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.

 
My Favorite Husband
(the precursor to I Love Lucy)

From England

And Australia