would take reading material into the bathroom. I would sit on the only thing you could sit on in the bathroom and read like a radio announcer. That’s what I wanted to do.”

In 1943, a disc jockey gave him his first break. French was 16 and broadcasting live big band shows from Southern California.

He wrote radio dramas about the week’s news while in the Army, and he wrote his first scripts for CBS radio dramas in 1948.

Since then, French has written and produced nearly 500 original shows.

“I like the idea of being able to tell stories and embellish them with sound effects and music, fine actors and I know this will automatically create vivid pictures in the minds of listeners.”

A ticket to adventure

Larry – or Lawrence Albert – plays Harry Nile and Dr. John H. Watson in“The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”

“Being a radio actor or an audio actor allows you to go places no other media allows you. I’m 5-feet-6. On radio I can be 6-7.”

And what’s a 6-feet-7 guy sound like?

“Like a guy who’s 5-6 only more confident,” Albert says.

Cue the cabbage

Albert has acted in more than 400 radio dramas. He helps French with the post-production of each show, putting in sound effects to really make the stories come alive.

Which is when a head of cabbage really comes in handy.

Want to signal the sound of a head being bashed in?

Hit the cabbage with a pipe.

“Artscape” is a weekly KPLU feature covering Northwest art, performances and artists. The feature is published here on Sundays and airs on KPLU 88.5 on Monday during Morning Edition, All Things Considered and on Weekend Saturday Edition.

http://www.kplu.org/post/old-time-radio-drama-fires-imagination

From 1920 until the mid-1950s, no other medium unified America like radio.

Unlike newspapers, which were regionally focused, radio dramas like “The Lone Ranger,” comedy shows like “Jack Benny” and variety shows like “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour” connected millions of Americans in a way they hadn’t before.

With the advent of television, radio’s impact decreased until finally in 1962, the “Golden Age of Radio” officially ended when CBS radio canceled “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,” a radio drama about an insurance investigator.

Top 40, news and talk radio filled the void left by the demise of what came to be called “old-time radio,” but a few vocal supporters kept, to paraphrase the opening of “The Lone Ranger,” returning to the thrilling days of yesteryear by collecting tapes of old radio shows and hosting conventions where the actors on classic shows reenacted episodes live in front of an appreciative audience.

One of the most popular of those events has been the annual Friends Of Old Time Radio Convention, which, for 36 years, has attracted hundreds of people to Newark, N.J., to see, in the flesh, the people that made radio the theatre of the mind.

To read more of article, click here.

Before e-mail, the internet and Facebook, in the middle part of the 20th Century, people were entertained by radio and TV shows like Dragnet, The Bickersons, Duffy’s Tavern and other live broadcast performances featuring live actors and hilarious studio-made sound effects. On February 11, Massasoit Community College’s Radio Players will present music and comedy in a cabaret format providing an intimate setting.

Read more here.

US Producer Jonathan Mitchell is launching new radio drama in the UK.  Hopefully this will open doors in US.

For more info, click here.

It is interesting to note that The Green Hornet started as a radio drama in the 30s and then branched off into comic books and film serials in the 40s, then starred in a successful and memorable TV show in the 60s and even enjoyed a comic book revival in the 80s. Now, with a new film, the character certainly seems to be at a real apex of popularity.

We hoping the same will be said for Joe Gunther!

Pia Catton wrote an article in the December 30, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal about  podcasts produced in the offices of Naked Angels.  She wrote, “Now, a group of 15 theater types in their late 20s is meeting every week at the Naked Angles offices on Seventh Avenue to write and rehearse weekly theatrical offerings in the style of short radio plays.”

Commenting on the WSJ article in The Nonprofit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge writes,”…Pippin Parker, a director and playwright and Naked Angels board member comments, “When there’s less production money, you need to find ways for artists to see their work realized. It allows them to have their work produced in an economical way.” Aspiring writers are invited to participate in the radio-based works and the group is now seen as something of a “farm system” for Naked Angels stage productions.