Boxcars711 Old Time Radio

LAST BROADCAST: July 1st 1953 SPONSORS: Ford Motors, General Mills CAST: Brian Donlevy, Herb Butterfield, GeGe Pearson, Ken Peters, Betty Lou Gerson, Dan OâHerlihy ANNOUNCERS: John Storm PRODUCERS/DIRECTORS: Don Sharpe WRITERS: Bob Ryf ORCHESTRA: Steve Ashley Dangerous Assignment â 1950-1954 This thirty-minute spy adventure featured Steve Mitchell, and investigator of crimes in exotic locations. 6...

Lights Out was an American old-time radio program featuring "tales of the supernatural and the supernormal." It was immensely popular, and was one of the first horror programs, predating Suspense and Inner Sanctum. In its heydey, Lights Out rivalled the popularity of those shows. Lights Out ran through several series and networks, from January 1, 1934 to August 6, 1947. The principal sponsor was I...

The Casebook of Gregory Hood, starring Gale Gordon in the title role, took over where Sherlock Holmes had left off. Sponsored by Petri wine, it used the same "weekly visit" format and the same team of Anthony Boucher and Dennis Green that had written The New Adventured of Sherlock Holmes. Gregory Hood was modelled after true-life San Francisco importer Richard Gump, and many of the stories revolve...

The first portrayal of Phillip Marlowe on the radio was by Dick Powell, when he played Raymond Chandler's detective on the Lux Radio Theater on June 11, 1945. This was a radio adaptation of the 1944 movie, from RKO, in which Mr. Powell played the lead. Two years later, Van Heflin starred as Marlowe in a summer replacement series for the Bob Hope Show on NBC. This series ran for 13 shows. On Septem...

Abbott and Costello William (Bud) Abbott and Lou Costello (born Louis Francis Cristillo) were an American comedy duo whose work in radio, film and television made them one of the most popular teams in the history of comedy. Thanks to the endurance of their most popular and influential routine, "Who's on First?" â whose rapid-fire word play and comprehension confusion set the preponderant framework...

The Damon Runyon Theater was a 52 show series that was syndicated across the USA beginning in early 1949. Damon Runyon was a gifted sports writer in New York City as well as being a great journalist and great short story writer. His stories were humorous ones, written in the "dem" and "dose" vernacular of the city's loveable and not so loveable characters of Broadway, the prize ring and the underw...

Frank Lovejoy stars as Randy Stone, a toughened, street-wise Chicago Star reporter working the Nightbeat in the early 1950's. Sometimes the capers are cops and robbers. Or just normal people in trouble. Sometimes they deserve it. Sometimes fate twists their arm. Sometimes they're just too scared or confused to know the difference. Lovejoy is a seasoned pro of radio and film with an honest, grippin...

In 1937, Americans began a Sunday night ritual that lasted three decades. They tuned in to the Bergen and McCarthy show. It was the top program on radio and Hollywood's top movie stars lined up to make cameos. They included Mae West, whose flirtations with McCarthy got her banned from NBC for 15 years, and Marilyn Monroe, who once became "engaged" to marry McCarthy -- a stunt that ended when the d...

Inner Sanctum Mysteries was a popular old-time radio program that aired from January 7, 1941 to October 5, 1952. Created by Himan Brown, the anthology series featured stories of mystery, terror and suspense. The tongue-in-cheek introductions were in sharp contrast to shows like Suspense and The Whistler. A total of 526 episodes are known to have been produced. The early 1940s programs opened with...

Blackie was a tough, wisecracking private detective working in New York, billed as "enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend." His speciality was making fools of the police, a simple task with Inspector Farraday heading the official investigations. "An enemy to those who call him an enemy, a friend to those who have no friends." Boston Blackie is a reformed jewel th...

Lux Radio Theater, one of the genuine classic radio anthology series (NBC Blue Network (1934-1935); CBS (1935-1954); NBC (1954-1955)) adapted first Broadway stage works, and then (especially) films to hour-long live radio presentations. It quickly became the most popular dramatic anthology series on radio, running more than twenty years. The program always began with an announcer proclaiming, "Lad...

Whitehall 1212 is a crime drama featuring cases from New Scotland Yard's "Black Museum". Unlike the show starring Orson Welles, however, this series was done with the official support of The Yard and tries to downplay the sensational aspects of thes cases and highlight the rigorous police work that went into solving them.

Sponsored by Vic's nose drops, vapor rubs, and other great products by the Vic Chemical Company, this collection contains all known episodes in existence of the short-run series of 1944, Dangerously Yours. Hollywood star, Victor Jory, was the primary herostarring in story adaptation of pirates, espionage, adventure and romance. The series was later renamed in October 1944 to Matinee Theater.

Tales of the Texas Rangers, a western adventure old-time radio drama, premiered on July 8, 1950, on the NBC radio network and remained on the air through September 14, 1952. Movie star Joel McCrea starred as Texas Ranger Jayce Pearson, who used the latest scientific techniques to identify the criminals and his faithful horse, Charcoal, to track them down. The shows were reenactments of actual Texa...

Barry Craig (AKA Barry Crane" and then "Barrie Craig) Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator is one of the few detective radio series that had separate versions of it broadcast from both coasts. Even the spelling changed over the years. It was first "Barry Crane" and then "Barrie Craig". NBC produced it in New York from 1951 to 1954 and then moved it to Hollywood where it aired from 1954 to 1955....

For the 1970âs late-night horror show, The Price of Fear, the BBC dramatized the most chilling stories they could find, drawing on talented new writers as well as the established master of terror who narrated tale, re-written as though Price actually experienced each chilling adventure himself. The show was enormously successful in the UK and abroad, and a number of series were made during 1973, 1...

Mystery In The Air. September 25, 1947. NBC net. "Crime and Punishment". Sponsored by: Camels, Prince Albert. The last show of the series. Nice try, but you can't do "Crime and Punishment" in a half hour. Ben Wright, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (author), Gloria Ann Simpson, Henry Morgan, Herb Butterfield, Joseph Kearns, Luis Van Rooten, Michael Roy (announcer), Paul Baron (composer, conductor), Peggy Webbe...

In 1934-36, Berle was heard regularly on The Rudy Vallee Hour, and he got much publicity as a regular on The Gillette Original Community Sing, a Sunday night comedy-variety program broadcast on CBS from September 6, 1936 to August 29, 1937. In 1939, he was the host of Stop Me If You've Heard This One with panelists spontaneously finishing jokes sent in by listeners. Three Ring Time, a comedy-varie...

Let us journey âinto the land that lies beyond midnight,â into a world of ghost hunters, men going mad, and DEATH DEATH DEATH! Written by the masterful Michael McCabe, these well-done South African radio shows will capture your attention and keep you up listening to them well beyond midnight. Exact Date Unknown

X MINUS ONE was an NBC science fiction series that was an extension, or revival, of NBC's earlier science fiction series, DIMENSION X. which ran from Apr. 8, 1950 through Sept. 29, 1951. Both are remembered for bringing really first rate science fiction to the air. The first X MINUS ONE shows used scripts from DIMENSION X, but soon created new shows from storied from the pages of Galaxy Magazine....

In 1964, South Africa began The Creaking Door, using original scripts which included stories with a heavy emphasis on the supernatural. The topics ranged from haunted houses to a woman who turns into a giant cat, and of course, the typical paranoid murderer so often presented on the original Inner Sanctum. The host for this series was Peter Bloomfield. There are at present anywhere from 34-37 exta...

Jeff grows up near Basin Street in New Orleans, playing his clarinet with the dock workers. He puts together a band, the Basin Street Hot-Shots, which includes a cornet player, Memphis. They struggle to get their jazz music accepted by the cafe society of the city. Betty Lou joins their band as a singer and gets Louie to show her how to do scat singing. Memphis and Jeff both fall in love with Bett...

Police Melodrama 1-19-47 through 3-7-57 . Mutual network.  Many weekly timeslots. Presented in cooperation with Official Detective Stories Magazine. CAST: Craig McDonnell as Detective Lt. Dan Britt.  Tommy Evans as Sgt. Al Bowen.  Directed by Wynn Wright.

2000 AD is known as the first of the network science fiction shows, although it ran on Mutual just a month prior to the introduction of the landmark series, Dimension X. It was a half hour of science fiction wonder in an exciting package. The stories have a charm that is always present in science fiction of the future that is written in the past. "When The Worlds Met" takes place "at the giant spa...

The unmistakable voice of Bud Flanagan singing 'Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?', a cod-Second World War propaganda singalong written especially for the show (by Jimmy Perry), introduced Dad's Army, the zenith of the British broad-comedy ensemble sitcom. Consistently good writing and a wonderful cast of old timers and newer talents combined to produce a whimsical period-piece that con...