Sorry to hear Eric didn’t appreciate the Bester interview I posted awhile back. I found him to be a jovial and intelligent dude myself. I suppose I’m biased though because I’ve been a fan of his novels and short stories since I was 14.

I have lightly edited the links above for formatting purposes. Thank you for the comment!

As a story, this was great. In terms of the performances, John Archer has to be the most un-shadowy Shadow of them all. Other than the added slightly-echoey effect, he didn’t alter his performance at all when he switched from Cranston to The Shadow. He might as well have been playing Lamont the whole time. Unlike Eric, I *was* taken out of the story by his performance.

And on the subject of performances, I was glad that Joshua mentioned the announcer’s emphasis of inappropriate syllables, because I also found this odd. Even odder than just emphasizing “to whom” over the rest of the sentence, of those two words, he emphasized “to” more than “whom”: “…the only person who knows *TO* WHOM the voice of the invisible Shadow belongs.” Apparently, the most important word in that sentence was “to”, with “whom” being almost as important but not quite as important as “to”.

I also found it odd that Italian-American cop Joe Cardona would speak in a bad attempt at an Irish accent (although I suppose that if Cardona were to attempt an Irish accent, it probably *would* be bad). Joe Cardona was a long-running supporting character in the Shadow pulps, first appearing with the rank of Detective in the very first issue of The Shadow Magazine, and working his way up to Inspector over the next few years. No rank (or first name) is mentioned in this episode, but he doesn’t appear to be very high up or to have any significant level of expertise, unlike the ace investigator of the pulps. (But at least they didn’t “Shrevy-ize” him.)

And speaking of the pulps, I have to take issue with one point in your introduction. I was listening to this (with headphones) in public, and I had to stop myself from blurting out “No, he didn’t…” — I may have said “No” out loud, but nobody around me seemed to be looking at me, so maybe it wasn’t *too* loud — when you described The Shadow as wearing “a blood-red scarf.” Black cloak, yes. Wide-brimmed hat, yes. Scarf, no. In the pulp novels, The Shadow’s attire was described as being entirely black, with the collar of his cloak masking the lower part of his face. On the *covers* of the pulps, to make them more colorful, his cloak was depicted as having a bright-red lining, with the collar folded over so that the red lining is on the outside where the cloak’s collar wraps around his face. Some examples can be seen in:
Shadow Magazine Vol 1, 113
Shadow Magazine Vol 1, 116
Shadow Magazine Vol 1, 119
In at least one novel (only one that I can recall reading myself), author Walter B. Gibson did describe the cloak as being lined in red (apparently succumbing to editorial pressure to make the description match the covers), but most of the time, he described the cloak as solid black. The red lining looks striking on the covers, but it doesn’t make much sense for a character that is supposed to blend into the shadows.

Later, in the mid-40s, after the magazine had been shrunk to digest size and the covers were painted by a different artist in a more modern style (for that time), The Shadow *was* depicted wearing a red scarf, apparently because the artist mistook the red-lined collar of the earlier covers for a scarf. But those covers don’t tend to be the ones that you see reprinted, and more often, the covers of that era don’t show The Shadow at all, so there are only a handful of pulps which depict him with a scarf (here’s an example: Shadow Magazine Vol 1, 284), and he’s never described as wearing a scarf in the text of the novels.

Where he *is* consistently depicted with a scarf is in the modern comic books. Michael Kaluta drew him with a scarf in the comics he drew for DC in the 70s, and virtually every artist since then has followed Kaluta’s example. I don’t know whether Kaluta was referencing the handful of mid-40s covers that did have the scarf, or if he just also mistook the red-lined collar for a scarf. Kaluta’s artwork on those comics was awesome, by the way, so this isn’t meant as a criticism of him; he just got that one detail wrong. It’s just unfortunate that it has been perpetuated by all of the artists since him, and it has become embedded in the public’s mind (or at least that portion of the public that has any idea of The Shadow at all).

Oddly, in later issues of Street & Smith’s own Shadow Comics in the 1940s, The Shadow appears to be wearing a red bandana over the lower half of his face. On several of the covers, you can see the ends of the bandana where they’re knotted at the back. I suppose I should be thankful that this didn’t catch on.