From Those Were the Days:

1934 - The program Home Sweet Home debuted on the NBC Red radio network. The principal characters were Fred, Lucy, Dick Kent and Uncle Will.
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Odds and ends

I will take this opportunity to confess I have been a bit slack in the old-time radio department, but I blame the people that I interact with every night from 11:00 p.m. to 7 a.m. (Honestly, these folks think we’re running some kind of motel or something.) I bring along a CD or two to listen, but I never seem to get around to actually enjoying it. I’m hoping to get some free time in the next day or so.

I received a couple of goodies in the mail today—I found a pair of classic serials on DVD at Overstock.com for small change, Mandrake the Magician (1939) and Drums of Fu Manchu (1940). I love these old-time cliffhangers, and I often wish that more of them were available in DVD format—particularly my all-time favorite. 1945’s The Purple Monster Strikes. (Please don’t ask me why this is my all-time favorite; I’m not entirely certain I know myself—although the fact that a superior alien being is able to land on Earth but can’t get back home without stealing an experimental rocket might have something to do with it. Oh, and the fact that he must subdue his enemies not with some sort of advanced gizmo rocket gun but with a good ol’ Republic broken balsa-wood furniture donnybrook helps, too.)

Mandrake is based on the successful Lee Falk comic strip, but the famed magician also enjoyed a brief radio stint over Mutual from 1940-42 as played by Inner Sanctum’s Raymond Edward Johnson (the renowned actor Juano Hernandez played Mandrake’s sidekick, Lothar). The serial stars Warren Hull as the titular prestidigitator; Hull also starred in what is considered the best of all the Columbia serials The Spider’s Web (1938) and took over for Gordon Jones in the second serial to feature radio’s Green Hornet, The Green Hornet Strikes Again! (1940). I’ve not seen Mandrake, but even though most of the Columbia product suffers from a little too much comic relief I’m looking forward to watching it. Drums of Fu Manchu is a classic Republic serial (most serial fans agree that the best serials were made at Republic) based on Sax Rohmer’s inscrutable Asian villain, and this particular DVD is a twofer, containing a digitally remastered version with commentary by Scarlet Street editor Richard Valley. Henry Brandon plays Fu; Brandon was a superb character actor best known for his portrayal of Barnaby (the villain, boo, hiss) in Laurel & Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934) and Scar in The Searchers (1956).

I also received my copy of Martin Grams’ new book (that’s it on the left—beautiful cover, don’t you think?), Gang Busters: The Crime Fighters of American Broadcasting. I’ve only been able to thumb through the book but I can already tell that this one is going to be a keeper. I’m a great admirer of Martin’s books, as past posts probably indicate, because of his dead-on attention to detail and accuracy. But I’m predicting this offering will be one of his very best—for the simple reason that no one has attempted (at least to my knowledge) the arduous process of putting together a complete broadcast log for this well-remembered and highly influential radio series. Many of the Gang Busters shows in circulation are undated, in part because many of the surviving broadcasts were culled from those rebroadcast in radio syndication during the 1970s by Charles Michelson (ironically, the show didn’t do very well in the nostalgia boom because many listeners thought it to be too “pro-police”) so having a log available to date one’s shows is a positive boon. It’s a big honkin’ book, too—700 pages thick and available to order here. I can’t wait to get the opportunity to devour it in detail.

Finally, for us classic film buffs, Entertainment Weakly—sorry, that should be Weekly—has an interesting article by Stephen (“Boo!”) King on classic lines from the movies. King solicited nominees from readers sometime back and it shouldn’t come as any big surprise that most of the best known (“…I coulda been a contendah…” is Numero Uno) are represented here, plus there’s a sidebar on just how many famous lines can be found in The Godfather (1972). But other than a brief blurb on the tragedy that Twentieth Century (1934), the classic screwball comedy with John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, isn’t being considered for DVD release by Columbia Tri-Star any time soon, that’s pretty much it.
9:13:29 PM    comment []  trackback []