How many times have you read Dracula? The hosts did say this was likely plagiarised to some extent.

Was his voice in Edward Scissorhands?

First, according to IMDB, the voice of the Pincushion Man in Balloon Land was prolific voice actor Billy Bletcher. He mostly worked in cartoons but apparently he did some radio work too so *maybe* he was in this?

Also, the BVD “joke” was a reference to BVD underwear, which was very popular at the time. (I guess underwear humor was funny even back then.) I don’t think they make BVDs any more but I remember seeing lots of ads for it in the 1980s.

I’m pretty sure that Webber played the niece also. When I heard the niece’s voice, I immediately pictured an actress from several episodes of the 1967-70 Dragnet TV series, and then had to do some Googling to find out her name. I could have saved some time if I’d just come here and read your comment first! 🙂

The file is mislabeled, but this is 394. Apologies for the error!

Respectfully Yours
Timothy Freitas

Apologies! The whole podcast is having technical difficulties. In the meantime, you can find episodes (including this one) here: https://the-mysterious-old-radio-listening-society-1.castos.com/

I am so glad it’s over. Not a fan of this series, for sure. Felt like the writers had a deadline and wrote whatever was on the mind at the time. The storyline felt disjointed and more of a serial for kids.

And oh, the Maestro. Ugh. The way he insisted that everyone worship him, based only on “miracles” he performed under suspiciously specific circumstances (i.e. obviously faked somehow), and anyone who refused to believe him was “delusional.”

As for the hypnotism thing; it does make a certain sense for the time period, as back then it was the hot new thing, and all kinds of myths cropped up about it. I think this would have been the same time frame where you had, like, six different movies using the premise of “past life regression hypnosis is actually time travel, I guess.” Doesn’t make it any less infuriating, but it does explain why Morse might have thought it was a good idea.

But, because the characters were so unlikeable, my only investment was to hear the solution. And not only does it hinge on crappy science, it claims to explain but absolutely does not explain a) how the dead body vanished, since the Maestro would have had to push it all the way out of the car in like ten seconds, without anyone noticing; or b) how Nasha got out from under three feet of sand and a massive boulder, whether or not the coffin had a latch on the underside.

Ugh. I’m just glad you guys have fun with it.

Apologies for the technical difficulties. In the meantime, it’s here! https://episodes.castos.com/themorls/2142597/c1e-4k9qc1xpwvs7gv2p-47x5vzroh767-tx8w6h.mp3

Also, I too have only seen “Casablanca” once. The problem with watching it in full the first time when one is their fifties is that EVERY. LINE. OF. DIALOGUE. is a quote you’ve heard a thousand times.

The De Havilland movie suffers from stretching a 22-minute story to fit an hour and a bit. A lot of it is just her approaching different people in the neighbourhood and playing out their various reasons for not helping her.

I agree. The Auto Lite ads were delightful–largely due to the actress–but the Roma ads were tedious.

Whoops! 368 had an error in titling that has been fixed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53tMzPR0eAo

The Granite Furniture company apparently still has one store left in West Jordan, Utah.

I did just stumble on one of the best Bob Bailey episodes I have heard. A real hard boiled noir story. A mystery about a haunted damsel in distress where Johnnyhas to figure out if she’sreally in trouble or on the edge of sanity?

The Tears of Night Matter

https://youtu.be/mEvkKmR65PE?si=EA5lLbwk8IZNv44w

Oh, you raise a good point! I’ll confer with the others but it makes sense to use The Birds a little teaser to join a higher tier. Thanks!

But I was confused by one thing
Are the rest of us not going to get to hear The Birds too?

There’s nothing I could find on patreon about the results of this pole.

Yes, the wife got the tip out to her doctor. If that were on its own, it might have been enough. But instead, it was the only one out of over half a dozen ideas she tried that got anywhere close to succeeding. And, ultimately, she literally dies because she got too emotional.

Like, the moment you include a rant like that in the narrative, the story shifts away from being purely character driven. It is necessarily a story about that idea, and whether or not it’s true. Suddenly, it’s a lot less understandable for the wife, who is now a stand-in for any woman, to be so completely unprepared for a crisis.

And, maybe it’s because of my male privilege or modern sensibilities, but she actually doesn’t come across to me as very brave; because most of the ideas that fail, do so not because the gunman was smarter than her, but because she just didn’t follow through. I’m sure getting violently slapped in the face by a big tough guy hurts plenty… But she instantly gives up after one slap, every single time.

You want me to believe she’s brave, or determined, or desperate? Have him have to choke her the second or third time, not the tenth. Have her bite him, scratch him, kick him, take her shoes off and stab him with the heels. Have her do something that does more than irritate the guy. Even with the letter opener, she only goes in for one hit! Just because he’s stronger doesn’t mean that over the course of literal hours, she couldn’t do any meaningful damage.

And that brings up the opportunities she completely missed. Twice, she had him in reach while holding a liquid you do not want in your face: the iodine from the cabinet, and the boiling hot coffee. Throw it at him! But instead, she fails, every time, and ultimately literally dies because she got too emotional. And the police come, not because the gunman did something stupid and emotional, not because he underestimated her, but because he couldn’t have possibly figured out on his own who the delivery boy was.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by seeing well-written modern female protagonists, who aren’t assumed to be helpless and frail. But I do like seeing a woman giving a chauvinist a black eye and a fat lip.

So imagine my surprise after listening to the discussion segment of the podcast and hearing that I had completely missed everything in this show. In my defense I listen at work a lot and was probably not paying enough attention but at first listening all I heard was some standard noir characters talking in clichés without any trace of a plot. Who are these people? What are they doing? I had no idea but I did enjoy some of the dialog.
Then you guys come along and give it such weight.
In a way this is good because now I get to re listen on a dull night at work where there will probably be not much going on later.

I am glad that Eric took a chance on selecting an episode randomly! I agree with Joshua’s take on Phantom Menace. I feel bad for the extra research Tim did.

Also, hedgehogs and groundhogs are not the same thing. Not even close. In fact, groundhogs are more closely related to humans than they are to hedgehogs. (Not that groundhogs are closely related to humans, but hedgehogs are even further away.)

Groundhog:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Groundhog-Standing2.jpg/1280px-Groundhog-Standing2.jpg

Hedgehog:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Igel.JPG

:p

Forgot to mention that Houdini and Doyle were actually friends in real life, so the speculation makes total sense.

Even though this Escape episode wasn’t a classic, it comes very close to being one because the story itself is so well-thought out and put together, and the acting is so top notch, and the mystery of what happened to the train kept me hooked until the end. If it had been a straight-up Sherlock Holmes story, it would have been a classic. First time I’ve
heard a story by ACD that wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes story—it was still pretty good anyway.

Speaking of ACD, there was actually a show on the CW network a few years back called Houdini and Doyle, which speculated how both the famous magician and the famous author could have teamed up and solved weird mysteries together. It was only on for barely a season, but it was pretty interesting,.

The end was a total surprise. I loved the whole thing.

I think you all missed another key moment in that great shaving scene … the moment ‘the butler’ reveals ever so subtlety that he’s George Miller … “you’ll be a new man, Ace” … hit me like it must have hit Ace. The butler had never called him “Ace” up to that moment!

All fair points and a good reminder to better contextualize my arguments. I will stick to my praise of the lead’s performance though. The faults you found with it are what I liked about it. As you mentioned, this is a slight story so there is not much time to fill in the idiosyncratic nooks and crannies of Fell’s character so a broader performance makes sense to me. As you say, the tone, pitch, intensity, etc. of a voice cannot specifically convey a love of beer, but it can convey more generic traits such as physical size and temperment and, in that respect, I think the performance very much suceeds. If I remember correctly, Carr once compared Fell to Old King Cole which is certainly an aspect of the character captured here, particularly the merriment expressed upon solving the case.

I agree that the story, like most of Carr’s radio scripts, is too truncated to capture the intricacy of his novels. I said something to the effect of “this is not the best example” of Carr’s work and did not call it a classic by any means. I will cop to abusing the term “impossible mystery” by expanding it to include mysteries that are joyfully artificial and contrived (such as this one).

As always, thank you for your comments and, more importantly, keeping me on my toes!

It was as if the actor had never read a Fell novel and had no actual knowledge of the character, and just portrayed his own concept of a stereotypically pompous Oxbridge scholar with an extremely plummy voice. But Fell is not a stereotypical scholar; he’s an iconoclastic figure. He smokes cigars constantly and drinks beer copiously. His great scholarly work, which he’s continually working on but apparently never finishes, is a history of beer-drinking among the English people. In Death-Watch (which is the one I read most recently, so it was handy for me to go to and grab a quote), he explains his nervousness at one point by saying “It’s the result of going until noon without the strengthening influence of beer.” Now, I’m not saying that the actor’s performance was bad because he didn’t mention beer (after all, Fell does spend much more time talking about things other than beer; and the lack of beer references would be a matter of the script anyway, not the performance), but the actor’s portrayal didn’t seem like the sort of character who would say things like that or behave like Fell.

And aside from being unlike Fell, it just wasn’t a very good performance. It got better toward the end, as Fell prepared to demonstrate the solution, but for most of the episode, he didn’t seem to be portraying a character so much as just reciting his lines, like the stereotype of a ham English thespian with a rich, mellow voice. Carr frequently describes Fell’s speech as “Dr. Fell growled.” This guy didn’t growl; he just orated. I do disagree with Eric on one point — the actor did not sound like the “Where did the fishy go?” guy (which was a higher-pitched voice) — but he did sound like he could have been playing Lord Generic Upperclass.

As for the story itself, it was rather slight. The entire case against the condemned woman is that another character said he saw her commit the murder. If we’re to believe that the condemned woman is innocent, then there’s really only one person who could be guilty. (There couldn’t have been much of an investigation. I’m imagining the police saying, “Well, we don’t have any real evidence against her, but this guy who stands to inherit the victim’s money says he saw her do it, so it sounds open-and-shut to me.”)

And Joshua said “My favorite type of mysteries are these, the impossible mysteries or locked-room mysteries” — but this isn’t one of those. There was no locked room or impossible aspect to this. The victim was shot, and one character said he saw another character commit the crime. The lack of a locked room is not in itself a criticism (after all, Carr didn’t exclusively write locked-room mysteries, but they’re what he’s most renowned for), but even for a non-locked-room mystery, there really wasn’t any puzzle to this, or much of a mystery.

The plot deficiencies may have been result of it having been highly condensed from its original form. Prior to listening to this, I did some googling to see if this was adapted from a book that I haven’t read yet (and if it had been, my plan was to read the book first, and then listen to the episode). It turned out it was not adapted from a book, but it was adapted from an earlier radio play that Carr wrote, which was a three-part story. Carr re-wrote it for Appointment With Fear, condensing it from three episodes down to one. No recordings exist of the original version, but the script survives. According to this blog, the three-part version had a lot more twists and turns and red herrings, with a surprise ending (although the blogger feels that the Appointment With Fear version is more atmospheric). Now my goal is to try to find the script of the original version and read that for comparison.

Now, having said all of that, let me add that I didn’t hate it. It was still kind of entertaining, but it was a disappointment. When I read your Patreon email, I was eager to listen to a Gideon Fell story, but the actor’s performance was so unlike how I envision Fell, and the story was not one of Carr’s best.

Birch!!! I do have some unfortunate regionalisms (“inter-pet” among them), sloppy enunciation in general, and a terrible habit of dropping the “be” on because. All of these issues are heightened when I speak extemporaneously so my apologies to listeners. That being said, writing and speaking are two different functions, supported by two different parts of the brain! C’mon, man! The fact that I write scripts and spell interpret correctly and even hear it pronounced correctly in my mind when I read the word has no real bearing on how I pronounce the word in conversation. Going forward though, I promise to pay much closer attention to my rhoticity!

AHHHHHH!!! I SO WISH I KNEW THAT BEFORE RECORDING! Fantstic!

Since adult female voice actors often would be called on to play male children, I’m not too surprised, but now I can’t unhear Rudolph when listening to this episode. 🙂

This episode was … OK. It didn’t fall apart like some episodes of CBSRMT, but it wasn’t particularly great, either. It was pleasant enough to listen to, but it really didn’t generate any suspense.

I would be delighted if Monty Masters used the [historical figure known by a single name] [common last name] template in other episodes that featured people in Rembrandt Watson’s circle.

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?419973

Apparently, that anthology was published by Scholastic in the 70s. Maybe you read that short story when you were a youth?

Also! I’d like to request a remote broadcast, where all 3 of you purify yourselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. The foley on that would be awesome!!! Just a thought. 💜💜💜

That would be a great twist, but so many reasons it is a trope, least of which is to play into fears about “headshrinkers”. It is almost funny. People fear mental health professionals, so pop culture plays into that and makes them “scary”.

…sadly, I would just like to add that my OTR listening buddy, Robin – my 15 year old Pomeranian – recently passed away. In April 2020 (around the time I discovered the MORLS, actually) he was diagnosed with both Congestive Heart Failure as well as diabetes. Cataracts from the diabetes soon caused him to be almost completely blind. The last three years he was on three meds for the CHF as well as two insulin injections per day, and he was a real champ, doing his best to not let those setbacks interfere with him living the best life he could. While he was very outgoing and adventurous, he loved to relax and listen to OTR with me while taking long car rides, or while waiting for me to get out of the aforementioned bubble bath. He always seemed at his most relaxed when I played OTR (except maybe when there were shrill screams).
Recently, age – along with his ailments and the Summer heat – began to take a heavy toll on him and I couldn’t allow him to struggle simply to survive. I was right there with him when he took his last breath on July 19th at about 4:55 pm.
I miss him dearly, and I just don’t think I’ll ever enjoy listening to OTR alone quite as much as when he was listening along with me…

I also love this serial, primarily because of Howard McNear. I am catching up on old episodes, and in Episode 44 the guys were delighted to discover the voice of Floyd the barber, but I don’t think they ever even mentioned him by name in these discussions. I love the Bob Bailey Johnny Dollars, and particularly the serials, but in this one I thought McNear stole the show! I am a relative newcomer to old time radio, but I have seen every episode of Andy Griffith, so his voice is probably the one I recognize most often. I was a little disappointed that he didn’t get more praise for this serial because he was truly hilarious!

final thought: please cover ‘Sorry, Wrong Number,’ sooner than later, while Long Distance is still ringing in my head. Pun intended.

Mark

Not a classic, but the story itself was definitely chilling and scary.

Thank you! I truly hated this one, and was feeling self-conscious about it. I was listening to it in the car, and kept hitting the skip button…are they at the castle yet? No? Skip, skip, skip.

It doesn’t help that by now I’ve encountered many, many variations on this sort of story. Person suddenly finds themself in a world that looks familiar, except that the details are wrong and no one recognizes them? That’s the basic premise of any number of Twilight Zone episodes. The difference is that in the Twilight Zone, all of that stuff with the protagonist running around saying “Don’t you know who I am?!” is the first act. The castle is reached. The rest of the story is about the protagonist trying to figure out how to cope with and/or escape this altered reality.

And agreed that it made no sense for the daughter not to recognize her mother. Perhaps if the mother’s appearance reflected that twenty years had passed, but looking exactly as she did when she died?

I can’t understand how and why he murdered the woman whom bore him 3 children. Why did he wait so long.

I liked this episode—it’s even more interesting than the last Frontier Gentlemen episode. It hooked me in just enough so that I wanted to see just how the situation would play itself out— which wasn’t what I expected. It was pretty good, and the concept of Frontier Gentleman is a unique one for a western radio show of that era.

Found a new radio show called Molle Mystery Theatre from the ’40s—heard a really good crime episode from it called “Red Wine” courtesy of the podcast Weird Darkness—it was really good.

There was also an EC Comics adaptation in 1953, drawn by Jack Kamen, whose son invented the Segway. (That last fact has nothing to do with “Zero Hour”; I just felt like sharing it.)

Joshua mentioned towards the end of the podcast that he couldn’t recognize which character Daws Butler was portraying. Butler played Sam, Tom’s friend and owner of the wharf that was outfitting the yachts. I thought it was Butler when Sam started talking, but wasn’t 100% certain until I listened to the end credits and heard his name.

One of the two stars of this episode was Barney Phillips, who played Friday’s partner Ed Jacobs on Dragnet (after Ben Romero and before Frank Smith).

And Tim might be interested to know that the Mayan storm god Chac, the guy whose head was being dumped in the ocean, was the antagonist in the first issue of Hawkman, in 1964.

Thanks!

Your comment is back! Sorry for the delay in approval.

(I edited my comment when I discovered that, although you can italicize your text by using the button at the bottom, it doesn’t work if you try to do it by typing the <i>html tags</i> yourself.)

Regarding your discussion over whether the stranger’s losing his face was supposed to be an allusion to anything: My take was that it was intended to suggest that Tony’s father might have been the one who cut off his face. When Tina asks Tony why he chose his occupation, he says “Maybe it’s because my name is Murillo”, and tells her about his father, Cesar Murillo, who shot nine men before a sheriff’s posse shot him. A “sheriff’s posse” suggests that this occurred in the west, and in combination with a Hispanic surname, that suggests the southwest. Then when the stranger stops Tony in the street, he asks Tony if he’s Tony Murillo. And then a bit later, he says that his face was destroyed by a bandit in desert country — and “desert country” could also mean the U.S. southwest. So at that point, I was expecting it to be some kind of revenge scheme against Tony because of the crimes of his father. And when he asked Tony to sculpt Tony’s own face for him, I was expecting him to commit some crime wearing Tony’s face, and frame Tony. But, of course, this being Inner Sanctum, the plot instead went in about thirteen other directions.

Mason Adams also played the Atom Man, a Nazi villain, in possibly the greatest storyline of The Adventures of Superman radio series.

And I slightly surprised that, in your discussion of “The Lost Chord”, you didn’t mention the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord. (Not that I’ve ever actually listened to the album; I’m just aware of its existence. I listened to Days of Future Passed all the way through once, and that was more than enough for me.)

I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a lot of the time. There are vastly more instances where the mentally ill are the villains, or minions of the villains.

I agree about Tony Randall.

2. I think Pip was played by a young Tony Randall…

This episode is hands down better than any episode of Rawhide and better than 80% of Dragnet. While it is true it doesn’t have the same audio effects, there is a ton to enjoy. Vincent Price is talking to a ghost!

Anything with Peter Lorre’s creepy vocals is worth listening to. The imitation of him going all deranged reading a Christmas poem was hilarious—that was worth hearing again by itself !

Yep, Temptation! Great song, riveting episode of radio.

That’s true about the stereotyping of mentally ill people, particularly in horror movies. However, in horror movies a lot of the time, it’s usually the main protagonist who is mentally ill, or being driven mentally ill by forces beyond their control. This was a good, intense, suspenseful story with some genuinely creepy moments and an interesting twist to it—it was good right up to the very end.

This was a good show, up until the ending—-which didn’t make any sense at all. The guy sees that thing killed his co-worker, then he takes it home and hooks up with it? Come on–that was so stupid. That wasn’t even really explained, either. Other than, it was entertainingly creepy.

Also: This was not only the best (and most faithful) adaptation of “The Signal-Man” so far, it may also be the most faithful adaptation of any Dickens story I’ve ever encountered. I really enjoyed this.

Truth be told, for the past few years, I haven’t been looking forward to your annual Signal-Man fest. It’s started to feel kind of tedious listening to yet another adaptation, most of them not particularly good. (I really liked your first one with Sarah Churchill, but it went downhill after that.) Going into this one, I really wasn’t expecting it to be very good, but I thought that Nightfall might at least do something crazy with it that would make it a change from the others. But I was not expecting what they did do, which was to make an extremely faithful adaptation and perform it extremely well. I’m glad I listened.

Duty.

https://youtu.be/3qAshUH7ySc

As for this episode, for my perspective there was an angle I thought that was slightly glossed over as a brilliant “theatre of the mind” moment. This episode has the hanging pitfall that somebody has deduced who the Shadow is, and you pointed out that hey, that’s a glaring loose end that Lamont needs to shut. The quintessential trope of the bad-shadow dying right before he could expose Lamont was indeed quite hilarious, but I’ll fully admit that when listening I saw a very different twist.

Lamont was particular in his telling of Margo to have the police arrive after his meeting, and he had to at least suspect his adversary knew his identity given the targeting of notes and calls. To me the beautiful “sneering” moment when Lamont tells the professor that he can in fact see him is very telling. There was an edge here in this version of Lamont that we don’t really see that pairs well with the otherwise irrational and easy admission that Lamont is, in fact, the Shadow. You guys hit on in your discussion how strange it was that he just gave up the gig and had to know ahead of time his foe wouldn’t be coming out of this one alive. Follow all that up with the pushing of the police to start shooting, and in that listen I ‘saw’ Lamont taking the kill shot himself, before immediately laying on with the “he’s hit with a stray shot”. It’s all too convenient for a threat so obvious to his whole way of life.

What would you do if you were invisible and this punk was about to bring the world down on your little secret? In that dying gasp I ‘saw’ the Shadow’s boot coming down on the dying professors neck to silence him at the crucial moment, before slipping away from the scene. It’s a darker take than this version usually takes, and is far too dark for this “children’s episode” of the Shadow to overtly take, but an amazing example to me of how the radio can play out a different picture to each listener. Theatre of the mind, indeed!

That’s all for me nerding out today. Thanks again for all your hard work and fantastic productions.

But the episode is so ham fisted, with its reaally weak double-twist, to the main protagonist who probably didn’t have a stroke. It feels exploitative of people who face issues such as life-changing medical event or suicidal ideation. The advice to suicidal people in this radio play is so pollyanna and extremely unhelpful.

This episode is kind of awful.

Whatever did you mean by ‘glaring misogyny’?

This wasn’t kink code, this wasn’t consensual, this is re-enforcing that women can be physically beaten by men, in order to control them and society was fine with it (read, the men in society).

Looking at how prevalent domestic violence was back then, this is a joke in the whole “it funny because it’s true” way.

THE BUTLER DID IT?

Tim For The Win.

funny thing about blue coal: I’ve heard ads where the sponsor admit to coloring the best coal blue, so the customer would know it was their best anthracite! Also did you hear them encouraging purchase of asbestos cement!?! 😬Jeez! How many cases of mesothelioma came out of that suggestion! Keep up the great work. Wish I lived near MN to see your live shows. Do you stream them?

This was an excellent story that keeps you in suspense the entire time you listen to it, and Fred Gwynne’s impressive performance anchors the whole thing—-really enjoyed this one.

This episodes was done very well, even if the surgery takes up most of the plot. Good story with a dark ending, too.

Thought this was an excellent episode—really enjoyed how the music blended in perfectly with the story instead of being intrusive, too dramatic or out of place. The story itself, based on an actual case, was creepy enough by itself.

Here’s some quick suggestions for a couple of show episodes to listen to: The Sending, from the CBS Mystery Radio Hour, and The Marriage Bureau Murders, from an obscure crime show Let Justice Triumph.

_________________________

[July 25, 1947 Cleveland (OH) Plain Dealer – Radio editor Robert S. Stephan reviews a lost Wyllis Cooper episode]

LIGHTS OUT is the kind of dramatic series the American living room could easily do without. It deals in horrible stuff. This week’s “sketch” (WJW, Wednesdays) concerned the doings of vampires (the living dead). These are the folk who are supposed to go about at night feeding on their victim’s blood until someone is fortunate enough to drive iron stakes through their hearts.

Most vampire tales follow a pattern. There is the innocent victim, the relentless chase, the final blackout of the vampire. In this tale, a young wife (played as I caught the credits by Lurene Tuttle, an actress who has the ability for much better roles) is being bled to death by one Mellodoff. The play reveals he’s a fellow whose attentions once proved unwelcome to the heroine. He’s been killed in a traffic accident.

The action is based on the efforts of the young husband and a physician to thwart Mellodoff. They’re unsuccessful. The wife dies to become a vampire herself. Then the husband visits the wife’s vault, drives a stake through her heart and then shoots himself to death. What happens to Mellodoff I’ll probably never know. What possible entertainment value for the average family circle can be found in such morbid material?
_________________________

[July 30, 1947 Dallas Morning News previews Cooper’s “The Ring” — with spoilers.]

… Boris Karloff, the only living human who could scare the wind out of a ghost, will be involved in a ghastly drama about a gold ring disappearing from the hand of a beautiful lady . . . and the lady’s hand vanishes also. The ring is discovered later in the eye of a dead man, who has fantastically escaped from the grave to be found lying on a cold slab in the morgue. …

Although (theater of the mind) I want to listen to this again with David Thiel’s interpretation – that there was a big flashing sign saying “We’re eating people” and Vincent Price was sitting right under it too focused on his food to notice.

I have to say, I did like this episode, but like one of the hosts said, there were a couple of loose ends that were left dangling for no real reason, it seemed. For instance, how come it’s never explained exactly why neither the inventor nor the librarian could get in touch with each other for three months? How come the inventor couldn’t explain what happened to him? And why was there no explanation for why the same thing that happened to the librarian’s father also happened to the inventor—his invention suddenly being patented by someone else? It would have made the story better had there been a villain who was somehow using the inventions to travel through time and steal other people’s inventions—which would have tied up that particular loose end. In the end, good story, but there could have been a lot more explained about the strange things and coincidences in it, which would have made it even better.

Liked the twist that the sent the mad Doctor to be buried alive, could have been better executed.

Worst honeymoon ever!

Was very happy they didn’t explicitly say “people” or “cannibalism”.

Dillion would absolutely bring his guns to hunt down these guys. He would most likely have gotten his ass handed to him in his final fight. But the myth is that that since Dillion is a ‘real’ man, he doesn’t bring his guns, he wins his unmatched fight. Just full on toxic masculinity.

Also, the idea that the ‘tattle tale’ is so weak, even though he enables Dillion to carry out his vengeance. It is hilarious, but he should be chastising himself for not doing his own job. Will Dillion go home to learn to fight his own battles?

Also, that Dillion gets to just beat and torture these guys? Nothing to do with justice, nothing to do with heroes.

Dillion is more of a villain than anyone in this episode. The idea that a marshal is needed to handle a couple of drunks? Just a really stupid, overly macho story.

This is him telling the public he wasn’t going to do more Sherlock Holmes. It isn’t really a story, no mystery, no heart, no emotion. Holmes follows typical English virtues and he doesn’t sacrifice his friendship with Watson, instead he saves him. Watson is the stand in for the English empire, the every man who is virtuous by being English. Holmes sacrifices himself to save the English empire.

The dinosaur is completely unnecessary belongs on a t-shirt. Also, would listen to a Strangers on an Underground Train episode.

The only good part of the whole thing.

Very well-produced and well-acted episode, with a dark unexpected twist ending.

This show was obviously a spoof of the whole detective genre, which was why it was fun to listen to. And it’s a little funny, too.

It was pretty disturbing to listen to the wife get bossed around by her husband, who sounded like he didn’t even like her, and when he confessed the real reason he brought her down there, that confirmed it. He got what was coming to him, regardless. Entertaining, though disturbing.

Really well-done episode—if I didn’t know beforehand that only one actor was performing the entire show, I wouldn’t have believed it—that’s how good William Conrad was. I read the story it’s based on as a child, and it scared the heck out of me. This episode was really creepy, and well done, too.

However, the idea that Dragnet is actually presenting anything close to the truth is laughable. Of course evidence of a serial killer in LA matching the details in the story don’t show up and it’s disappointing to see the guys fall for this idea that Dragnet is giving a gritty, real version of 1950’s life, instead of just a glamorized, propaganda.

Interesting enough though, Roof (the movie theater shooter) was bought a fast food sandwich while in police custody.

Contrasted to the Parade from last time and this episode just fares really poorly. Eric was right on the money at first and should have held his ground. Also the idea that this episode has more than a passing acquaintance with the truth is pretty laughable. This episode is highly apocryphal.

There is also the fun of watching a mildly unsympathetic character come to this realization of what is happening and his struggle to get help.

The moral is pretty on the nose, with American consumerism having become so rampant and advertising becoming so influential. It is still an applicable message and the irony of the Ad man having done his part in the downfall of the world is kind of delicious/cathartic, when he gets the ‘boy who cried wolf’ treatment.

This story was absurd and poorly written. It has a dead baby just for shock value and the best part when it was over. Kudos to Eric for making it entertaining by pointing out the floating baby thing. Woof.

I’m never visiting a wax museum again.

On canon, especially during radio, before everything was recorded and made easily available, canon was really relegated to comic books, where there is a written canon. But even with comics, if you missed buying a comic, you missed part of that canon.

I really wanted Harry to get caught all through this episode. Welles is so sleazy, arrogant, and overbearing, I am so glad when he eats a bullet.

A much better story would have left clues for the butler to give himself away. It doesn’t have to be spelled out. The whole ‘non solution’ idea is really navel gazing excuses for lazy writing.

Other than that, I would love to see Eric’s adaption of this. I think it would be alot of fun.

There are a lot of silly things though, like not immediately evacuating the building. Or time not passing when not in a dialogue scene.

I felt like they spent alot of time going over that there is a gun-like hammer, that will hit a cap and ignite the bomb. So, he smashes his hand through and grabs the hammer from striking the ignition cap. Like a cap gun kind of.

I think Spence and Johnny Dollar would make an awesome team.

It is really hard to listen to the gas-lighting by the warden, the victim blaming, abuse of power by the police, the stalking and torture of the woman, and then for it all to be justified with “she committed murder and lied about it because she just was too in love”. The murder was just an excuse for the hate.

Poorly written, just garbage. It is clear MORLS crew really enjoyed and so I can understand why they had to work so hard to justify and excuse the misogyny.

It was really disappointing to hear them heap so much praise on such an openly misogynistic episode.

Additionally, I more enjoy the Signal-man (Signal-men?) when the narrator is a more active participant in the end.

While I think it would have been a better ending to cut off at the end of the phone call, this is truly a classic episode.

Plus, psychic abilities and guardian angels are usually two very different camps. Psychic power comes from within, while guardian angels are divine protection. Very weird to have someone that combines them.

This story would have made a lot more sense if she doesn’t mention psychic abilities at all, and just brought home the wrong newspaper. There could even have been a discussion about how she got the wrong paper, which could have brought up the guardian angel not working, etc. Or even have the husband find the rental. The current story has the wife be both the cause and solution to the problem. Ugh.

Ya, the radio announcer talking on end about it and invoking providence just really brought me out of it. I guess they didn’t think it would land otherwise?

I, literally, could not agree more with you. The story is just nonsensical.

So putting on the coat makes you undead.

The characters are a little rom-com-y, but the development is interesting. There is definitely supernatural elements in this story. The coincidences are so huge, that they become the domain of fate or kismet, which for me is a supernatural force.

I would say that Bishop strips away everything that can be explained trivially. For example, why is the inventor at that library (beside fate)? It doesn’t matter. We don’t need to backfill something that adds nothing to the story. Sure, there could be a line about how he is in town because it is close the big city/university, but also cheap to live. There are so many mundane, plausible explanations, that I am not bothered by their absence. It starts with the important part of the story, the relationship between the inventor and librarian.

There is one comment by Eric I wanted to call out. I hope it wasn’t intended the way it sounded, but it was kind of misogynistic in the way he found it unbelievable that a librarian might know more than the inventor about hydrodynamics. The story makes it clear she is intelligent and has education. Librarians often have degrees, she is probably fairly familiar with the books in the library, etc. ad nausuem. But the biggest thing is that fate is bringing them together.

I agree, also it is a more entertaining interpretation.

I have a sentimental attachment to Gunsmoke. Some of my earliest memories are of visiting my grandfather in Indiana and watching Gunsmoke on TV with he and my parents. AT least one of them would always say “Gunsmoke was once on radio, but it was a lot better on radio”. Being 4 or 5 years old, I couldn’t understand how a western could be on radio. LOL…I figured it out eventually!

Thanks, guys!

However, this came out almost a decade after Chariot of the Gods, which Eric correctly derides. The explicit racism in that book and the implicit racism in the show, that aliens brought along their technology (those two lines could have been cut without issue) is just awful.

I completely agree.
Dammit, he’s an archaeologist, not an astronomer Jim.

For example, if it isn’t literal, then how does writing to the hospital work? But if it is literal, how does the young man just come out of the hospital, and come home with him? If the therapist thought it as real, then they would be reporting him to the police for the crime he committed or working to have him committed to an institution as a danger to others.

I think this story is about sexuality and love, and coming to terms with being gay. There are many aspects of the story that support the idea, but I want to draw attention to how much detail is given to the Tall Hansom Man (who is undoubtedly hetero sexual), compared to how little description is given to his wife!

Overall, this episode gave my partner and I alot of interesting discussion. Great episode.

Interesting, but it would be such an amazing coincidence, I feel there would be more clues tying his former wife to the town near the cave.

Also, no one is going to take legal advice from this show, but the owner is 100% correct. He has a right to refuse service to anyone (particularly at that time). More recently owners are not allowed to refuse service on the basis of a protected class. While the argument might be made that his appearance is a disability, it has not been legally qualified as one.

It was obvious the guy was trying to drive away business though. It might have been interesting if the faker had tried to play on his sympathy and note how hard it is to find a place to get service. But then it would be obvious the faker is trying to drive away other customers.

Also, have to disagree with Eric, the 39 Steps by Hitchcock is an awful adaption. I am curious what his opinion of Charade, which seems like a Hitchcock movie, but is not.

Fair points. I agree with ending A, the idea that she either uncovers the bones with the axe, or C they do a quick bit at the end where some people (police, doctors, construction workers), have a discussion about the discovery of the bones. That would let them keep her ending monologue, which I found really powerful. It feels like it’s a commentary on the people who won’t listen to women because of their gender.

Everybody’s got business!

On the topic of female characters though, here is a riddle:

Q: What does Ray Bradbury think of women characters?
A: He doesn’t.

It is painful to see how incompetent The Shadow is made, in order for the writer to make their point and it really defies belief.

Would love to see MORLS do a Dracula sitcom, that has alot of potential!

Eric nailed it when he said “What is the point?”. The answer: to simply fill up airtime and earn a check. Foley was also exceedingly poor, with so much telling what is going on instead of ‘showing’. 0 out of 4.

The killer supposedly hates scenes, but why doesn’t he have his lawyers divorce his wife? If they had just seen the empty pool, that would have led to a scene for sure. Also, how in the world is it so dark they can’t see the pool is empty? It would reflect the starry sky since it is so isolated. And pools aren’t dead quiet. The water makes noise and when empty, they actually echo. The sound of the pool room is different.

This was just lazy uninspired writing. 0 out of 4.

The misogyny is pretty strong with this one. Aside from the whole sexist catty and cat fight tropes, the female characters are really one dimensional. In response to Eric’s question about the Queens motivation, there isn’t any beyond, she is a woman and women-be-jealous.

At no point does anyone challenge the main guy, who is obviously an unreliable narrator. This is really about how put upon men are and how even after getting away with murder, it still seems to be this whole woe-is-me attitude. 0 out of 4.

Also, the casual animal cruelty and violence, made my stomach turn. Then the ending bit by the mysterious traveler probably caused some real life animal abuse.

Would have been interested to hear Josh, Tim, and Eric discuss whether Sue was ‘real’ or not or kind of dive into what she represented. I liked that the show didn’t explain it away at all.

For a time, I thought that Cary Grant’s character had engineered the entire chain of events, and that the “crazy woman” would turn out to be related to him. That seemed the most plausible explanation for his non-stop series of denials and bad decisions.

I get that he was an alpha male in the classic “won’t stop for directions” mode, but come on…the radio is only one step removed from saying, “You, Cary Grant. Yes, you. The ‘crazy woman’ is on that road. Do not take that road. And stop for gas, for God’s sake.”

Meanwhile, the woman in the back seat is doing her best impression of someone who is 100% about to kill her fellow passengers.

When no one is behaving in a believable fashion, I find I just can’t care what happens to them.

I agree, that was my feeling on this episode as well. They should have setup the haunting to something, new house, or even if his friend’s voice had been part of the chorus, to show he transmitted the haunting.

Brilliant story!

To parahprase All the President’s Men, it isn’t what Mr. Coleman did, it was How he did it.

Also, we don’t need to apologize or try to excuse sexism in the past. The opening was very sexist and demeaning to female authors and creators. I appreciate Eric, Tim, and Joshua for calling out that bs.

I totally felt the tension and suspense toward the end, because I could easily see her dying by the hand of her husband.

I believe the foley was supposed to be the guillotine.

Aliens are a tough sell in the Shadow universe, because of the implications to the wider world. Just killing this one leader doesn’t wrap stuff up, and it it introduces a new question. The usual question is supernatural based, but now it is going to science fiction. No suspense, just bad writing.

The writing is just such a hack job. During the time, people knew about gun powder residue tests, which the driver would have failed. They didn’t find gloves, so why isn’t his fingerprints on the loot? If the fingerprints don’t matter why do the crooks wear gloves? The fact that other crooks held up the bank doesn’t absolve him of the crime, unless they confess on their deathbed, but again, why do they do that?

The whole story line of trying to exonerate the driver is just chock full of plot holes. It doesn’t make sense and it is a distraction.

Can patreons be called Morls Support?

Great twist, disagree that there were a lot of clues!

What was her game plan? When she passed naturally, her Son would be left without anyone to care for him. That didn’t bother her, but losing her son to another woman did.

Would have been better to have him go to jail for the poisoning of both sisters (secret murder + suicide).

Martha sounded like Mildred Natwick from The Trouble with Harry (whose incidental music appeared in an earlier episode).

Also noticed the signal flare loop hole, which could have been utilized to show the old man’s descent into madness, simply by having Price tell him to shoot off a signal flare, only to come back after securing the doors and windows and finding the old man still staring at the ship in shock.

It would be fairly easy to do, as you could have survivors hiding in central park with a radio setup, maybe former reporters and they would witness the machines gathering in the park, the debarkation, and then the death of the martians.

The whole death thing does add alot of good angles to the story, not just kind of biological science angle, but also going back to HP Lovecraft, and how the martians are almost god-like in their power, but humanity and the earth are saved by a fluke.

I really like those aspects of stories that show humanity, not as the center of the universe, but as a galactic after thought.

If I was the ape, I would have beaten that guy with his own arm, as soon as the cage was open.

Also, he is clearly guilty of manslaughter at a minimum, pre-meditated would be fairly easy to prove in this case, particularly since there are witnesses to a bunch of stuff.

Totes agree. Not usually on Eric’s side (sorry Eric), but I was bummed he caved.

The big plot hole that bothers me is that the kids call police on the one neighbor, but then at the end the father has his kids call the police to report the killer… So why didn’t the kids actually call the police about the screaming underground???

That part of the story was mostly padding. I think they could have fleshed out other parts of the story to better effect instead.

I thought this was kind of silly, but now that I see the religious angle, it does kind of grate. Its saying that even if you don’t believe, you will come around and be ‘saved’.

A girl states she is fearless and goes to a graveyard to prove it. She plunges a dagger into the ground to prove she was there, but as she leaves, she finds that something is holding her back. Something has grabbed her dress and is pulling her down towards the grave. Later it is discovered she stabbed the dagger through her dress and died of ‘heart failure’.

I think it’s a bit of trope, that those who proclaim to be the most fearless, must die from fright.

The whole ‘belief will save us’ really stuck out to me. Was jarring.

But, the big issue is that it wasn’t progressive script, but very much along the lines of moralistic horror writing. You have two women who both defy conventional feminine mores. Strong women who ultimately are raped and murdered. Because of the endings for the women, the story isn’t holding up the women to be emulated, but rather to be examples of what happens to willful women.

Also, notice how once the women were in a locked house, they were completely helpless. They don’t fight back. They turn on each other. They aren’t tied up or anyway restrained yet do not fight back in anyway.

The unable to escape should been much better setup, so ridiculous as it is now. It would have been so noisy to secure the who house. It could have been done well, but the writing is just clumsy.

I agree, it is just clumsy. Had the last lines been “Hello Lavina” and then “As I turned to face the intruder, I grabbed my sewing scissors…”. Something to that effect.

I totally agree with you Trish. Without the ending, this is just a Bradbury morality tale about how uppity women are secretly afraid and will be deservedly killed if they don’t know their place.

The more Bradbury MORLS reviews, the more clear it is that Bradbury is pretty socially conservative.

The ending could have been more gracefully integrated, perhaps a producer or sponsor demanded a ‘happy ending’?

I am also a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock Presents fan, so I looked up their adaptation. It was really fun to watch. Thanks for the heads up!

I loved Josh’s description of the difference between being inside and outside of a story. Perfection.

There are two way more interesting setups. 1) the stowaway is the pilots son, unknown to the pilot until the end. 2) this is a flashback while the pilot is working with the husband on the planet.

Speaking to the malice of the Doctor and his sister, there is a single comment the sister makes that really shows the evil of the times and those people (who are stand ins for a paternalistic society that didn’t tell wives what their medical results, were, but rather the husband). That line is “Shes just doing it to prove you wrong”. So much to unpack, but the idea that the man could never be wrong, and that anything that might prove him such is just a conspiracy by women to undermine him. It shows a real malice by the sister towards the wife and that the Doctor goes along with it…

I humbly disagree, and I know the BBC version well: I like the way this version makes the key relationship slightly more believable. Might not be as faithful to the source, but I prefer this adaptation (apart from the Nughtfall music of course).

Interesting take. I didn’t consider the belief vs atheism angle. That makes alot of sense to me. I don’t think it means to, but it really illustrates this idea that if you don’t accept divine love, then you are doomed. It shows just how abusive and cruel that position is.

I would have been interested in the hearing more about the gay angle. In that lens, is the Doctor being punished for being in the closet?

It is an interesting episode, but it seems like there is a lot of subtext to unpack. Parrot idea is brilliant though.

Also, the plot really squirms to make the twist work, but there are alot of plot holes or missing story elements. For example, why does Chari kill? Faith isn’t made out to be very concerned with public opinion, yet she will kill Chari and commit suicide? etc. etc.

The format is fun, the main characters are interesting, I liked the forcing of saying sorry. It was a nice bit of standing up to the money/blueblood.

*Ron Adams.
And the thought that that brief three minute call was worth more than $70 really speaks to his desperation to hear the voice of someone he loves…which is ultimately denied to him.
All the money in the world won’t buy you one more minute with someone you love…….

And I love these Goodrich summer season episodes. Greatest celebrity product endorsement ever.

He is demonizing modern parenting, where there is basically no consequences, using psychology (he creates a buffon like character), basically parents moving away from corporal punishment. The parents die because they give in to their children instead of holding their boundary.

The second obvious point is that working men and women need work in order to maintain moral fortitude. The automated house is fairly misogynistic. The house has taken over ‘womens’ work mostly, and this is portrayed as just an absolute moral failing. Bradbury is directly equating housework, cooking, cleaning (all done by the wife of course) as parenting.

I agree it isn’t anti-technology per se, but it is against the lower classes needing to be kept ground down by not having automation.

A little bit of history of the show is found in a Montreal Gazette article from 11 August 1969:

Radio drama in favor at CBC
by Bernard Dube

Theatre 10.30, the half hour of nightly drama that CBC radio broadasts Monday to Friday, was conceived as an outlet for network regional stations — like Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver — with Toronto getting into the act only occasionally.

It was conceived also somewhat as a surprise to CBC’s own radio drama producers, as CBM drama boss Earl Pennington — who makes certain Montreal gets at least its share of the action — recalls it.

He’s preparing for Theatre 10.30’s second season now, but remembers that early last year he was telling writers “there’s no market here for half-hour plays and definitely not for serials.”

‘Serials welcome’ said brass

Mercurially, someone higher up in CBC programming hierarchy, sent word down to the regions that the half-hour not only was back in programming favor but serials were especially welcome on what would be called Theatre 10.30.

Not for Pennington to question why, but to do or…

Most notable of his contributions in Theatre 10.30’s first season were 10 consecutive Monday-to-Friday half-hours, spread over two weeks, tracing the lives of the ‘Black Donnellys” in Lucan, Ontario, in the latter part of the last century…

This five-hour drama was written in serial form by David Windsor of Montreal, on whom Pennington counts for at least two five-part serials in the new season.

Black Donnellys remembered

Pennington sad the Donnellys are far from forgotten to this day in Ontario where they lie buried.

A distant relative of theirs, a young actor with the first name Donnelly, went looking for the site of their graves.

He said, no one in Lucan would give him directions to it and a policeman there suggested he get out of town.

So Pennington heard.

Another local writer, Jim Harris, is contributing a five-part script for Pennington and Theatre 10.30.

Harris wrote comedy, “The Call of the Hippie”, which Pennington has produced for broadcast Sunday afternoon on Summer Stage, from 2:03 to 3 p.m. The cast is headed by Bob Peters, the tenor, essaying a straight acting role; Peggy Mahon and Henry Ramer, with Budd Knapp as narrator.

Bronstein entry

Another local contributor to Theatre 10.30 is Martin Bronstein, who has provided Pennington with what producer calls “a wild satirical comedy set in 1975.” It is in five parts, set for October and titled The Laughing Death of Lonnie Neff.

Bronstein, one of the original writers of Funny You Should Say That, is himself laughingly alive and well and did California scene this summer.

To round out Pennington’s current Montreal projects for the new network season is a September production, for CBC’s Summer Stage, of the Maize, a script by Montrealer M. Charles Cohen that has already been done by the BBC.

Penning has more productions in various stages of progress — from script to rehearsal to taping — including documentaries, which he also supervises and one of which is expected to focus on Mayor Drapeau this fall.

I was wondering if it would turn out that he had actually murdered someone in the past, and his conscience and/or psychosis was causing him to imagine his own victim in the window. I did not anticipate the actual twists at the end.

And judging solely by the bit that you tacked on to the end, the Robert Montgomery version sounds horrible, both in Montgomery’s performance and the extra added twist, which seems like one twist too many. (Maybe someone felt they had to show that he didn’t get away with it?)

”that’s a Montana accent”

(I snort-laughed so heartily I almost swallowed my gum)

For a similar “in the narrator’s head” terror experience, read “A Walk in the Dark” by Arthur C. Clarke. Scared the hell out of me as a kid.

A couple of questions:

When did Trudy say that John was her brother? I combed over the episode and couldn’t find it. Is this perhaps a deliberate imperfection in this otherwise perfect script?

Should I make anything of the fact that her dead husband’s name Jack is a nickname for John?

What is George? You guys talked about him as if he was another family member, but the narrator refers to him as a monster and John says that he has a “cozy little apartment below ground,” which I took to be a grave.

Surely it’s not a coincidence that George shares his name with another simple-minded brute?

Thank you Trev- I was going to make the same comment about the CBC. It’s not the first time it’s been incorrectly described like that. Kudos to Eric for his awareness of Canadian Content broadcasting requirements.

but I have to say, it kills this Canuck every time you call CBC the Canadian Broadcasting Company instead of Corporation.

The marketing campaign is unnecessary. If the goal is to draw attention to a public mass execution, the Martians should be perfectly capable of attracting a crowd by, for example, landing a saucer in Times Square.

I felt that there was a more interesting satire lurking within. Instead, what if the campaign stoked interest in all things Martian, so that by the time the invaders arrived, they’d be so popular that they’d be welcomed into positions of power?

SPOILERS AHEAD

Okay, I get that it wound up being the bullying creep Colin inside the snowman, but why?!? Everything we’ve heard points to Colin being a nightmare child and Alex a terrified kid who just wants to go inside. Suddenly the roles reverse, but why and how? What am I supposed to think happened here? It just seems like a twist for its own sake.

Also, little Colin being dead seems like a win-win.

If you listen to Robert Stack in his Unsolved Mysteries episodes, he still uses that accent. He says “atall” a lot!

Thank you for that.

In addition, I simply couldn’t get past the premise. The funny thing is that I’m perfectly willing to accept—as fantasy—the idea of “tissue memory.” That’s every old movie about a transplant patient who receives a killer’s hands. But when THE DOCTOR said “oh sure, this is a totally normal and scientifically accepted thing,” I was out. Time to get a better heart surgeon.

I appreciated how the script played with my loyalties. I started out rooting for the protagonist, especially as he was being dicked over by everyone he met, but by the end I was ready for Kali to take him.

That said, love your show; I just disagree vehemently with ya on this one. A crime that it wasn’t picked up. I would have loved to hear the next promised episode.

You can watch it for free on the Hammer Films page on Facebook: https://fb.watch/7ts4qtsi3f/

Great show. Thanks a lot!

As you note, the original story as written ends with humanity saved by a close call, when the alien is torched just as it prepares to use the anti-gravity harness it’s been tinkering together to escape to the outside world. This adaptation definitely appears to be drawing from the final scene of the 1982 film.

Seconded. It’s “Doctor Who” does “The Twilight Zone.”

There are two Tom Baker stories that draw heavily on “Who Goes There?” “The Horror of Fang Rock” is about a shape-shifting alien blob lurking amongst a small group of survivors trapped in a lighthouse. And “The Seeds of Doom” pretty much rips off the 1951 “Thing” for its first two episodes, with alien seed pods found in the Antarctic permafrost and defrosted at an isolated research base.

Some of the musical cues were driving me nuts for the longest time and I just got it – The Black Museum.

I’ll show myself out.

The post-episode discussion was glorious! (In Space!)

Bela Lugosi remains a true favorite, but the 1931 film is incredibly slow and takes such a long time to get anywhere. Or at least, it feels like it.

One thing I want to correct is that Bela Lugosi had already learned English by the time he starred in Dracula. He’d had to learn his lines phonetically for a role in a Broadway play a few years prior, but he’d gained enough English (and had already played Dracula onstage) by the time he was cast in the movie.

As you point out, as an alibi it would immediately fall apart. Despite that, my impression was that we were meant to interpret it as one. (Your suggestion that it was just a performance makes more sense, but I’m not convinced that was Fletcher’s intent.)

Dude

http://patnovak.50webs.com/quotes.html

The livestream option provides a link that can be used to watch the show anytime. Or, you might want to consider supporting us on Patreon. We almost always share a link of our streaming shows with our patrons sooner or later. I’m happy you found us and best wishes on your recovery!

THANK YOU! That sounds perfect!

I’ve been going through the back catalog, but am just now starting to branch out beyond Cooper and Obeler. Listened to “Spawn of the Sub-Human” during my morning walk, and it was a delight!

I see that you guys are performing SotSH this weekend! Wish I could be there, but I’m in Champaign, Illinois and they won’t let me drive yet! I’m not 100% certain whether I’ll be free this Saturday evening; will there be an option to listen to the livestream not-live?

As for this week’s episode…well, it makes me appreciate the likes of Oboler all the more. There’s clearly more to the craft of radio horror than finding the proper sound effect of a spooky door!

The thing that made me laugh the hardest was the attempt at an EC Comics twist-a-roo. “He was LOSING HIS VOICE!”

On one hand, it’s a cursed irony that so much of this series survives while much of Cooper and Obeler may be lost forever. On the other, in your heart of hearts, aren’t you glad the One About the Opera-Singing Gorilla was preserved?

Also, Under Arrest is worth considering as a series beginning with U.

And yeah, it’s entirely silly to adult me.

*Dad passed away at the end of 2020, and the Jack Benny set was one of the things I saved.

The name Beezer is suggestive of Beelzebub, and the old boy seems to have a strong interest in punishing murderers. He’s got a self-regenerating cellar floor covering a pit full of flames and “things (that) crawled far, far below.”

Sure, he pretty much says that he’s the guy who hung himself in the (ceilingless) cellar, but why take him at his word?

Incidentally, all those techniques we associate with Oboler — the stream-of-consciousness, the self-referential “meta” stuff, et cetera — were all used by Wyllis Cooper in the first two and a half years of the Lights Out series. Oboler was tasked with replicating Cooper’s style and content when he took over the show. Just as Cooper reused a lot of his Lights Out ideas on Quiet Please, Oboler reused ideas from Cooper’s scripts when he was working on his own. His classic “Chicken Heart” — about a menacing, ever-growing heart that goes THUMP-THUMP! — was partly inspired by an earlier Cooper script about a menacing, ever-growing amoeba that goes SLURP-SLURP! And Cooper reused the same basic idea for QP’s “One Hundred Thousand Diameters,” about a menacing, ever-growing virus.

So it wouldn’t be a surprise if there’s a lost Lights Out script of Cooper’s that features him as a character or that he reused the idea for QP’s “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

This episode is a go to for me if I want something a little creepy to listen to by the campfire. Give me this, Casting the Runes, House in Cypress Canyon & He Who Follows Me (take that Hall of Fantasy haters!) and I am a happy guy.

I like this one too and can see why it works for you.

As far as the commercials go, I love them. When I am looking for an episode of CBSRMT to listen to at night I always pick episodes with commercials and news if possible.

(1) Kept my complete attention the whole time. The plan seemed foolproof – how does it go wrong?
(2) One of the few that I wound up relistening to right away.

I’m a first responder and I often think that stupid should hurt, but it shouldn’t be fatal and above all it shouldn’t hurt others. This was fatal stupid that hurt many others. This one brought back some crappy memories for me.

I love OTR and I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of it but I’ve never had this kind of reaction to any episode.

Enjoyed the show a lot but there is something to be said for the classic OTR sound that is missing in modern productions.

I agree, Dave. It was also a lot of fun to listen to the MORLS talk and laugh about it afterward too.

I have every reason to believe what you say about Hitchcock’s weak adaptation skills. Regarding other versions of the story, the lodger in the 1932 film is a much better character and despite the overacting typical of the early film era, the ending is pretty good.

I can listen to this episode over and over.

Back when my kids were into campfire ghost stories I told them this and they didn’t sleep the whole weekend.

I was thinking it would be sharks, and that the assumption was that radio audiences were too unsophisticated to know that sharks wouldn’t survive a chlorinated pool. But the real ending? So much better.

I was TOTALLY thinking of Henry James as I was listening, yes, Fletcher totally nailed that vibe!

I totally agree with you!!

“I watched hope push some of the unhappiness off of her face”

I’m with Eric here and I liked this one a lot. Joshua’s thoughts of the spiritual context of Cooper’s writing and how the point the narrator makes at the beginning about being more interested in souls than flowers strongly endorses Eric’s smart explanation. I really enjoyed how sublime the messaging was and how the flowers, the nature of pure love brought the lovers together with them to forever dispel their conflict. I like how the unambivalent ending points to this.

Classicy!! HAHAHA! Perfect

Bravo, Kelly. Your selection was excellent.

No, keep the ride-alongs. They remind of those 1960s Mission: Impossible episodes where the IMF would have a guest agent helping them out for a single episode every so often. It breaks up the monotony, adds a wild card to the mix, and forces the regulars to stay on their toes. Also, it allows the podcasters to mulct their adherents for the big bucks.

(And/or Dimension X!)

Never forget that episode of the Jack Benny show that began with a phone ringing. No voices. No explanation. A phone ringing.

Then…

…

ROCHESTER: We may not be funny but we suuuuuure got suspense!

I think there was also a Twilight Zone with that theme.

This episode is so amazing, and I have to thank you guys. I was listening to the more recent poscast ep with the Dark Fantasy doubleheader, and in the second one, which I actually enjoyed, you guys mentioned Ghost Hunt so I thought I’d give it a listen.

Anyway, I’ve been a big old time radio fan for years and years and years, I actually spent a little time in college as a DJ playing old time radio shows, but I had never heard Ghost Hunt before and I’m kicking myself. What an amazing, AMAZING show, and yeah, it just zoomed up into my top ten classics list. And this makes me so happy because I worried I had gotten to the point where I had already heard all the really good ones, you know? But being introduced to Ghost Hunt after all these years, I’m smiling to think there’s still a few amazing gems for me to discover.

thanks again, as always, you guys are great, and your discussion adds to the enjoyment of the shows.

Haha! I see what you did there. Yeah…I’m all over the map.

If I’m prepared for poetry…

(I was also surprised that Eric didn’t bash him for being a poet!)

I read them, mark! I didn’t return to mysteries for years after them but they helped prep me for a steady stream of alfred hitchcock strange story paperbacks later on.

And not to nitpick but I find it hard to believe that the hydrodynamics genius librarian would find the library loud-talker charming. (Yes, that is my complaint, and also, I hate how people are loud in libraries now, and also-also, all the teenagers should get off my lawn)

I have no idea if this is the story Eric was trying to remember, but it certainly has a lot in common with “The Hitchhiker”. To answer the reviewer’s question, I think Fletcher wins. “Summer, Goodbye” is a solid Cooper script with some beautiful narration, but the end is a little too pat for my taste. And I say that as an ardent admirer of Mr. Cooper’s work.

Thanks for sharing it. I’ll pass it on to Eric and find out if this is the one!

I was so enthralled by the sound of the coins, I didn’t stop to think of their value. Thanks for the insight. And, yes, I second your Gah. Fletcher is fantastic.

Well played, sir. Well played.

There appears to be no middle ground with this one. Either you think it’s literate and chilling or silly and soporific. I love it to pieces, but my slavish devotion to all things M.R. James makes my opinion less than impartial.

You’re welcome, David! I’m glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for the comments!

My favorite line was “throbbed like a love story in a women’s magazine.”

All in all, this was a fun episode, all the language was great, but in this vein, I prefer Candy Matson. I feel like her delivery is so wry, it is more enjoyable for me than is Jack Webb’s playing-it-straight (and no offense to Jack Webb, he’s great). But yeah, all throughout the listen I kept wishing Candy would show up and lighten the mood. “Oh sister!”

In other words, I wish you guys would do more Candy Matson. 🙂

But that’s just a nitpick, in fact, I paused the podcast to write the above paragraph. This is a great episode.

Which isn’t Lights Out’s fault. 🙂

Also, I should have waited a few days after listening to the oh-so-exquisite Hitchhiker, as one of you mentioned, nothing could follow that. The Hitchhiker was Jerry Lee Lewis setting the piano on fire.

Quiet, Please
Summer, Goodbye
by Wyllis Cooper
Interesting to compare this to Lucille Fletcher’s “The Hitch-Hiker,” one of radio’s most famous horror plays, since both use the “mysteriously reappearing hitch-hiker” device. Cooper’s play takes place in a matter of hours, Fletcher’s in six days; Cooper’s protagonist drives for his life from the cops (which ratchets up the suspense immediately), Fletcher’s travels leisurely for obscure reasons; Cooper’s protagonist has another fully-realized character to talk to for the entire trip, Fletcher’s meets a number of minor characters of no great depth; Cooper relates the trip’s details right down to street names and his “local color” is overwhelming, Fletcher is a lot less generous; and Cooper’s ending, whatever one thinks of it, is probably more of a surprise than Fletcher’s. But which is the better play? Hmmm. — Anonymous

Source: http://www.otrplotspot.com/quietPlease.html

(But also, as lovely as it was to hear the coins dropping for $3.85, I would definitely lose interest if it was $71.56 quarter by quarter)

I see what you did there

🙂

Agree on the plot synopsis, I didn’t even realize how much crazy WTF I had just listened to until it was summarized.

The story was so absurd, from the get-go, and then at every turn we’re introducing some entirely new weird thing that we’re not going to explain? It was like going on a county fair funhouse ride but the cars are going 80 miles per hour, so each scene is a blur.

I’m glad you guys mentioned Scooby Doo, because that’s all I can ever think of when anybody, in any context, introduces the ideas of a painting with live eyes. And, when they find the little painting? I was picturing a tiny oil painting done in a realistic style that somebody stuck googly-eye stickers over the eyes, and I can’t stop laughing at that image.

Anyway, I didn’t vote this timeless or even good, but wow, I loved this episode so much, so incredibly ridiculous. (And “oh my chubby aunt!” is entering my vernacular)

What else does Jill recommend? John Waters of Old Time Radio has definitely piqued my curiosity.

Totally wonderful!

Montague is played by Monty Woolley, best known for his starring role in the film The Man Who Came to Dinner – which was written by George S. Kaufman and based on Alexander Woollcott.

Cooper would sometimes borrow basic ideas from his ’30s LO series to write more sophisticated scripts for the ’40s QP: LO’s “The Coffin in Studio B” became QP’s “A Night to Forget”; LO’s “The Haunted Cell” became QP’s “Good Ghost”; LO’s Christmas episode became QP’s “Rede Me This Riddle”; LO’s 1935 ever-growing amoeba script became QP’s 1948 ever-growing virus script “One Hundred Thousand Diameters.” And so on.

I think it’s possible that Cooper wrote a ’30s LO script about a dead man’s coat making its wearer invisible — and then reworked the basic idea as QP’s “Wear the Dead Man’s Coat” in ’48. And when the LO TV people signed Cooper to write scripts for them in ’51, he chose to update or adapt the old radio script, and not the QP script with its completely different plot, characters, and emphasis.

Also, the QP series was jointly owned by Cooper and Ernest Chappell, and it may be that Cooper didn’t have the right to adapt his QP scripts for television without Chappell’s permission. On the three TV series Cooper produced in 1949 and ’50 (Volume One, Escape, and Stage 13), none of the scripts appear to have been directly adapted from QP.

Obligatory preface: I’m not a lawyer! This is as best I know based on a bunch of Googling. Take it all with a grain of salt. That being said, we certainly hope you’re free to use it because we’re essentially sampling the whole thing. It’s not clearly in the public domain that I know of, but it is largely treated as an Orphaned Work since it’s all over the internet and no one has stepped up claim ownership. You’re probably fine to use it.

Insightful

It was absorbing and anything that was called a plot-hole or clue that this was an unreliable narrator I interpreted as “Not everybody behaves and thinks the same way that people do in all the other 180 episodes of the MORLS podcast.” That is what fascinated me. People behaved in unexpected ways that were, to me, perfectly plausible.

I liked that we had a story that was going a lot like the one about the guy with the swimming pool, and then it just took this turn and was about Jerome’s isolation, and then when the couple was in the cave, it took another turn. And Jerome’s behavior was explained by all we had seen him experience until then. And the end, where he takes the young man in was totally creepy, and Jerome was concerned but not repentant…

This was a wonderful character study of a character who I think was a reliable narrator, but a twisted individual. We got to go into the mind of someone who really really wasn’t quite right, and see things through that lens. Which was hard to deal with – but I think it is a cop out to say after that horror -“Oh, he was unreliable… that horrific shit we just witnessed didn’t happen, so we be coo.”

One point you didn’t comment on regarding [SPOILER WARNING] the cleaving of the cat: My impression is that what triggers the narrator (whether the narrator of Stoker’s story or Price in this adaptation) into impulsively killing the cat is not simply a desire for punishment, but the horror that the cat is sitting on its victim, licking the blood pouring from his eye sockets. I’m not as against this killing of the cat as you were (in this work of fiction — let me hasten to add that I don’t think it’s acceptable to walk around with a sword saying “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty”), but I agree with Joshua that it doesn’t work as well here with Vincent Price being the one who does this, compared to Stoker’s story.

I, too, noticed similarities to <i>Quiet, Please</i>, but other than a slight bit of interest due to that, I otherwise agreed with Eric. This just plodded along slowly without building any tension or suspense, and there wasn’t enough of a payoff at the end to make it worthwhile. Maybe the can’t-really-call-it-a-twist-because-it-was-so-obvious-where-it-was-going ending might have been startling when the script was originally produced, but it certainly isn’t today (and I doubt that it was when this remake aired). It wasn’t awful, but it does not stand the test of time (for me, at least — though I see that somebody voted it a timeless classic, so obviously opinions can vary — although seeing that “timeless classic” vote may have startled me more than anything in the episode did).

When someone mentioned it had the makings of a movie I thought it sounded like a Coen brothers movie.

That made me laugh as well.

The two lunar hemispheres have very different terrains. The first photographs of the dark side of the moon were first published in 1960, so this is likely something a professor would know about or at least have heard of at the time.

Oooh….I have listened to this episode several times and I’ve never thought about that aspect.

In my opinion this was a masterfully done piece of suspense.

I stayed for the Morrissey references.

Bravo.

I find the trope of the border town interesting, since it’s so often used to portray a world in which two (or more) realities converge, and things are thus often not how they appear. Some of my favorite films (like A Touch of Evil and Lone Star) are set in such border communities.

The Asian character named O’Toole reminded me a bit of the Japanese(-American?) character in Fargo (another sort-of-border-town story), who speaks with the same exaggerated rural Minnesota accent as every other character, and who also ties into that “nothing is as it appears” motif.

I actually knew that! I had forgotten I knew that until you just posted this – BUT I totally remember that now! Wish I would have remembered while I was doing the discussion…

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.

I have to disagree regarding Jerry Lewis. He shouldn’t be seen or heard…

Check out his pilot for Once Upon a Midnight where he attempts to adapt Malice Aforethought into a half-hour format and bungles it, leaving the story incomplete. It seems to be a recurring problem he had. Thankfully, when he moved into television, he evidently hired staff who helped him solve his pacing issues. Or perhaps he was simply never comfortable in an audio-only medium.

(but as David pointed out, we have a pretty good adaptation of the Lodger via Mystery in the Air, or the Hollywood Star Time adaptation of the film with Vincent Price)

I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I undid the vote in case you want to choose a different option. I’m so excited I have the power to rig these votes!

Someone did a recreation of this episode not too long ago though. Here’s a link to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI9cERA7vmI

Astutely noticed! Clearly the answer to the last question above is, “No!”

Episode 135: The Silver Cord – Obsession;

Episode 154: Dracula – The CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

Geesh guys…this is worthy of the Bulwyr Lytton prize for bad writing.

The judge said he took her money, but that wasn’t in the story.
I would like the story to have a more definitive ending. A) They actually find his bones and the truth drove her crazy. B) He shows back up and because she couldn’t handle the rejection, she went mad.

Alexander Courage was a surprise, although I knew that he worked some radio programs before moving to TV. Fun fact: he did not “sing” the Star Trek theme, but he did perform the whooshing sounds you hear during the opening credits. He left the series after scoring the pilots and two episodes because he was perturbed by Roddenberry’s poorly written lyrics to the Star Trek Theme. He spent a couple of season working on Lost In Space with his old friend: John Williams. Not a science fiction fan at all, he referred to most science fiction as marvelous malarkey.

(And maybe I’ve watched and listened to too much Dragnet, but what kind of police department has a detective investigate solo, instead of paired with a partner?)

“It wasn’t an episode of The Shadow…”

However, as bad as “The House and the Brain” was, your commentary afterwards was among the most entertaining that you’ve ever done. Eric’s four-minute plot synopsis alone would have been worth the price of admission, if there were a price of admission.

I, too, have read Bulwer-Lytton’s original story, but unlike Joshua, I don’t recommend that your listeners read it. I really don’t remember much about it except that I found it tediously-written, dull, and utterly un-scary. The Weird Circle’s version at least added that crazy “WTF” factor, so maybe this adaptation was an improvement.

Perhaps because of all the EC horror comics I’ve read, my first suppositions about the nature of Harry’s revenge were a bit more graphically outlandish — is he going to fill the pool with piranhas? No, that wouldn’t be plausible; he’d have to drain the pool and refill it with water that wasn’t chlorinated. A shark? That’s even less plausible; he’d have to refill the pool with salt water. Just seconds before it happened, I realized, oh, he’s just going to [spoiler redacted]!

When the Mysterious Traveler says “Some years ago, when I was practicing medicine…,” I wonder if there’s an unspoken “before they took away my license” in there?

Regarding Eric’s complaint likening this to “everyday stories of real-life people doing real-life things”: If he feels that this is too much like real life, Eric must have a much more interesting life than I do.

But what intrigues me about this episode is the difference in personality between Dr. Smith in the story and the Mysterious Traveler in the opening and closing bits. They’re supposed to be the same character, but Dr. Smith seems calm, authoritative, and relatively rational. He doesn’t appear to believe in the supernatural, as he regards Chris’s problems as being in his mind, and tries to treat them accordingly (though the method of treatment may be somewhat dubious — I said he seemed rational, not competent). The Mysterious Traveler, on the other hand, seems to take gleeful, almost sadistic pleasure in relating stories about people being torn to pieces and their eyes ripped out by malevolent cats (and implying that the listeners’ own cats might be liable to do the same thing). What happened in the meantime, to turn the calm doctor into the deranged commuter? I suppose if you lose too many patients through horrific supernatural violence, maybe that would be the result.

Despite the telegraphed-yet-still-abrupt ending, what elevated this above a typical crime thriller was the performance by Mercedes McCambridge. She was an amazing actor, and deserves to be better known than she is by the general populace. I’ve enjoyed every episode you’ve shared of hers (and I even found myself thinking, while listening to an episode *without* her, “This would be a lot better if Mercedes McCambridge were playing that part”). You will get no complaints from me (at least, not about her) if you continue to feature more episodes with her in the cast.

I also thought the actor who played Bishop was really good, and his voice sounded really familiar to me. Do you have any idea who the actor was? I tried Googling, but I couldn’t find any cast member listed for this episode besides Mercedes McCambridge.

There is a 1982 interview with Bob Bailey’s daughter, Roberta Goodwin, by John Dunning from a Denver CO. radio station that is really well done. I think I got it from a set of MP3s sold by Old Time Radio.

Also in the cast was Herb Ellis, who was the first Frank Smith on Dragnet for a few episodes (both radio and TV), before Ben Alexander took over the role, which he played for several years. Ellis also played various other roles on Dragnet. But I’ve only seen one of Ellis’s TV Dragnets, and I haven’t heard any of his radio episodes, so I don’t know his voice to tell which character he was on this.

Yes! Good ears!

The effect with the voices was really good, but that wasn’t enough to save it for me.

Admittedly, this show sounds more cheesy than chilling to 48 year old Clarence. Good points on the sameness of many Hall of Fantasy stories. Even at 12 years old, I thought “Masks” was very similar to the “Jewels of Kali” episode I had heard a few weeks earlier.

Also, were the makers of Roma Wines under the impression that people couldn’t spell their product’s name? It seems very important to them to clarify that it’s spelled R-O-M-A.

Also, I appreciated the use of the term “Wisenheimer.” We should really bring that back.

Thanks for the recommendations…TAYLOR SWIFT!!? EEEEEEE! *swoon*

Agreed. Particularly that moment when he realized there was a sleeping child in the house and called off the search. His conscientiousness was unsettling. Definitely a Hans Landa moment.

Fair points. If like Eric, you were looking for the suspense to come from the literal action of the story (Will Rachel and the old man escape? Will the old man make a Golem in time? Will the Golem be able to kill the Nazis?) then the story probably felt padded and ultimately unsatisfying. If like Tim and I, you found suspense in the moral or spiritual choices made by the characters (Will the woodsman jeopardize his family to do what he believes is right? Will the wife compromise her spiritual convictions to save her husband and child? Will the summoning of the Golem embolden Rachel and the old man to fight the Nazis?) then the story was riveting. I think both are very valid responses.

When E.G. Marshall hints at multiple interpretations of the ending, I assumed he was impugning the reliability of the narrator (I guess in this case himself) and suggesting that perhaps the ending didn’t happen just how we heard it. The Golem attack was just one interpretation of what happened to the Nazi soldiers. It was definitely a case of trying to have your ambiguous cake, eating it, and then trying to say maybe you didn’t eat it after all. I forgave it though because it’s E.G. Marshall!

Eric’s admission that he enjoyed an episode of X Minus One was one of my favorite moments of the podcast as well.

That was one of my favorite moments of this podcast as a whole.

Oh, just one more thing: Next episode is from “Obsession”? Isn’t that Joshua’s brother’s podcast? 🙂

Also, regarding the use or non-use of foreign accents: I agree that the Nazi was much more frightening with an American accent than he would have been with a mock-German one. If a story features foreign characters in a setting where everyone is supposed to be speaking English, so we’re hearing everything exactly as it supposedly happens, then it makes sense for the foreign characters to have foreign accents. But if a story has a foreign setting and the characters are supposedly speaking a foreign language, and we’re just *hearing* it in English, then there’s really no logical reason why they would need to have foreign accents. We’re not hearing an exact presentation of the words as they are supposedly speaking them; we’re hearing a translation of them. It’s no less realistic for their accents to be “translated” along with their words. There might be some cases where using different accents would be preferable (such as if the accents are necessary to distinguish between different characters from different countries, all of whom we hear in English). But in other cases, such as this one, it can be more effective not to use accents.

This episode wasn’t *terrible* — it didn’t have an annoyingly lame cop-out ending like “The Thing in the Cave”, or a twist reveal that just made the story seem stupider and just underlined how the mysterious incidents didn’t make any sense instead of explaining them, like “A Holiday Visit”. (I never got around to writing my rant about everything I disliked about that one — if I had started, I would probably just be finishing it about now.) I just didn’t think this one was very suspenseful, and the climax was way too brief and too “offstage” after forty minutes of buildup.

And the attempt in the closing narration to make the ending ambiguous didn’t make any sense whatsoever, because we had just heard the characters describing the golem as they watched it come to life and attack the Nazis (and we hear the sound effects of its heavy footsteps as it stomps through the cave). So how could this be ambiguous? Did the golem really come to life, but just coincidentally, an Allied bomb wiped out the Nazis just as the golem emerged from the cave? Or the golem was really an atomic bomb — because there must have been U-235 in that clay that the old man used — but it was an atomic bomb in a humanoid shape that came to life, stomped through the cave, and then detonated with enough force to destroy the Nazis and itself, but not enough force to injure the people observing it from a short distance away? Yes, that’s a *much* more rational, real-world explanation than a supernatural golem.

Having ranted about that, I will say that I thought this episode was really well-acted (with the possible exception of the wife, who really wasn’t bad, but as Eric pointed out, she seemed to be performing in a more melodramatic, theatrical style, when contrasted with Robert Lansing’s lower-key, more naturalistic performance). And for the most part, I enjoyed this more than some of the other CBSRMTs. It’s just that the ending didn’t live up to what led up to it.

And as always with CBSRMT, E.G. Marshall’s performance as the narrator was excellent. He was really a top-notch host for a suspense/horror program. It’s just too bad that they couldn’t have given him better stories to host.

Everybody makes mistakes, so there really is no single source for reliable OTR info. You have to read different sources, then compare and evaluate the info. Here’s a link to an X Minus One log that seems to have got it right, noting the Dimension X repeats in parenthesis: https://www.old-time.com/otrlogs2/x-1_fp.log.txt

Insightful as always, Mr. Potts. You’re quickly becoming an honorary co-host!

I understand your quibble with the logic behind the monster’s wrath, but it didn’t jump out at me. It’s one of the benefits of being so familiar with the story. I think the listener unconsciously fills in certain gaps.

You raise a good point about Mr. Coleman’s introduction. I listened to it again and that’s absolutely what he was doing – building up to the big reveal of the name of the story.

I’ll play devil’s advocate to your last point though. Wouldn’t creating a sterile bride only delay the inevitable? At the time this novel was written, children were an expected outcome of marriage. I think the monster’s request for a companion included the implicit desire for a family. When procreation proved impossible, the monster would return to Frankenstein just as angry as before. Not only that, he’d have another angry monster at his side!

Glad you enjoyed the story, Bob. I felt confident about the number of recycled scripts because it was verified by John Dunning’s comprehensive Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio.. Do you have a source you go to for reliable OTR info? As you say, the internet is a minefield of misinformation.

(To clarify, in case you have any international listeners, I meant “pissed” in the U.S. sense of “angry”, not in the U.K. sense of “drunk” — although the thought of Frankenstein’s Monster drunkenly posting comments on social media is also amusing to me.)

One more comment: At the end, when Frankenstein warns the listener, “Above all things, do not say my name — for the sound of the syllables ‘Frankenstein’ makes the anger rise in the monster’s brain,” it made me imagine that all of the comments on social media to the effect of “Actually, Frankenstein was the name of the doctor” might in fact have been made by Frankenstein’s monster, and he’s pissed.

Regarding Ronald Coleman’s introduction and the lack of an immediate identification of Mary Shelley, I interpreted this differently than you. Yes, when he says “strangely enough, it was written by a woman,” it reflects the sexism of the time (and when I heard this, I laughingly thought something along the lines of “Gasp! A woman!”), but when he says “the wife of one of the greatest poets of our language” before he has ever identified her by name, I did not take this as a sexist dig against Mary Shelley. I interpreted this as providing clues for the listener to identify the story before Coleman reveals it: (1) it’s “probably the most startling tale of horror ever dreamed upon this planet” (which is arguable, but the superlative does indicate that it’s presumably something famous enough for the audience to recognize); (2) “it was written by a woman”; and (3) “the wife of one of the greatest poets of our language”. That these hints were supposed to be sufficient for identification is made evident by the next sentence starting with “Yes”: “Yes, before the minute hand of your watch completes its next half-circle, you’re coming face-to-face with Frankenstein’s monster.” He then identifies it as “Mary Shelley’s ghastly adventure of Doctor Frankenstein.” (Now, if he had said “Percy Shelley’s wife’s ghastly adventure…,” THAT would have been sexist.)

To continue on the topic of Coleman’s intro: I thought the joke about Jack Benny was extremely funny — so much so that when Eric called it “a terribly unnecessary shot at Jack Benny,” I actually said out loud, “No, it wasn’t!” Fortunately, I was alone at the time.

And on the topic of jokes, I didn’t mind the mid-program joking about Percy and Mary Shelley writing. I didn’t think it was particularly entertaining, but it didn’t irritate me the way it did Tim. And it’s worth remembering that this would have come at the end of a commercial break, so it wasn’t as if they interrupted the story just to make a feeble joke — and I didn’t find it anywhere near as intrusive as Harlow Wilcox and Hap with their allegedly humorous discussions of Autolite products.

On a more critical note — which I can’t blame on this adaptation, so I’m not holding this against it — in listening to this, it reminded me of the main criticism I have of Shelley’s novel: When the monster demands a mate, Frankenstein initially goes along with it, then rebels and destroys his work when he considers the prospect of the creatures breeding a race of superhuman monstrosities — thus dooming his own bride and anyone else who cares for him. Frankenstein could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had just thought to assemble a female creature with no uterus or ovaries.

I’m not laughing! That was a treat to watch. The use of shadows is beautiful. STANDS THE TEST OF TIME! Thanks for sharing.

I’m absolutely certain this is the first ever piece of Shadow/Far Out Space Nuts fan fiction. I doff my hat to you, sir.

You’re welcome. We’ve found the OTR community amazingly friendly and supportive. It’s a pleasure to share that support with other OTR enthusiasts. Thank you for the great recommendation!

I totally missed the Coleman/Benny connection. Thanks for pointing it out.

Had The Shadow gone on another 10 years, the opening would be, “The Shadow, Lamont Cranston, a man of wealth, on a trip to India obtained the power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him. Now he devotes his life to righting wrongs, protecting the innocent, and punishing the guilty. Recently, while touring an experimental coal-powered space craft with the lovely Margo Lane, and her friends Ruth Buzzi and Bob Denver, the latter accidentally pushed the “launch” button when the penultimate asked him to push the “lunch” button. Join us now as the Shadow continues to right wrongs and protect the innocent… in SPACE! … while hoping to some day find his way… home.

So yes – timeless classic.

The whole episode felt like it was written and produced very quickly, with no confidence in the audience. The first part is understandable; the latter is not.

“The Outsider” was the first Lovecraft story I ever read, in some horror collection that I found in my college library when I was a freshman. I liked it enough that I sought out other Lovecraft stories, and I was soon hooked. Maybe if I had read his later, “cosmic” stories first, I would have a lower regard for this more “backward-looking” one, but as my introduction to Lovecraft, it has always been among my favorites.

Great observations as usual, Mr. Potts. You should really be hosting this podcast! While I enjoyed the story more than you, I whole-heartedly agree that second-person William Conrad narration makes everything better.

Nick Cave was courtesy of Eric. He does all our “post-credit” gags.

For me, it was less comfort food and more empty calories.

Yeah, not one of Oboler’s most sympathetic protagonists. Arch did not take kindly to Americans who turned their back on the war. I think that’s why he went out of his way to make the couple in this story so loathsome and their deaths so horrific.

Agreed. I’m eager to listen to more episodes of Black Mass. Bauersfeld adapts a number of classic M.R. James stories. Like Lovecraft, James was criminally neglected by the golden age of radio. “Casting the Runes” is the only major American radio adaptation I’ve discovered.

You’re welcome! Thanks for suggesting it. As you heard, we thoroughly enjoyed it.

That was an odd one! I had a half dozen or so Crime Classics episodes on Radio Spirits collections as a kid but I don’t remember ANY of them being as bizarre as this. Interesting piece of radio history but I doubt it would be enjoyable to anyone who’s not a radio drama nerd.

And those closing lines where she’s expressing pity for the killer were really bizarre. It almost felt as if the producers had said, “Gentlemen, we’ve just picked up a new sponsor — the Church — so we’ve got to tack on an inspirational moral at the end to balance out all of the murders, no matter how out of place it might seem.”

The first-person present-tense narration didn’t really work for me at first, and made it harder to get into the story, although I got used to it. First-person present-tense would work if it were supposed to be the character’s thoughts as the events are happening, but this told too many details and explained too much backstory for that to be realistic — and I realize why it had so many details, because the audience needs to know them in order to understand what’s going on — and past tense wouldn’t have worked, because it would have removed any suspense as to whether he was going to live or die — but it still felt artificial. But, as I said, I got used to it, so it didn’t spoil the story for me. I wonder how it might have worked with second-person present-tense narration. I can imagine William Conrad saying “You look around — the only opening is a small hatch in the ceiling, six inches across — too small to crawl through” or “Your only chance is to keep pressing that Emergency Stop button.” (Then again, maybe that wouldn’t have worked with anyone _other_ than William Conrad doing the second-person narration.)

One other thing that kept it from working completely for me — and maybe it was just the audio quality, or maybe I just wasn’t listening closely enough — but on the first listen, I didn’t have any idea what had happened at the end. (Wait — what happened to Rogers? How is Brewer suddenly phoning his wife?) I heard the slight “smack” noise (which, I realized later, was Brewer punching Rogers), but I had to back it up and re-listen before I caught the sound of the elevator moving and its doors opening, and Brewer’s footsteps. But I can’t really blame the story for modern degradation of audio quality — or my own lack of attention, whichever it was.

Regarding Rogers’ idea to frame Brewer for the crime: Even if he had remembered to wipe his fingerprints from the gun, and even if the gun wasn’t traceable to him, it was still a pretty stupid plan. The police might have arrested Brewer, but once he told his story, they would have checked his hands for powder marks, and then checked Rogers’ hands for powder marks. But this new plan was hasty and poorly thought-out in the heat of the moment, so that’s not a flaw in the story, just a flaw of the character. So the moral of the story is: If you’re going to murder your wife, don’t change plans in the middle of things. And wear gloves.

On the bright side, I had previously criticized the missed opportunity to use Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” to play out the discussion of “The Young Man with the Cream Tarts” but you have totally redeemed yourselves by playing Nick Cave.

Not by design, but I think it is the appropriate result.:)

Yes! In your face, Tim and Eric!

I’m glad to hear you enjoyed it, Mr. Potts! Now I have to ask Eric his opinion on Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein…

Thanks for your interpretation of the “died like a man” line. It seems obvious now that you say it, but at the time all I could think of was, as you say, masculine courage and virility. I still think it’s unintentionally hilarious.

Couldn’t agree more, Dave. “Human” would have been a more effective choice for the reasons you mentioned.

By the way, when Lamont says “he died like a man,” I don’t think the meaning is supposed to be “he died like a prime example of masculine courage and virility,” but rather “he died like a human” — i.e., he wasn’t immune to bullets. It’s kind of a grim statement, although the actor didn’t really deliver it in a very grim manner (and the line would have worked better with the word “human,” regardless of the actor’s delivery).

Glad you liked it, Mark.

https://comicbookplus.com/?cid=1236

Nope! Thought it was great and agreed with Joshua (as usual). It’s not as experimental as “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” from Quiet Please but it’s still a great meta-deconstruction of the genre/medium. I laughed out loud in the mail van several times.

Staking out some bold territory right out of the gate! I’m intrigued to hear if your opinion changes after hearing the episode.

I’m glad I got a chance to listen to this, David. It was a lot of fun!

Alas, my work as a letter carrier had no bearing in choosing this episode. I mentioned in my original message that I had this episode on a collection called The Lost Shadow (or some permutation of that) as a kid and, as you guys know, you had to live off physical copies of old time radio shows in those days. As a fan of Bester’s stories and novels, I was especially drawn to this episode, corny as it may be, because it was such a curveball compared to the American episodes I was more familiar with at the time.

Thanks again! I hope you guys (and the rest of the MORLS community) enjoy this one!

Roger Ebert was adamant that when he reviewed a movie, he changed his criteria based on what the movie was trying to do. A horror movie? “Did it scare me?” A comedy? “Did it make me laugh.”

This show was trying to keep me off balance and have me listen to the end with my mouth open. It succeeded.

Milk was also used in quite a few movies as a way to poison people (the two Mrs Carrolls comes to mind), and I think that it was used by writers to use something innocent as a vehicle of death, which is always off putting. Like children were used in horror movies during the early 2000s, milk post prohibition was considered “safe” or “pure”, no one suspects that bland white drink (plus the color would hide cloudiness) of dealing death.

Great episode, but a kindly reminder – women can be the killers without it being mysogony.

Thanks, I wish we could lock down the pilot, he was great, too.

For those who might be interested: In addition to Frank Lovejoy, others listed in the cast included Stacy Harris, whom we heard in “A Study in Wax”, and Jack Kruschen, who starred in everyone’s favorite episode, “The Day Sinatra Got Fat”. You may also remember Kruschen as the mad Albanian genius Eivol Ekdal on Batman (in the episodes “Zelda the Great”/”A Death Worse Than Fate”), and he had a memorable role as a pedophile in “The Big Crime”, a really grim episode of the 50s TV version of Dragnet — as well as literally hundreds (222 on IMDb) of other roles in movies and TV. (“The Big Crime” was originally done on the radio, but I haven’t heard that one, and I can’t find any information as to whether Kruschen was in that version.)

I *think* Harris played Mike, the other guy in the tower with Lovejoy. (Harris was listed first after “Included in tonight’s cast”, so ordinarily, I would have expected him to have the second largest part, the pilot, but it doesn’t sound like his voice to me.) I didn’t recognize Kruschen.

So for the record: That’s one actor (Harris) who played Batman on the Superman radio show, and another (Kruschen) who played a villain on the Batman TV show, giving this episode a Batman Score of 2.