Glad you enjoyed the discussion and thank you for the recommendation! I’ve added Frankenstein to our listener list. We’ll definitely feature it on a future episode. I’ve never heard of Favorite Story, but the concept sounds similar to Murder By Experts. I look forward to hearing it!

I never knew that bit of Two-Face trivia! I think “The Face” is from 1947 so this might be the first and only time The Shadow ripped off Batman instead of the other way around!

On the subject of disfigured Batman villains, the version of Two-Face from the Batman newspaper comic strip is even closer to this. In that version, which ran in the Batman Sunday page from June 23 through August 18, 1946, Two-Face is not District Attorney Harvey Dent, but handsome actor Harvey Apollo, whose vanity about his looks contributes to his mental breakdown after his disfigurement. It was re-printed in the collection “Batman: The Sunday Classics 1943-46” (and previously, where I first read it, in the tabloid-size comic book Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-37, August-September 1975).

Can I make a suggestion for a future episode? Favorite Story was hosted by Ronald Coleman and did a half-hour adaptations of stories recommended by various celebrities. The Feb. 12, 1947 episode–recommended by comedian Fred Allen–is Frankenstein. To fit a novel into the half-hour time slot, the script gives us a very bare bones version of the story, stripping away the sympathetic aspects of the monster and simply making him an inherently evil creature dedicated to killing his creator. In context to the show, this approach works really well. Mary Shelley’s novel made important sociological and philosophical points about science, while the Favorite Story version simply wants to scare the pants off of you. It does quite a good job of this. I think it would be a fun choice for your podcast.

That sounds like a blast. I would love to perform this one live. We’ll have to put it on the list for next year’s James J. Hill shows.

I played Lamont Cranston/The Shadow a couple of times and directed one of the performances. It’s a pretty great entrance for The Shadow, breaking glass followed by laughter. It was fun to deliver righteous avenger lines like “You have forfeited your right to any consideration.”