Radio Days is a weekly journey back in time to when the mind’s eye was the theater in which episodic, serialized adventure played out listening to the performances on the brainchild of Marconi, Tesla and Edison. Before the advent of television, the center of family entertainment was the radio. Live broadcast of such programs as The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, Buck Rogers, and The Adventures of Superman thrilled audiences across the country, bringing together households and entire communities in a ritual of aural storytelling unlike anything before – and yet, on a massive scale, so similar to the tradition dating to pre-Homeric times, probably as far back the spoken language itself.
But not to get too cerebral – this is about entertainment. It’s about listening to stories together, getting caught up in the words and the acting and the sound effects coming together to paint a picture in your mind of adventure, comedy, romance – just about anything you can think of. It’s about the art, taken from pulp fiction of serialization, of crafting chapters in such a way as to reacquaint the listener with what happened last time, move the story along, and leave it in a “cliffhanger” that would make sure they come back for the next episode. But mostly, it’s about fun.
This is Radio Days – welcome to yesteryear!
