When we talk about reboots and the re-imagining of old characters and storylines, most of us are thinking about the TV serials of the 60's through to the 80's that have been given new treatments to suit the changing expectations of the modern viewing public: Batman Begins and Battlestar Galactica are perfect examples.
In fact, when you examine the history of the entertainment industry over the last hundred years, you see that this has been done time and again. Nowhere is this more evident than in the changing fortunes of what was once thought to be a dead medium, a historical curiosity - the Golden Age of Radio.
Few realise how fertile it was as a breeding ground for story franchises that survive to this day, legends in the making. Much of it was Detective stories, mysteries and drama such as The Shadow and The Whisperer, the adventures of Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade.
Little of this was actually written for radio. Like the film serials that were to come later, radio was built on the successes of the pulp fiction and comics of the preceding years with such Sci Fi classics as Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers. Science fiction's fantastic vistas and monsters are at once the weakest and strongest points of radio. On the one hand it was a challenge to "set the scene" with words only but on the other hand only the barest of outlines had to be specifically painted for the "cinema of the mind" which was able to supply the rest of the details.
One of the great radio serials of the time was "The Adventures of Superman" which ran close to continually between 1940 to 1951 and, although Batman and Robin never had their own serial during the Golden age, they were regular guests on the Superman serial, usually when the actor who played Superman needed a holiday. With the magic of the internet, we can still listen to some of these classic shows, on web archives such as the Radio Nostalgia network, part of a niche market that is catering to an audience that appreciates the radio classics of the last century.
A Batman series was proposed in 1943 during the war and a sample premiere episode, "The Case of the Drowning Seal" got as far as a script. In 1950, they tried again with the "Batman Mystery Club" which was to be a weekly "club" in which Batman investigated ghost stories. One episode, "The Monster of Dumphrey's Hall", which is now available on the internet, was created for the juvenile market but never aired. By this time it was the end of an era as, from the mid-1950's, the spread of TV supplanted Radio as the major medium for mass-media drama.
As you can see, "reimagining" is not a new phenomena. The entertainment industry has always had a tradition of updating characters and imaginary worlds within the same media and as the raw material for new shows in different media. It was only natural then for George Lucas to recognise radio as a viable medium for "Star Wars" in 1981 when it was released as thirteen half-hour programs on National Public Radio. The results were astonishing! Far from being a hit with just the sci fi niche market, it proved to be popular with the general listening public as well, with a 40% jump in the overall NPR audience, 750,000 listeners per episode and 50,000 letters and phone calls in a single week.
Audio drama was far from dead!
Overseas, radio still retained a core of the mainstream listening audience. Batman finally got his big break in radio in 1994 with the adaptation of the epic "Knightfall" story arc from the comic books, transmitted on the British BBC Radio 1 network as "Batman: Knightfall" to be released this year on audio-tape and CD by BBC Audiobooks. This adaptation of the dark and dramatic tale has met with serious critical acclaim and has nothing in common with the films of the time. This was Batman as we saw him in the comics, the Dark Knight, driven and brooding.
These were all of course professional, licensed, productions made for transmission on radio but, to paraphrase Yoda, "There is another."
I was fortunate, recently, to be able to talk to Jeffrey Bridges, the executive producer of Pendant Productions, an internet audio production group which today produces a wide range of original and "fan productions". Fan productions are unlicensed, strictly not-for-profit shows made by the fans of a franchise as a labour of love and Pendant got its start with fan audio dramas of Superman, Wonder Woman and, for 18 episodes between February 2006 and July this year, "Batman, The Ace of Detectives". Is Old Time Radio a dead end, I asked, now that on-the-air drama is not popular in prime-time, mainstream radio? "Five years ago I would have said yes, sadly," said Jeffrey, "but iTunes and the surging popularity of podcasts has brought OTR back from the brink, I think."
The internet has become a gold-mine for aficionados of the genre with many of the originals available for free download, as well as an increasing number of original shows, made for the internet and distributed by podcast, that have been made to emulate their style. What's the attraction of OTR for modern audiences, is it just the nostalgia? Do these productions have anything to say to the "Y generation" of today? "That's like asking if the Mona Lisa has anything to say to us today artistically. Of course it does, and of course OTR does. There is a nostalgia factor for some folks, of course, and they also function as a bit of a time capsule into the world back then. But they're still good entertainment, too."
What did he see as the relationship between his modern productions and the classic works of the Golden Age of Radio? "I don't think there really is one beyond sharing the same medium. What's the relationship between "The Sopranos" and "The Honeymooners"? They shared that same great medium, but beyond that there's no real relationship present."
So other than the vastly improved production values made available by modern technology, what would you say is the major difference between OTR and modern contemporary productions? What does a modern audience expect? "The major difference between OTR and modern radio drama is that our modern shows are, as I like to call them, 'movies without the video feed'. The production values are a lot higher, but that's to be expected when you move fifty - sixty years into the future from the heyday of OTR. But the difference goes beyond just the production values, as you said."
"Storytelling is different now than it was then, and audiences expect a lot more than they used to. There's also the issue of so many forms of competing entertainment today that just didn't exist when OTR was big. Television all but killed OTR, and today's radio dramas still have to compete with the behemoth that is television, with cable added in ... and the internet ... and video games! It's tough to capture a lot of today's audience, especially since a lot of people have a stigma against OTR in thinking modern versions are just like the originals, which is anything but the truth."
Whilst you could say they are descendants of the early OTR shows, there is a world of difference between the Pendant produced shows and the serials of The Goon Shows and, I think, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. A tip of the hat for OTR fans to pick up? "Yes, and all credit for that goes to Pete Milan, writer and director of the show. It was all his idea, and it was a really nice touch."
These fan productions are, of necessity, strictly not-for-profit and none of the cast or crew are paid for what they do. Whilst, as with fan films, there is a leavening of professionals amongst the amateurs Pendant Productions and other groups such as Darker Projects, The Voice Acting Alliance and The Sonic Society have become an on-line community, a breeding ground for Voice Actors and the technical crew needed to create their own, original, audio productions on the internet.
In fact the new writers and production staff are pushing the envelope by branching out into their own original productions like The Kingery and Seminar. Do you see original works as a future direction for Pendant or will you keep you current mix of fan-based and original shows? "We've always intended to move into original productions, but I don't see us stopping the fan productions anytime soon. The fan productions are what draw in the vast majority of the audience, and rightly so. Millions of people are fans of Superman and Wonder Woman and Indiana Jones, but nobody is a fan of an original production when it starts. If we'd started only with original shows, finding an audience would have been terribly difficult and our originals probably wouldn't have a third of the audience that they do now. And that's not to disparage them, of course, as I think our original shows are really fantastic stuff. But getting people to listen to something, and not watch, when they know nothing about it and aren't familiar with the medium is an incredibly tall task."
"So the fan shows bring the audience in, and then they check out our other productions and lo, the audience for the original shows grows and grows. There's a balance, and the fan shows actually help the original shows out a lot."
Of particular interest to those who like OTR is Pendant's "Umket Industries Presents: The Dixie Stenberg and Brassy Battalion Adventure Theater". This is an original, monthly sci-fi serial adventure that, according to director Seth Adam Sher, is based on the aerial adventure drama, like Captain Midnight, Hop Harrigan, Adventures by Morse and Speed Gibson. These "showcased not only the dramatic range of the writers of the period and the actors and actresses involved, but also a somewhat larger canvas than most other radio serials of the period. The characters in these shows would traipse all over the world, getting into trouble and danger, sometimes not getting out again, most times saving society or friends or their neighbor's cat, but throughout all of this there was a high sense of fun and adventure in the voices of the cast."
"Dixie is such a labor of love." Said Jeffrey Bridges, who created the concept and writes the series. "The scripts sometimes give me trouble because I try to be as true to the period as I can, so I've often got to stop mid-sentence and look up different slang terms or research what was and what wasn't in existence yet at a given time, etc."
Dixie soon celebrates its first anniversary with it's biggest episode yet, followed in early August by the wrap up of the first story arc after which the show will go through some changes, including a jump in time. "It'll still be the same light-hearted adventure/action/comedy show, but some of the details will have changed. I'm not sure yet how long the second arc will run, though I imagine it will be somewhat shorter than the first 13-episode arc." The show has been roughly plotted out through to its ultimate, explosive denouement in the fifth or sixth story arc.
Old Time Radio is something that is also close to the heart of Tad Pietrzykowski, a twenty five year veteran of the Australian comic scene and a radio announcer for 21 years. Tad is, amongst other things, the co-creator of The Southern Cross, a comic created for Cyclone, a short-lived but highly regarded Australian comic of the '80s. It tells the story of Gordon Russell, a voice actor who plays the part of a crime-fighting super hero, The Southern Cross, in a radio play of that name during WWII. After being struck by lightning on the roof of the AWA building in Sydney he gains super powers and takes on the persona of the Southern Cross in his fight against a Nazi spy ring. Tad is currently in negotiations to bring out 'print on demand' editions of The Southern Cross and his other, more well-known title, The Dark Nebula. He plans to make the entire Southern Cross storyline, which has been serialised to date, available as a single prestige edition.
"There was never a richer chapter in our broadcasting history than the days of Radio Theatre," said Tad, "in its day, it was their TV. I did my research and the names of most of the characters are based on the names of real radio theatre stars of the day."
No, there never really was a radio play during WWII called "The Southern Cross" ... but there might be one in the near future! "I am looking at submitting the Southern Cross to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as an adapted radio play to finally compliment the comic feature. It was my lament that Australia never had a 'National Pride' hero like the Yanks have Capt. America , The Shield, Uncle Sam etc., so I felt it only right to create one myself that would be that without being too obvious or tokenistic."
A radio play about a super hero based on a radio play? Makes you wonder if someone somewhere is writing a book about a comic book writer called Tad who wants to make a radio play about ...
Tad and co-creator Glenn Lumsden plan to make it much more than that though. "I believe the fact that it already exists in comic form should be very attractive to the ABC as they like to explore all avenues of such projects e.g.: pod-casting, multi-media, on-line content etc., the fact that visuals can accompany the audio should be a very tempting carrot."
Therein lies the current challenge for the entertainment industry. New technology is handing them new media and forms of distribution that did not exist ten years ago. Video and audio distributed over the Internet, either streamed live or as podcasts, satellite TV and radio, movies made for DVD or internet distribution - could these be the death knell of traditional TV and movies? Only time will tell.
Radio drama has certainly profited from these distribution and publicity opportunities, the question is, where will its content come from, where will the producers get their ideas and inspiration?
Listening to OTR is a window onto another world, it was written for an audience whose world view was simpler and more clear-cut. A world of unabashed swashbuckling adventures - noble heroes, vile villains, and helpless heroines. We live in a more cynical world than that of the Golden Age of Radio, where people's motives are routinely questioned and personal values are not universal and cast in stone.
Modern audio drama is far more than simply a nostalgia media. Personally I would expect that the trends in audio dramas will parallel those in TV and cinema, a combination of original productions and cross-fertilisation from other times and other media. Old time radio is a fertile area from which to get such ideas.
Yes, audio drama is far from dead! Welcome back to the cinema of the mind!
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