Escape:
Bird of Paradise.
03/11/54.
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Inner Sanctum:
“Song of the Slasher”
(04/24/45).
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Mindwebs:
“The Man Who Returned”
(12/08/78).
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Strange As It Seems:
“The Author Who Ate His Book”
(1935-39).
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In episode one we have an Escape involving a “Bird of Paradise” from March 11 of 1954.
A spin off from Suspense, Escape ran on CBS from 1947 to 1954, and dealt in a wide variety of stories: science fiction, horror, murder.
You know,good fun for the whole family!
The program displayed a fondness for adventure tales set in the tropics or on the high seas. As far as I have been able to find out, there were a total of 194 stories.
Many of the episodes were taken from the classics, but not all. Often the writers and producers of Escape culled material from stories that were not then considered classics but have gained that status since. Not that the radio show had anything to do with that. This distinction was brought about by the excellence of the material itself and the garnishment of time.
“Bird of Paradise” was adapted from the short story of the same name by John Russell, first published in Colliers, August 19, 1916.
Andrew Harben, a want-a-be fortune hunter, arrives at one of the spice Islands. Once there he makes his way to a dealer in rare birds. Then with more muscle and ambition than good sense, attempts to muscle his way into the trade.
Success, after a fashion, he does find. While wandering the Solomon Sea he succumbs to an illness. Barely alive he and his boat make landfall. Uncertain of where he is, it is nevertheless here that he finds this opportunity and his nemesis. Oh, and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Well, there’s always a Dame. Ain’t there?
Held prisoner on the island by a huge man. He is nothing more than a slave.
This is not what he intended for himself. It does not fit in with his plans at all!
The story was adapted for radio by John Meston and produced/directed by Norman MacDonnell. John Dehner starred and the cast included Andrew Harbin and Lawrence Dobkin.
Inner Sanctum presents a marry tune, ” Song of the Slasher”; Which originally aired on April 24 of 1945.
Taking its name from a popular series of mystery novels, Inner Sanctum Mysteries debuted over NBC’s Blue Network in January 1941.
Inner Sanctum Mysteries featured one of the most iconic openings in radio history. First an organist hit’s a dissonant chord. Next a doorknob turns, and the “creaking door” slowly began to open. So impressive was this opening that when South African radio ran its own version of the show it was called The Creaking Door
Every week, Inner Sanctum told stories of ghosts, murderers and lunatics, with a cast consisting of veteran radio actors. Although Produced in New York, there were occasional guest appearances by Hollywood stars such as Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains.
Raymond”, the host, had a droll sense of humor, and an appetite for ghoulish puns. Raymond’s influence can be seen among horror hosts everywhere, from The Crypt-Keeper to Elvira, and even more so among his contemporaries on radio .”Raymond” was played until 1945 by Raymond Edward Johnson. Then Paul McGrath took over and played “Raymond” until the show ended production in 1952 .
Producer Hiram Brown was so taken with the creaking door that when he produced and directed The CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s he would use it again.
Inner Sanctum Mysteries was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1984.
“The slasher has murdered and mutilated five victims in eight days, and there is no sign that he will be stopping any time soon. In fact, Detective Miller arrives on scene just as the Slasher’s latest victim is in the final throws of death. Such a hard-boiled dick is he–dick being the operative word–that when she does keel over, he actually has the intestinal fortitude to chastise her. “Hey! Don’t do that!”
He has no real clues to go on other than the fact that the Slasher whistles while he works, some “queer tune” that Detective Miller just can’t place. And on this particularly dark and foggy night, he chases that tune through the neighborhood, trying to locate the knife-wielding madman that seems to be consistently one step ahead and always just out of sight.
It’s a brief and relatively fun 30-minutes, but not too shocking to modern audiences. We’re too used to the silver screen to be frightened by the silver speakers. Still, its got a bit of old-school tough-guy lingo and an off-kilter musician that would be at home in any number of those black-and-white crime films that exploited the jazz generation. It will probably be of interest to fans of the old E.C. Comics stories, as well as slasher film fanatics that want a little history lesson.”… Midnight Media
Mindwebs – “The Man Who Returned” from December 8, 1978.
MindWebs, was a program of Science fiction stories that ran on WHA radio in Madison, Wisconsin from 1976 to 1984. The programs are actually more like audio books than audio drama, or really, maybe, someplace in between. The producers of the show took some of the very best science fiction short stories and gave them a dramatic reading with multiple performers taking the parts of various characters. These performances are rounded off with the addition of good, atmospheric background music and excellent, realistic sound effects.
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Edmond Hamilton was a pulp science fiction writer of the highest reputation, a veteran writer who was not only popular with readers, but also a very prolific writer who managed his prodigious output without sacrificing quality (according to Jack Williamson, in his biography Wonder’s Child, Hamilton sent 40 stories to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales without a single rejection or request for revision). And on something of a personal note; He was one of my absolute favorite writers of all time, beginning in about 1960 with his novel , The Haunted Stars.
I think I’ve read every one of Hamilton’s novels.
The Man who Returned” was first published in the February 1934 edition Of Weird Tales.
Is he dead, or is he not dead? That is the question.
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I have posted links to some of Edmund Hamilton’s works that are in the public domain. This includes both E-books and voice recordings as done by Various people at the Librivox Project.
Click Here
Segment four is an episode of Strange As It Seems about, “The Author Who Ate His Book” From somewhere in between 1935 and 1939.
Strange As It Seems began as a 15 minute radio program on March 22, 1935 broadcast over the Columbia radio network. The scheduled at first was for was 3 nights a week – Sunday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:45 PM. The sponsor was Ex‐Lax. In late September 1935 the show changed to two shows per week,The stories themselves were Believe It or Not type tales, only instead of being based on Ripley‘s famous newspaper cartoon panels, they used a competing cartoon series drawn by John Hix. These tales were interesting, but not scary.
Over the years this show would go through a couple of more incarnations. It would come to exist as a 30 min. show and then as a 1 min. show. I have not been able to find many of these shows so far only a handful of the 15 min. versions.
Well, the title of the episode tells a part of the story but not all. There are four or five segments in this 15 min. episode, not all of them amazing.
I did not, for example, know that Calvin Coolidge was never a governor. But I must say that I do not find this fact to be particularly strange.
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