Category: Broadcaster's Lounge
Hey All, what's up? If you haven't checked out this site yet and you are an afficionado of oldtime radio, go to http://otr.net. You will need the Real audio player or the Real Alternative which you can obtain from http://www.whitestick.co.uk to play these programs. There are over 12000 old time radio shows. Enjoy and comment about it please.
I've seen that site and it's cool. Even better though, if you want to actually download a lot of shows, go to http://archive.org and go to the radio programs link. you can download thousands of old time radio shows in mp3 format, some collections sound better than others of course, but I've downloaded at least 3 gigs of shows from there and with the exception of a very few, all the shows had really good quality. or at least listenable. So that's another site to look at.
Doug, thanks very much for that site. I have another person who is interested in those as well.
Well, i'm not doug. but thanks.
well, just for an alternative, for the longest time Iv'e been buying OTR on MP3 CDs. Saves clutter on the old hard drive, and if you go someplace like www.yourradioshows.com you can get CDs starting at about $3.98. See, I don't like to sit there and ahve to pick and choose what episode I want. If I like a series, I just want the whole thing, so it's an alternative, plus if you avhe an mp3 CD player, you're not stuck at your computer playing a stream.
Thanks sweet sensativity and Chris for the sites. I'm always trying to add to my collection which now stands at 33gb and has over 7000 shows. I think total recorder may be getting a work out over the coming days.
I want to buy the entire series of suspense. Or find a place to download it all at least. I'll check out those sites in the meantime though. thanks for posting them.
awesome. Yes, now my 80 gb ipod will defanatly be my best friend.
Oh, dude, last time I checked, the guy who runs the WWW.otrnow.com website has been trying to release the best and most complete Suspense set possible. I'm thinking he's taking out any duplicates, correcting airdates, making better-sounding recordings of some shows where possible and so on. You might want to consider this guy if you want a Suspense set, even though others might also sell you a complete set. The thing I don't like about some of these CD vendors is hey don't check over the stuff they have sometimes, such as Lights Out, because many of those shows have been re-released under two and three alternate titles and so forth.
Anyone know where I can listen to the episode of Lights Out called Inside out? Thanks.
Check out
http://www.fearyoucanhear.com/index.php
They have a bunch of the lights out series and suspense too.
Also, live365 has a lot of stations that play old time radio shows, including one that is devoted to suspense.
Good luck.
Bob
From what I've seen, there's no actual transcription/recording of the original version of that story in circulation. The only version that I know of the story that exists is from an album Arch Obler did I think in the Fifties called Drop Dead, and that was one of the featured stories. Now, some vendors might take that cut from that album and name the file to look like it was an original broadcast when it was not. I've seen that done with the Chicken Heart story. I do have a stereo copy of this album and I can zip it and upload it somewhere like Filesend or such a place and provide a download link either here in this topic or to you privately. You'd just have to cut and paste the link into your browser because I don't know how to write raw HTML. but the zip and upload is no problem if anyone's interested.
Hey, another cool OTR station to listen to is AM 1710 Antioch Old Time Radio. and it can be accessed at:
http://radio.macinmind.com
The cool thing about this stream is that he plays shows that aired on this date in history. For example you might hear a show from April 22, 1945, or April 22, 1952, or something like that. If you look at the website, you can tell that this guy is super serious about how his station sounds and the work he puts into it. He uses a Mac so he sometimes gets in a few jabs at the Windows users but hey, I don't mind cause he does a fantastic job. Take a listen ifyou have the time. Just click on the mp3 stream link and have a listen.
Hey, I checked out the site and it looks awesome. I'll have a listen later. They do have a wide variety.
Thanks.
Bob
I've been collecting old time radio shows for over 25 years. Remember the old distributers before Radio spirits bought them out? I used to buy records from a company called Meticom which later became Adventures in Casettes as they stopped selling records. There was another popular distributer before called The Charles Michaelson. I remember Radio spirits sponsered some of the radio shows that played old time radio stuff. They advertised on many of those stations including When radio Was which can still be hard on 780 Wbbm Chicago. I bought many tape collections from Radio Spirits as pricy as they were. The cassette binders were nice. Inside would be a book in some cases, with lots of picutres and information about the content on the tapes. My friend Kevin used to collect the transcript disks some of these shows were stored on. He went around the different radio stations he worked at and collected these things before they threw them out. Most transcript disks were done away with in the early eighty's by many radio stations as they were no longer of any value to the programmers trying to keep up with the format of the day. Nowadays I belong to quite a few private mailing lists on the computer where the members share and request shows. So I can get just about anything I want, even shows I think I have but unsure. It's refreshing to see people encoding the shows from tape and other formats so people can access it easily. You see buying the shows from a distributer could break your pockets easily. The prices sometimes were rediculous. However now that this stuff is available for public consumption, it can be found for free as it once was when you sat down after a days work in front of the radio to hear some of your faverourites.
hello does any know or have the buffalo new york version of the world of the worlds? if so leave the link or contact info in my mail box please and thanks.
Aw yes 1710 in Antioch could be heard easily on those extended am radios. I didn't have to listen to it that way at my qth but sometimes I would just to see how it was coming in since I live nowhere around Antioch. At some point the stream I listened to with it stopped working. I haven't checked since. Also otrnow is a great place to keep it locked. Sometimes there are shows I'd rather not here but usually they'd run some classics. In case as you're listening you might not be reading along, there's detailed information on the screne as to what you're hearing and the year it came out and a whole mess of things displayed that your speech may not read should you be using it. If anyone has spisific titles they can't find I'll be more than happy to help. One place you people should visit for all your download material is dc ++. Get that software and my friend knows of a few hubs strickly for old time radio. It's there where we get pretty much anything. There's a hub called theotr hub and you have to subscribe to the yahoo group to get the info to go in to it. I believe it's otrhub@yahoogroups so look in to that. They have hubs for audio books as well. That hub in particular has both. I'm a part of it thanks to Kevin va3kky's recomendation and get lots of goodies. I will say this as far as collecting shows is concerned, I'm not one for collecting entire things. I never want entire collections. If this were the ninety's I'd avoid dealing with bulky cassettes and records. As I have my share of them as is. Besides that would be the fact that I want to know there are certain shows in any series I haven't heard. Ever since I was 9 I heard lots of old time radio. Even before then when wben 930 used to run both Bob And Ray and Cbs Radio Mystery theator. Can't forget about the Sears radio theator which turned in to Mutral Radio Theator. Those were also ran on wor 710 in New York. So I've been fed quiet a diet of old time radio and I love all catigories of old time radio. Some people love their cop shows, others like comedy stuff, some like scary stuff, I like a variety. I can't just listen to one thing. I sit back and think of how the shows must have been aligned in it's original order as you're getting it. Like a program sced for the tv. Well unless the network is running some sort of marathon you wouldn't hear the same show after another. I transform myself to being there in the decade and time as it's playing. Theator of the mind as it is can definitely be a type of magic that one can loose themselves in to.
I liked the cliff hangers for the radio superman show. How many remember superman on the radio? They were more less for kids. Fifteen minutes pack with action and always left on a cliff hanger, didn't matter if there was a short break in between. Something major always happened and you had to wait threw the break to find out. When they didn't run adds they ran little announcements about being friendly to your neibour no matter what color, they were anti racism adds. Don't be prejudice to your fellow man and so forth. The early shows as well had no sound affects really. The organ music was good enough. I brought up superman because I'm listening to a series right now from 1948 about the Atom man. Oh and this is one show as well that ran adds for food products that if you open up serial boxes for instants, you may find a prise. A record, a ticket for a bicycle, anything. They always found a way to get those "little bastards hooked." That reminds me of a funny story. I forgot his name so someone may know, but who was the guy that was fired from a kid's show (maybe Let's Pretend) for remarking after a story on the air, "that'll hold those little bastards for a while." Just like a sports guy in the nineties, and I don't remember his name either, but he mentioned in a sportscast that, "we need more lesbians in the woman's golf league." Now only in one instant here did the person forget that the mike was still going. This guy said it on purpose.
Comedy in itself has always been controversial in it's little way, even way before I remembered it. It had to be acts like Amos An Andy and Life of Riley that made it possible for TV shows like All In The Family and Saturday Night Live to do a kind of satire that was tolerated because of the changing times. Nowadays a show like Amos An Andy would be interpreted as racial in a sense that major stereo types were portrayed such would be the case with any black face humour which was a norm at the time simply because minority actors were few if at all. This was a time before television was in everyone's home and when a show needed people to play the rolls of Indians or Black people they had to improvised since very few minorities were used. I've never seen Amos An Andy as a TV show, but the radio show had white people playing all the black parts from what I could hear. They might have had real black people as guests or some other infrequent roll, but most of the other voices heard were familiar people from other shows. Which made the whole thing even funnier. Here were two very white people doing black face humour and creating this image which the audience based on the people that they thought existed in the studio threw the radio to them. Incidentally the writers for Life of Riley were the same writers for All In The Family. So the humour was very similar. In the Life OF Riley you had a type of Jewish New York humour which you just had to live in NYC to relate to. All in the family with Norman Leer as a writer, was the same New York Setting, just fast forward thirty years or so from when Chester Riley was real popular. Although Chester didn't exhibit racial tendencies. But he did have the same P size mind mentality as did Archie Bunker. Just a few things to ponder as I freeze my fingers off typing this shit. I was board and felt like writing any old thing so here I am. That's one of the things I like about these boards, it seems to cater to those who love to write and that's certainly me, I dare say!
On any radio show sound affects were very important. Unlike television where visuals set the seen for one's imagination, on radio it all of course had to be done with sound. It's interesting to note the unique methods of creating sound affects in the thirties and forties when the advent of cart machines were at it's prematurety. So often enough they had to improvise and make the sound affects on the spot. The Jack Benny show was one show which they had to be creative at the same time as having some sound affects available on record if they needed them. The sound man would q the necessary track from a record when prompted. A phone ring, a doorbell, footsteps, sirens, anything. Then they came up with sound affects that couldn't be duplicated. Mel Blanc did the sound for Benny's Maxwell. This happened on a day the turn table wasn't plugged in. So Mel improvised and saved the day. They continued using him afterwards. He also played the part of Carmichael the Polar Bear. Mel Blanc was popular on the Benny show way before the world knew him as Bugs Bunny and the man of a thousand voices. In fact certain people got their fame and career from their appearances on the Benny show. Frank Nelson, who's famous for this phrase: "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss" as seen on the Flint Stones where he could be a ticket check person, or a floor walker, and many other rolls. Allen Reid the voice of the original Fred Flintstone got his start on the Fred Allen show. He played many parts but was usually heard as Falstaff Openshore. Some or more of the voices now heard on the Flintstones were a mixture of voices from the Benny show, Fred Allen, and many others. One final thing I'll add about sound affects is that the further beginning of radio, it was live and totally improvised with nothing pre-recorded. One example would be the lone ranger show. In the later ones the guns they used were loud and ear splitting even as they were obvious carts being played. The earlier lone ranger shows the gun sounds were with cap guns and starter pistols. Which even as sound affects were slowly be perfected in the fifties, the cap gun was still used in the Falcon and Boston Blacky just to name a few. On the early Lone Ranger recordings the guns sounded so fake. The horses were fake as they are anyhow. Apparently they never used real horses. One example was a way a technician doodled with this piece of wood. I'm not sure how the rest was managed though. In the fifties when cap guns were still used in mystery shows and what ever, they were loud and better sounding (if not realistic) just because recording technology was getting better. It would be years later when they would introduced stereophonic. Remember when cbs sold they're stereo phonographs. Some of them were a combination TV or radio/phonograph all at the amazingly low price of $29.95. Astounding!
I like the old Mutual radio shows from Detroit. I forgot the call sign of the station that ran the Green Hornet, The Loan Ranger, Sergeant Preston, and the Hermit's cave. That was a unique radio cast with these voices they used for all different rolls. Also the minorities once again were portrayed by the same blend of voices that played everything else. I can't identify the names to some of the people in this cast that was these four shows I'm mentioning but I know a few of the actors were heard on other shows too. I wonder if that production team (The George Trendo) production put out other shows as well. If so in my years of listening to old time radio I haven't heard. It would be real interesting to find out. Amongst one of the voices I recognise but don't have a name to would be the guy who played Doc Adams on Gun smoke. You might know him as the barber on the Andy Griffon show. Then there was also the voice of Mendell Cramer. He was Johnny Dollar and had various rolls on the Boston Blacky Show with Pap's Blue Ribbon their sponsor. You could hear him in Gang Busters, The Falcon, X minus 1, which became Dimension X, and I'm sure there's way more. Certain voices were legendary and although you might not identify them by name, you probably recognise them when you hear them. To this day however I haven't heard anyone that's possess the same delivery and style to Gail Gordon. He had this Rudy Valley sort of way. Real ritzy like, and old fashion that I just haven't heard it duplicated nor anything resembling it. There were lots of characters like Frank Nelson, and Allen Reid who sort of had their own neesh and noone's ever latched on to it. The later Mutual radio shows were completely different. The cast of these later shows like Zero Hour with Rod Sterling as your host, and the Mutual Radio Theatre, had actors that were heard up to the early nineties and of course a great bunch of them were dying. One such example that I remember was the death of Claudette Coburn who died around 1997. It was amazing to hear her still alive and her progress as she was getting obviously older. That was the same year we lost George Burns who made it past 100. He died in March ninth if memory serves me right. On that same year radio spirits made a best of collection of burns stuff. They tend to put out lots of collections. Sure miss when they used to sell records and individual tapes though. Now with these big collections of shows, they make sure you spend some serious money. Thank god for all these different places we can access to download some of these shows. Sure save ware and tare on the pocket books.
The Detroit Mutual affiliate you are referencing was WXYZ 1270. Also, another great OTR site is radiotimezone.com. There you can subscribe to weekly podcasts of shows. 1710 Antioch is down for now, but another great live stream is http://live.wnar-am.com:8500/listen.pls.
i am a very sad individual with way too much time on my hands, and a bit of an otr geek where these things are concerned too.
Oh and check out
http://tennesseebillsotr.com/otr
and if anyone is interested in a load of british stuff the goon show, round the horne, itma etc pm or pqn me and i shal link you up, thanks.
Guys,
http://www.n8elq.com
He costs some but it's for bandwidth really and the upkeep and nothing else. My fiancee and I got a deal where it was $100 for all you could download for a year so needless to say we got everything we could in that time and so there's 330 gigs worth of it in my posession just now and his as well. I doubt Randy will ever do such a deal as that again, though. I don't remember what he charges per gig, I do know the cost goes down as you download more and more--if you buy one gig at a time it's x, but if you want to download say fifty gigs at one time it's cheaper.
Also, he's really fair. If you download a show and it's incomplete, he recredits you. Also think he does that if the audio quality is absolutely horrid--he tries to check the quality on all shows but with over 50,000 shows.... If you happen to ahve material that he doesn't which seems highly unlikely <grin> you can upload it to his server with his permission and he gives you downloading credits in return.
Also, if he doesn't have a show that you want, he does his best to find it. I wanted some more episodes of People are Funny and though he didn't find many, he did find me a few that weren't on his server before.
My fiancee and I have always had good dealings with Randy. He's so helpful and his site is wonderful and prices fair considering what he has to pay for all the upkeep. And he has gobs and gobs and gobs of Suspense--I have 917 shows. He may have uploaded more by this time... Plenty of escape, ETC. He has lots of shows you've heard of, and probably lots you've not.
Yall take care,and HTH,
Shanda
i have been a fan of OTR for a while now. thinking back to when i was 9 listening to the shows on KNX AM from LA. It would be a different set of show per night. and now i listen sometimes to KSL AM from Sault Lake late Saturday nights. like others have mentioned before
http://www.archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
is good to use too. oh yah another good site that streams OTR stuff is
http://www.yesterdayusa.com/
and the direct listen link is:
http://www.yesterdayusa.com/yusalive16.pls
well, enjoy and good luck
I'm at the top of the board here and you guys are talking about downloading shows, well there's otr hubs in dc++ so check those out if you can find them. There's an email group call otrhub. So join it and you'll be able to get crazy shows.
u die in 3 day boss Riverton. You go long way but long way no help you.
Well Paul Sutton (not sure of the spelling) played Sergeant Preston. At least that's the voice I'm used to. I think there were other characters. There were two versions of that show. First it was one everyday on xyz for a half an hour then they changed it to 15 minutes.
Gail Gordon was nothing like Rudi Valley. But speaking of Rudi Valley does anyone remember when he had Richard Prier on his TV show. It was his very first appearance and he did this visual thing. About the first man on the sun. Or something like that. I forget, it's been years.