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The Lives of Harry Lime (HQ Set)

Posted by Robert on August 26, 2011 at 9:00pm

The Lives of Harry Lime (original British title The Adventures of Harry Lime) was an old-time radio program produced in London, England during the 1951 to 1952 season.

Orson Welles reprized his role of Harry Lime from the celebrated 1949 film adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The Third Man. The radio series is a "prequel" to the film, and depicts the many misadventures of con-artist Lime in a somewhat lighter tone than the character's villainy in the film.

Most episodes would begin with "The Third Man Theme" being played, abruptly cut off by an echoing gunshot. Then Welles would speak:

"That was the shot that killed Harry Lime. He died in a sewer beneath Vienna, as those of you know who saw the movie The Third Man. Yes, that was the end of Harry Lime ... but it was not the beginning. Harry Lime had many lives ... and I can recount all of them. How do I know? Very simple. Because my name is Harry Lime."

Although often cited as a BBC production, the series was one of a number produced and distributed independently by the prolific Harry Alan Towers. Only sixteen of the episodes were acquired and broadcast by the BBC in the UK. It was the first time that the BBC broadcast episodes of a dramatic series that it did not produce. The full series was syndicated to radio stations in the U.S.

All The Lives of Harry Lime (HQ Set).zip

Singles

Lum and Abner

Posted by Robert on August 13, 2011 at 9:22pm

From 1931 to 1955, the Lum and Abner radio show brought the town of Pine Ridge (Montgomery County), into the homes of millions of listeners across the country. During World War II, Armed Forces Radio took Lum and Abner around the world.

Chester “Chet” Lauck and Findley Norris “Tuffy” Goff, two young comedians from Mena (Polk County), created the characters when they were invited to appear on a statewide flood relief broadcast over KTHS radio in Hot Springs (Garland County) on April 26, 1931. Seconds before being introduced, they created the names Lum Eddards for Lauck and Abner Peabody for Goff.

The two old codgers (Lauck and Goff were actually in their late twenties) ran the Jot ‘Em Down General Store in Pine Ridge. Lum was a bachelor with an eye for women, and his ego usually got in the way of common sense. Abner was a hen-pecked married man, and his gullibility was enormous. They were civic-minded merchants who never seemed to have any money in the cash register. Their schemes for grandeur always brought them to the brink of tragedy.

Additional characters were created for later broadcasts. Lauck portrayed Cedric Wehunt, and nosey Grandpappy Spears, while Goff became Dick Huddleston (the real store keeper in Waters, the town upon which Pine Ridge was based), schemer Squire Skimp, shy Mousey Gray, Mose Moots the barber, town-meany Snake Hogan, and many others. Each character was based on a composite of old friends from Waters and Mena.

The Lum and Abner show was set in the Jot ‘Em Down Store in Pine Ridge. On April 26, 1936, the citizens of Waters changed the town’s name to Pine Ridge in honor of Lum and Abner.

Their humor was clean and honest, reflecting small town life and human nature. The stories had universal themes that have not become dated, and therefore Lum and Abner continues to be popular with old-time radio fans.

KTHS groomed the young talent on Sunday broadcasts for just a few months, and then they auditioned in Chicago for a network show on NBC radio. Lum and Abner was picked up immediately and continued for almost twenty-five years, including 5,800 daily live fifteen-minute programs. A series of contracts saw them on the air for four radio networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, and Mutual), sponsored by such major companies as Quaker Oats, Ford Motor Company, Horlick’s Malted Milk, Alka Seltzer, General Foods, and General Mills.

Lum and Abner was the first network program broadcast from Radio City in New York in 1933, the first to do a marathon charity broadcast, and the first to make a transatlantic “simulcast,” with Lauck in London and Goff in Chicago. Their promotions of war effort causes during World War II were especially successful. Their sponsors offered premiums that are now collectibles.

As a result of their radio popularity, Lum and Abner broadcasts moved to Hollywood studios in 1939 in order for the actors to pursue careers in motion pictures. The pair made six movies during the 1940s: Dreaming Out Loud (1940), The Bashful Bachelor (1942), So This is Washington (1943), Two Weeks to Live (1943), Going to Town (1944), and Partners in Time (1946). Lum and Abner Abroad (1956) was made in Europe as a television pilot, with the two characters as Hollywood personalities. Lauck and Goff did not like the result, and it was not released to theaters; it is now sought-after piece of Lum and Abner history.

Lum and Abner began as a lark in Mena, traveled to Hot Springs, and grew in Chicago and other cities. Hollywood fulfilled the dreams of two small-town boys. Early broadcasts were carried by local sponsors, but soon, nationwide sponsors reached into millions of homes. After nearly twenty-five years of radio, television made inroads into audiences, and the programs were again locally sponsored. By 1955, the two were ready to quit, as Norris Goff had been in poor health for many years. Their concept has been copied on such programs as Beverly Hillbillies and by the comic strip “Li’l Abner,” which is often confused with Lum and Abner, but the original has never been equaled.

Lum and Abner made a small town in Arkansas world famous. Today, Pine Ridge is home to the Lum and Abner Museum. The National Lum and Abner Association was founded in 1984 and has 600 members nationwide. (Encyclopedia Of Arkansas)

L&A 480926 A Surprise Party For Lum And Abner

L&A 481003 The Store Is Pratically On Someone Elses Property

L&A 481010 Baby Cedric The Mind Reader

L&A 481017 Lum Fakes A Broken Leg

L&A 481024 Lum Becomes The Substitute Postmaster

L&A 481031 Lum Takes Up Surrealist Painting

More radio shows here

Jack Carson Show, The

Posted by Robert on August 11, 2011 at 8:53pm

.

The Jack Carson Show first appeared on CBS radio for Campbell Soups, on June 2, 1943. The show ran for about four years until 1947 when Carson became the M.C. on The Sealtest Village Store.

The Jack Carson Show centred around Jack’s hectic home life at 22 North Hollywood Lane and his encounters with a variety of strange relatives, friends and neighbors. As in their vaudeville days Dave Willock was the sidekick playing the part of Carson’s nephew Tugwell. Eddie Marr was Jack's press agent, Arthur Treacher his butler.

Biography

John Elmer Carson was born in Carman, Manitoba on 27 October 1910 to Elmer and Elsa Carson. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Milwaukee, which he always thought of as his home town. He attended high school at Hartford School, Milwaukee and St. John's Military Academy, Delafield - but it was while attending Carleton College, Northfield that he got a taste for acting Jack Carson, because of his size - 6ft 2" and 220lbs had his first stage appearance as Hercules in a college production. During a performance he tripped and took half the set with him. A college friend, Dave Willock, thought it was so funny he persuaded Carson to team with him in a vaudeville act - Willock and Carson, and a new career began. In 1936 they decided to try their luck in Hollywood - and landed at RKO where they were able to work in bit parts. Jack Carson quickly qot on the RKO treadmill through a gruelling series of films, sometimes changing costumes four times a day. Willock and Carson meanwhile got their big radio break on the Bing Crosby Kraft Music Hall program in 1938, and it was that appearance that lead to a string of other radio appearances and hosting opportunities which would culminate in his own radio show in 1943. (Jack Carson Fansite)

Jack_Carson_Show_47-02-12_20_Fixing_a_Radio.mp3

There is a excellent set of the shows in the OTR Archives, all HQ 128-44 except for two.

My Favorite Husband - Cartoon From 1949 Radio Show

Posted by Robert on August 9, 2011 at 4:00pm

My Favorite Husband began as a radio sitcom on CBS Radio, with Lucille Ball and Richard Denning as Liz and George Cooper (Cugat in a very few early episodes, until bandleader Xavier Cugat was said to be edgy about the radio couple sharing the name). The couple lived at 321 Bundy Drive in the fictitious city of Sheridan Falls, and were billed as "two people who live together and like it." The main sponsor was Jell-O, and an average of three "plugs" for Jell-O were made in each episode, including Lucille Ball's usual sign-on, "Jell-O, everybody!" It would start as:(1948 radio version).

The program initially portrayed the couple as being a well-to-do banker and his socially prominent wife, but three new writers — Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and Jess Oppenheimer — took over the writing, changed the couple's name to Cooper, and remade them into a middle-class couple, believing average listeners would find them more accessible.

Lucille Ball was asked to do a television version of the show (with Jell-O remaining as sponsor) and CBS insisted on Richard Denning continuing as her co-star, but Ball refused to do a husband-and-wife television show without real-life husband Desi Arnaz playing her on-screen husband. The network reluctantly agreed, reworking the concept into I Love Lucy after Ball and Arnaz took a show on the road to convince the network audiences would respond. But Jell-O dropped out of the show in favor of Philip Morris for television.

Carroll, Pugh, and Oppenheimer agreed to do the switch to I Love Lucy. They subsequently reworked a few My Favorite Husband episodes into I Love Lucy episodes, especially early in the TV show's run. For example, the 1948 radio episode entitled "Giveaway Program" inspired the I Love Lucy episode called "Redecorating," with some lines being exactly the same. Many of the actors who had done My Favorite Husband radio show also appeared on I Love Lucy, sometimes in episodes where they reprised their roles using a reworked Husband script.

Here is a cartoon made from an Old Time Radio episode of My Favorite Husband from Christmas 1949. Really very well done.

Go to radio page of My Favorite Husband

Life with Luigi

Posted by Robert on August 9, 2011 at 5:56am

Life with Luigi was a radio comedy-drama series which began September 21, 1948 on CBS, broadcasting its final episode on March 3, 1953. The story concerned Italian immigrant Luigi Basco, and his experiences as an immigrant in Chicago. Many of the shows take place at the US citizenship classes that Luigi attends with other immigrants from different countries, as well as trying to fend off the repeated advances of the morbidly-obese daughter of his landlord/sponsor.

Luigi was played by J. Carrol Naish, an Irish-American. Naish continued in the role on the short-lived CBS television version in 1952 and was later replaced by Vito Scotti when the series was briefly revived in the spring of 1953. With a working title of The Little Immigrant, Life with Luigi was created by Cy Howard, who earlier had created the hit radio comedy, My Friend Irma. Other characters on the radio show included Pasquale (Alan Reed), another Italian-American who was always trying to set Luigi up with his daughter Rosa; and Shultz (Hans Conreid), a German immigrant and fellow student in Luigi's citizenship class.

The show was sometimes regarded as the Italian counterpart to the radio show The Goldbergs, which chronicled the experience of Jewish immigrants in New York.

Life_with_Luigi_48-12-21_014_Antique_Colonial_Silver_Cup.mp3

Visit show page HERE

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All Posts (5)

The Lives of Harry Lime (HQ Set)

Lum and Abner

Jack Carson Show, The

My Favorite Husband - Cartoon From 1949 Radio Show

Life with Luigi

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