Welcome
to the Wonder Years
Old Time Radio (OTR) is, for the uninitiated,
those strange broadcasts that were received through the airwaves
way back in the stone age before prople had infrared remote controlled
television. Even further back that those strange black discs with
the small hole in the middle of them that Great Grandpa puts on
a strange maching that makes them go round and round and noice
comes from your $5,000.00 Nakamichi stereo with the Bose speaker
system including powered subwoofer that really don't
sound quite as nice as your Britney Spears CDs. And this was before
FM, too! Barbaric!!!
Back
when radio was king, every major star either had a radio program
or "appeared" on some other star's radio show. Sponsors
paid for the entire program series and had a say in practically
everything that went out. Great comedy routines were periodically
interrupted so that George and Gracie could hawk the virtues of
Carnation Evaporate Milk, or so that Don Wilson could tell you
about the seven flavors of Jello and how they were "flavor-sealed"
to protect the delicate taste, unlike their unnamed competition's
brand.
All you needed was an imagination and a radio
receiver and you had hours and hours of entertainment. All of
the genres were represented: comedy, mystery, soap opera, suspense/horror,
childrens programms, educational shows, and even adaptations of
major movies. These were either broadcast live, with all of the
actors around a couple microphones, or were transcribed onto large
recording discs (like huge LP records) which were sent to various
radio stations and played days or weeks later.
Today, the vast majority of the recordings have
been forever lost. The broadcasters were suppose to destroy most
of the discs after use. Some didn't get broken up; some were hidden
away. And many of the big name stars' shows were actually kept
on file by the networks.
The
good news is that thousands of recordings still exist. Many are
freely traded on the Internet by various ORT collectors. Several
businesses have sprung up specifically to sell tapes and CDs of
licensed programmes. Many retain the original commercial breaks,
while many others have been edited by recent users in the mistaken
believe that they are doing someone a favor. Those ads are a part
of history that shouldn't be deleted.
I have a collection of both downloaded shows as
well as purchased shows. While I will not place any show on this
site that I have purchased from a source that claims to have licenses
that show, I feel that it is important to put a few shows on this
site that are believed, by numerous sources, to have become part
of the "public domain."
The really good news is that there are some people
out there that like to work without pictures. New productions
are being mounted by various production companies. For example,
the SciFi Channel has a web site that features their Seeing
Ear Theater. Go check them out.
OTR is Back!
Somehow my set of ORT shows associated with this
site disappeared. The RS devil you ask? Who kows what evil lurks...
Anyway, here are three US shows, two British programmes, and a
little something from Pome land.
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From England
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And Australia
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