The Guiding Light on Radio

There's plenty of old Guiding Light radio shows on YouTube, from the days before it was a television show. The soap operas have their origin in radio, and this example from 1941 is a classic of the genre, complete with commercials and a mail-in contest.

Listen: The Guiding Light, June 10 1941

The Call of Cthulhu

I like audiobooks for the same reason I like radio dramas and staged readings of plays - one's imagination is forced to fill in the blanks and nothing is spoonfed to the mind. This audiobook version of H.P. Lovecraft's 1928 novella The Call of Cthulhu is read by Garrick Hagon, the guy who played Biggs Darklighter in Star Wars.

Read along with Biggs, using Project Gutenberg's text copy or you can download it as a free e-book at ManyBooks.

Listen: The Call of Cthulhu read by Garrick Hagon

A Study in Scarlet

One can find online the entire 1933 movie of A Study in Scarlet starring Reginald Owen, but I'm strangely drawn to this 32-part YouTube posting of an audiobook version instead. It features John Tefler reading the original Arthur Conan Doyle story - the very first of the Sherlock Holmes tales - originally published in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual.

If you like to read along with an audiobook, as I do, then check out the full text of the book at Project Gutenberg. Dashed clever device, this internet, eh what? A click here and clack there and Bob's yer Uncle.


Listen: A Study in Scarlet audiobook

Puppet Cabaret!

Now that's entertainment.

View: Puppets in Cabaret

The Green Hornet on Radio

This new Seth Rogen Green Hornet movie turned out to be pretty loathsome, although we here at Catclaw HQ are certainly big Cameron Diaz fans (she was great in last year's Knight and Day). Choosing to frame it in a slapstick camp style, they've totally missed the flavor of the 1966-1967 TV show and the 1940-1941 film serials.

But most of you young whippersnappers probably don't even know that the Green Hornet was originally a radio drama, having debuted on January 31, 1936, on Detroit's WXYZ, and running sporadically until 1952.

Five episodes of the radio show are downloadable in mp3 format from the great Old Time Radio Fans website: "Black Market for Profit", "The Return of Oliver Perry", "Murder and the Dope Racket", "Hot Money and Death", and "The Stuffed Panda".

Download: Five episodes of The Green Hornet

Aliens in the Mind

From the Internet Archive:

"This six-part radio drama stars none other than Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, who between them became two of the most famous horror film stars of the 1950s and 1960s.

Aliens in the Mind is based on a story by the then-foremost Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes. It centers around the discovery, on a remote Scottish island, of a community of 'human mutants' capable of telepathy. A plan is in place to use them to control the British Government, and friends Curtis Lark (Vincent Price) and Hugh Baxter (Peter Cushing) join forces to combat them."

Listen: Aliens in the Mind