From Those Were the Days:

1925 - Station 2XAG in Schenectady, NY became the first radio station in the U.S. to broadcast with a 50,000-watt transmitter. The station, soon known as WGY Radio, could broadcast with 50,000 watts, since it was owned by the General Electric Company -- a company that knew lots about watts. Today, WGY still broadcasts with its original call letters and is still using 50,000 watts of power.

1946 - Crooner Dean Martin and comedian Jerry Lewis staged their first show as a team this day at Club 500 in Atlantic City, NJ. Actually, the two had met while performing -- separately -- at the Glass Hat in New York City and decided to try an ad-lib act together. The rest is entertainment history.
12:25:50 PM    comment []  trackback []  

What’s Up, Tiger Mandrake?

A few months back I posted a heads-up to the OTR Digest that VCI Entertainment was planning to release the 1940 serial version of Terry and the Pirates to DVD—I figured that since Pirates was one of the most popular juvenile radio adventures of Radio’s Golden Age, there might be a few people interested. Since I hadn’t seen it, I solicited opinions as to whether it was any good (most of the Columbia serials that I have watched have been iffy at best, but they provide an entertaining sense of camp and comic relief) and most of the replies that came back could have come from Jay Sherman of TV’s late, lamented animated sitcom The Critic: “It stinks!”

But it was Martin Grams, Jr., boy author, who added some additional information of which I had not been aware; most of Columbia Studios’ film properties had long been neglected, and large portions of Terry and the Pirates' soundtrack had to be rerecorded by other actors. (I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that they had the original script on hand, otherwise the serial might have taken on an entirely new plot involving a valuable egg salad recipe.)

So I observed this morning while putting on the Mandrake the Magician DVD that apparently the same fate has befallen comicdom’s practitioner of legerdemain—according to this review, much of the dialogue in the first chapter is also dubbed. It took me a while to notice this—although the soundtrack didn’t sound quite right—but the penny dropped when character actor Kenneth MacDonald opened his mouth and out came…well, let’s just say that I’ve seen enough Three Stooges shorts to recognize his oily, urbane tones when I hear them. (I checked out RadioGoldindex to see if MacDonald had ever done any radio, and there’s only two entries under his name—both of which are soundtracks to Lone Ranger TV episodes. You’d think with a voice like that he would have done quite a bit of radio—if I’m wrong about this, please let me know.) The actor who dubs his voice sounds slightly effeminate; for a brief second I thought the director had suggested to Ken that he “camp it up.”

I made the decision to watch a chapter everyday (the first: “Shadow on the Wall”) and from what I’ve seen so far this baby is going to play like grade-A Velveeta. The plot, in a nutshell, has the nefarious arch criminal The Wasp scheming to get his skeevy hands on a radium-energy machine developed by Mandrake’s pal Professor Houston. I was kind of disappointed, though, that Warren Hull doesn’t look much like the Mandrake of the comic strip—and in the first chapter, the feats of magic he performs comes across like a bad magician at a child’s party. But that’s just a minor quibble—so tune in tomorrow for another thrilling episode of Mandrake the Magician!!!
12:21:57 PM    comment []  trackback []