Showing results by author "Radio Shows of the Past!" in All Categories

The Red Skelton Show is an American television comedy/variety show that aired from 1951 to 1971. In the decade prior to hosting the show, Richard "Red" Skelton had a successful career as a radio and motion pictures star.[1] Although his television series is largely associated with CBS, where it appeared for more than sixteen years, it actually began and ended on NBC. During its run, the program received three Emmy Awards, for Skelton as best comedian and the program as best comedy show during its initial season, and an award for comedy writing in 1961. In 1959 Skelton also received a Golden ...

1951 Private Detective stories starring British Actor Rex Harrison as Rex Saunders, a gentleman detective.

True Detective Mysteries radio series was based on the "True Detective magazine. Later it was sponsored by Listerine and Oh Henry Candy, but kept the same name. Each week the show presented the "case history of an actual crime. Many were told from the criminal's point of view.

Blackstone, the Magic Detective was a 15-minute radio series based on Elmer Cecil Stoner's comic book series Blackstone, Master Magician. The program aired Sunday afternoons at 2:45pm on the Mutual Broadcasting System from October 3, 1948, until March 26, 1950.Radio.Starring Edwin Jerome as "the world's greatest living magician," the radio series was based on real-life magician Harry Blackstone, Sr.The series was announced by Don Hancock from October 1948 through June 1949, and Alan Kent from July 1949 through to the end of the series in March, 1950. The background organ music was ...

"The Haunted Crossroads" was a horror radio show that aired in 1932, likely as part of a larger series called "The Witch's Tale" which was known for its spooky, supernatural stories; "The Haunted Crossroads" would have been one episode within that series, featuring a narrative centered around a haunted intersection. Key points about "The Haunted Crossroads":Part of "The Witch's Tale":This episode was most likely part of the "The Witch's Tale" radio show, which ran from 1931 to 1938 and was known for its eerie, supernatural themes.Genre:Horror fiction, focusing on a spooky story centered ...

The English-language propaganda radio programme Germany Calling was broadcast to audiences in the United Kingdom on the medium wave station Reichssender Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States. The programme began on 18 September 1939 and continued until 30 April 1945, when the British Army overran Hamburg. The next scheduled broadcast was made by Horst Pinschewer (also known as Geoffrey Perry), a German-Jewish refugee serving in the British Army who announced the British takeover. Pinschewer was later responsible for the capture of William Joyce.Through such broadcasts, the ...

Bogart began acting in Broadway shows. Debuting in film in The Dancing Town (1928), he appeared in supporting roles for more than a decade, regularly portraying gangsters. He was praised for his work as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936). Bogart also received positive reviews for his performance as gangster Hugh "Baby Face" Martin in William Wyler's Dead End (1937).His breakthrough came in High Sierra (1941), and he catapulted to stardom as the lead in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), considered one of the first great noir films.[4] Bogart's private detectives,...

For his entire life though, Welles's obsession was Shakespeare. He produced and starred in Shakespeare plays on Broadway and directed and starred in multiple versions of Shakespeare's work on film, including Chimes at Midnight.

The period 1948-1950 brought major changes to network radio, as CBS hired a number of stars from NBC in what some have called "talent raids". Some of the top performers who changed networks were Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Edgar Bergen, and the husband-and-wife duo George Burns and Gracie Allen. One result of the changes was that 12 of the 15 highest-rated radio programs at the end of 1949 were on CBS. Harold Peary did not find such success, however. Peary switched to CBS, while the program in which he had starred, The Great Gildersleeve, stayed on NBC. Those changes resulted in a new ...

Rocky Fortune is an American radio drama that aired weekly on NBC Radio beginning in October 1953. The series ended its run in March 1954 after 25 episodes. The program was created by George Lefferts. Frank Sinatra voiced the title role of Rocky Fortune for the entire series.Rocky Fortune aired Tuesday nights on NBC at 9:35 pm Eastern, immediately following Dragnet (and a five-minute John Cameron Swayze newscast). It was a sustaining series, meaning that NBC presented the program without corporate sponsorship. The premiere episode, "Oyster Shucker", originally aired on October 6,...

Murder by Experts is a 1936 mystery thriller novel by the British writer Anthony Gilbert, the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson. It launched her long-running series featuring the shady London lawyer and detective Arthur Crook. Although she had been writing since 1926 this was her first major popular success. The plot revolves around collectors of Chinese antiques.

The play involves several elderly Jewish men from the old country, Russia, all members of a small synagogue in Mineola, Long Island. The play opens with the hapless Sexton's daily quest to gather ten males to constitute a minyan required in Jewish tradition to conduct a religious service. This search has suddenly become critical as the granddaughter of one of the men has apparently become possessed by the spirit of a dybbuk, an evil spirit. The grandfather leaves the girl sitting in the office of the temple's young rabbi, who is progressive and not likely to believe in the existence of ...

Tom Corbett is the main character in a series of Tom Corbett—Space Cadet stories that were depicted in television, radio, books, comic books, comic strips, and other media in the 1950s.The stories followed the adventures of Corbett, Astro, and Roger Manning (originally; later, T.J. Thistle), cadets at the Space Academy as they train to become members of the Solar Guard.The action takes place at the Academy in classrooms and bunkrooms, aboard their training ship the rocket cruiser Polaris, and on alien worlds, both within the Solar System and in orbit around nearby stars.

The Big Show was an American radio variety program featuring 90 minutes of comic, stage, screen and music talent. It was aimed at keeping American radio in its classic era and making it robust against the rapidly growing television tide. For its year-and-a-half run (November 5, 1950 – April 20, 1952), the show's quality made Their ambitions seem plausible.

Webb, who had previously starred on the Mutual detective drama, Johnny Madero, Pier 23, played the title character, a private investigator working for Anthony J. Lyon (originally Wilms Herbert, later Herb Butterfield) at the International Detective Bureau. In the first incarnation of the series, Lyon was played by Wilms Herbert, while Webb's future Dragnet co-star, Barton Yarborough, played his co-worker, Joe Canto. This format continued until the end of the year, when Webb left the program. According to writer William Froug, Webb was fired for asking for too much money.[3] Police ...

The Campbell Playhouse (1938–1940) is a live CBS radio drama series directed by and starring Orson Welles. Produced by Welles and John Houseman, it was a sponsored continuation of The Mercury Theatre on the Air.The series offered hour-long adaptations of classic plays and novels, as well as adaptations of popular motion pictures.When Welles left at the end of the second season, The Campbell Playhouse changed format as a 30-minute weekly series that ran for one season (1940–41).

The Buck Rogers comic strip had been commercially very successful, spawning novelizations and children's toys, and King Features Syndicate decided to create its own science fiction comic strip to compete with it. At first, King Features tried to purchase the rights to the John Carter of Mars stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. However, the syndicate was unable to reach an agreement with Burroughs. King Features then turned to Alex Raymond, one of their staff artists, to create the story.One source for Flash Gordon was the Philip Wylie novel When Worlds Collide (1933). The book's themes ...

Counterspy was an espionage drama radio series that aired on the NBC Blue Network (later ABC) and Mutual from May 18, 1942, to November 29, 1957. David Harding (played by Don MacLaughlin) was the chief of the United States Counterspies, a unit engaged during World War II in counterintelligence against Japan's Black Dragon and Germany's Gestapo. United States Counterspies was a fictional government agency devised by the program's creator, Phillips H. Lord after Lord "had a certain amount of difficulty with J. Edgar Hoover over story content in Gang Busters."[3] Mandel ...

The Man Called X is an espionage radio drama that aired on CBS and NBC from July 10, 1944, to May 20, 1952. The radio series was later adapted for television and was broadcast for one season, 1956–1957.Herbert Marshall had the lead role of agent Ken Thurston/"Mr. X", an American intelligence agent[2] who took on dangerous cases in a variety of exotic locations. Leon Belasco played Mr. X's comedic sidekick, Pegon Zellschmidt, who always turned up in remote parts of the world because he had a "cousin" there. Zellschmidt annoyed and helped Mr. X.Jack Latham was an announcer for the program...

The series was a Ziv Production, produced at RCA's New York studios and licensed by the Mutual Broadcasting System, and later, NBC's Red network. It lasted two seasons, 39 shows each (78 total) consisting mostly of radio adaptations of classic horror or supernatural stories written by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens. A few scripts were written specifically for the series. The production values were modest and The Weird Circle featured very little music.