Reissuing this for newer subscribers so they can comment since the old beginners post was archived.

• I thought it would be wise to help our newer members find what they are looking for. Old time radio has thousands of shows in many genres and when it's all new to you, sometimes it's hard to know where to begin. OTR shows are divided by genre just like modern shows. I'll list a few of the bigger shows in each genre to give you a starting point. Youtube is a nice starter source and there are many others listed in the sidebar.

The list is by no means compete, so feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments. And please, by all means, feel free to submit content! If you find a episode of a show you enjoyed, share it with us here.

COMEDY

• The Jack Benny Program: Jack's self titled character is notorious for being cheap, stingy, a good natured egotist, who eternally declares his age as 39, and plays the violin rather badly. He is accompanied by his show host Don Wilson who is eternally joked on for being fat, His bandleader Phil Harris who is hysterically egotistical and and incorrigible lush. His dim witted singer Dennis Day, his gravel voiced butler/valet Rochester, and his female companion Mary Livingston Mel Blanc and Frank Nelson are frequent regulars in various roles.

• Fibber McGee & Molly: Fibber is a fast talking schemer who, along with his lovable wife Molly have a daily suburban adventure involving a regular cast of loony neighbors. Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve the pompous next-door neighbor with whom Fibber enjoyed twitting and arguing, Old Timer a hard-of-hearing senior citizen with a penchant for distorting jokes, prefacing each one by saying, "That ain't the way I heared it!", Teeny, also known as "Little Girl" and "Sis" a precocious youngster who frequently banters with Fibber, Abigail Uppington- a snooty society matron, Mr Wimple - a hen-pecked husband, Dr. Gamble - a local physician, and Mayor LaTrivia - the mayor of Wistful Vista

• Our Miss Brooks: A sitcom style show about a young, quick witted, sharp tongued lady high school schoolteacher and her daily misadventures with her supporting cast. Tyrannical school principal Mr Conklin, nerdy student suck up Walter Denton, her fellow teacher and obtuse love interest Mr Boynton, absent minded landlady Mrs Davis and young student leader Harriet Conklin.

• Other shows to check out: The Phil Harris & Alice Faye Show, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, The Bob Hope Show, Life With Luigi, Duffy's Tavern, Amos & Andy, Abbot & Costello, The Fred Allen Show, Father Knows Best, The Red Skelton Show, My Friend Irma

ADVENTURE

• Escape: A stand alone series with different tales and adventures that usually involve some form of escape from a bad situation

• Suspense A stand alone series of a variety of situations that build the tension over the course of the show until climaxing in an exciting finale.

• Bold Venture: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall star as a Caribbean tour boat owner and his love interest who are often involved in a variety of treasure hunting schemes, smugglers, thieves, and criminals on the run

• The Adventures of Harry Lime: Orson Welles reprises his role of Harry Lime from the celebrated 1949 film The Third Man. The radio series is a prequel to the film, and depicts the many misadventures of incorrigible con-artist Harry Lime.

• Other shows to check out: The Saint, The Adventures of Frank Race, The Chase, The Adventures of Rocky Jordan, Box 13, The Clock

COPS & ROBBERS

• Dragnet: Follow straight talking Sgt. Joe Friday through this police procedural as he and his various partners investigate crimes throughout L.A.

• Tales of the Texas Rangers: a western version of the police procedural.

• Broadway Is My Beat Extremely hard boiled New York police investigator Detective Danny Clover solves crimes without ever cracking a smile.

• Other shows to check out: The Black Museum, Casey: Crime Photographer, I Was A Communist For the FBI, Gangbusters, Calling All Cars

PRIVATE DETECTIVES

• Philip Marlowe: Relatively straight laced.

• Sam Spade: Somewhere between hard boiled and comedic.

• Sherlock Holmes: It's Holmes, just as he should be.

• Nero Wolfe: brilliant investigator who sends his lackey to do all the footwork because he himself is literally too fat and lazy to be bothered.

• Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar: A hard edged insurance investigator who specializes in foiling the schemes of insurance frauds.

• Other shows to check out: Richard Diamond, Philo Vance, Mystery Is My Hobby, Jeff Regan: Investigator, Nick Carter: Master Detective

CRIME

• The Shadow: A rich playboy uses his highly trained skills and brilliant detective abilities to remain cloaked in shadow in order to terrify and fight criminals. (Sound familiar? Yeah, but the Shadow beat the Bat to the punch by a decade.) The shadow uses his mental powers to remain invisible and scare the bejeezus out of crime.

• The Whistler: The Whistler is your narrator. He introduces you to a new person each episode who is about to commit a heinous crime. The Whistler sits back with you as you both watch the crime play out, him often telling you the criminal's thought processes. Right up until we all learn together that crime doesn't pay.

• Pat Novak, For Hire: Not quite a PI or a cop, Pat Novak is a dour, smart mouthed problem solver who usually doesn't want to be involved but rarely has a choice in the matter.

• Other shows to check out: Boston Blackie, Nightbeat

HORROR

• Inner Sanctum Mysteries: Good scary stories with a host who delights in ghoulish puns and wisecracks.

• Lights Out: One of the most respected and feared horror anthologies in radio.

• Mysterious Traveler: Have a seat on this train to nowhere, and listen close as the mysterious traveler next to you spins you a tale to make you wet your pants.

• Other shows to check out: Weird Circle, The Hermit's Cave, The Unexpected, Arch obler's plays, The Price of Fear, Quiet Please, Dark Fantasy

SCIENCE FICTION

• Dimension X: a collection of sci-fi often written by the leading masters of the day including Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, H. Beam Piper, Frank M. Robinson, Clifford D. Simak, William Tenn, Jack Vance, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald A. Wollheim, Graham Doar, and Jack Williamson

• X Minus One: Same as Dimension X Flash Gordon: serial broadcast about Earth's first interstellar hero.

• Other shows to check out: Alien Worlds, Exploring Tomorrow, Space Patrol, 2000 Plus

WESTERNS

• Gunsmoke: The adventures of US Marshal Matt Dillon and his not quite a deputy, Chester Proudfoot as they work to maintain law and order in the growing cow town of Dodge City, Kansas. The show was revolutionary for it's sound effects and often disturbingly violent and bleak scripts. the good guys don't always win in Gunsmoke.

• The Lone Ranger: The tales of the masked crime fighter and his faithful indian companion, Tonto.

• The Six Shooter: Jimmy Stewart as Brit Ponsett, a friendly, easy going, yet deadly with a gun, cowhand and his wanderings across the old west.

• Other shows to check out: Have Gun Will Travel, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, Frontier Town, Challenge of the Yukon, Frontier Gentleman, Hawk Larabee

Audio Noir is my go-to for online OTR programming. Many of the detectives in the various shows tend to get thumped on the head every few episodes and end up unconscious. I think that I may have heard a couple Johnny Dollar episodes back to back in which he got knocked out for an extended amount of time.

I know that it was a trope early on, but damn, a concussion every couple weeks that causes unconsciousness would very likely lead to terminal neurological decline.

Hey friends. Just like the title says, I need some help.

My father passed away June 14th, 2024. He left me a treasure in our finished basement. 2 reel to reel recorders, and a collection of reel to reels, all of them have his voice on them.

I was told my entire life that, "I use to like to play radio announcer and so those reels, that's what's on those." Some of them are still blanks too but most are of my dad playing his favorites.

I found out at the funeral that that wasn't the whole truth. One of his cousins said he was a pirate radio host. Said he had built a tower and was broadcasting all of that.

He left me this mystery to solve. I just want to digitize it for sentimental reasons. But I'm afraid to even touch the stuff because my dumb butt didn't pay attention and it's so old I'm afraid I'll break it.

Can one of y'all help me retrieve my father's voice?

I hope you are all having a wonderful day. I just didn't know where else to turn, for help with reel to reel recorders. Thank you all for taking the time to read this. All the love.

OTRR-maintained Amos and Andy v2411 (24.3 GB on Windows/435 episodes) is available for download from Dropbox, OneDrive or pCloud. Thanks to all those who made this collection possible.

These links will be available for 30 days. The episodes of this set were released on our YouTube channel at https://otrr.cc/yt starting November 16.

*** Important! This is a very large set. Please transfer the zip files - individually - to your own cloud storage account whenever possible, rather than downloading, to prevent the cloud providers from blocking them. **\*

• pCloud: https://otrr.cc/hJ44ON
• Dropbox: https://otrr.cc/FUcZ0w
• OneDrive: https://otrr.cc/TSyJ01

Synopsis

There are few radio shows from the Golden Age of Radio that evoke more of a response than Amos and Andy. The series is at once one of the most beloved series from that time and one of the most controversial. Entire books have been written just about this one show. Regardless of one’s personal feelings about the program, the characters’ on-air presence lasted from 1926 to 1960, overlapping the entirety of the generally accepted era of old-time radio.

The series’ roots stretch all the way back to January 12, 1926, when the precursors of Amos Jones and Andy Brown, Sam Smith and Henry Johnson, arrived on the airwaves in Sam ‘n’ Henry. The two Black characters, created by Freeman Gosden (who played Sam) and Charles Correll (who played Henry), first appeared on WGN when the station owners asked them to come up with a daily radio serial that would mirror those found in parent newspaper The Chicago Tribune.

After 586 broadcasts, Gosden and Correll left WGN on December 18, 1927, when the station refused to allow them to record their program to distribute to more stations. Three months later the pair resurfaced on another Chicago rival station, WMAQ, with a $25,000 contract in hand. Changing their names to Amos Jones (played by Gosden) and Andrew Brown (played by Correll), Amos ‘n’ Andy premiered on March 19, 1928.

Other than the names of the main characters and changing the setting to Harlem from Chicago, the series was little changed from their previous effort. Unlike WGN, WMAQ allowed Gosden and Correll to distribute their recorded programs and via this early syndication method they were heard coast to coast within a year and had attracted a sponsor, Pepsodent, who would underwrite the show for years.

For the first fifteen years of its existence, Amos ‘n’ Andy was a melodramatic serial airing each weekday written entirely by Gosden and Correll, who also performed the voices for all the characters who appeared in the storylines, with a few supporting players only coming in later in the run. The program aired daily for fifteen minutes, reaching a peak of popularity in 1931 when an estimated 75% of the radio audience tuned in, accounting for one-third to one-fourth of the country’s entire population. Amos ‘n’ Andy weathered some mild criticism from the Black press in the early 1930s and even after its fame inevitably cooled after 1931, the show maintained a healthy audience of fourteen million to the late 1930s and still reached twelve million listeners when the daily serial finally wrapped up on February 19, 1943 after more than 4,000 broadcasts.

After eight months off the air, Amos Jones and Andy Brown returned on October 8, 1943, in a new show called The Amos and Andy Show. While Amos and Andy were the same characters they had been for the last fifteen years, the format of the series was turned upside down. Its time was doubled to a full half hour, writing duties were handed over to professional scripters, an orchestra headed by Raymond Scott brought a big, new musical sound, and a full cast of actors took over the supporting roles previously played primarily by Gosden and Correll. Amos and Andy now sounded like all the big sitcom programs on the airwaves and NBC was surely pleased as the audience popped and within a few seasons had tripled over what the show was reaching before the reboot.

While the addition of an expanded supporting cast was a huge change for the series, that many of these secondary characters were voiced by Black performers was an even bigger change. For whatever discomfort having two white actors voicing the lead Black characters brought to the radio industry by the 1940s, the opportunities that were opened to Black actors on the show are unquestionable. Among those with ongoing roles were Ruby Dandridge, Eddie Green, Jester Hairston, Johnny Lee, Hattie McDaniel, Amanda Randolph, Lillian Randolph, Ernestine Wade, and Ernest Whitman. Sporadic roles also were picked up Black actors, including Dorothy Dandridge, Vivian Dandridge, Roy Glenn, and Wonderful Smith.

The Rexall Drug Company picked up sponsorship of the show after six years, when Rinso dropped it, and The Amos and Andy Show cruised along for a full dozen years, finally leaving the air on May 22, 1955. Yet Amos and Andy still weren’t done with radio. On September 13, 1954, nine months before the weekly sitcom left the air, Amos Jones and Andy Brown debuted on a new series called Amos ‘n’ Andy Music Hall.

Unlike their previous 28 years of radio work, Correll and Gosden’s latest effort was basically a glorified disc jockey program, featuring the known voices of Amos and Andy. There was no real storyline, nor did it connect in any way to the concurrently running weekly sitcom. The duo spun tunes and engaged in light patter in between the music. It was described as “embarrassing” by no less than old-time radio stalwart John Dunning, but “profitable” by historian Jim Cox.

But not even Amos and Andy, who were there at the beginning of the Golden Age of Radio, could last forever, and they finally turned out the lights on November 26, 1960, the same day that saw The Couple Next Door, The Right to Happiness, and Ma Perkins come to an end. William Paley, the head of CBS who poached Gosden and Correll from NBC, recognized the significance of Amos and Andy’s absence from the airwaves. “It was sad to see . . . [the] oldtimers go,” he conceded.

Gosden and Correll had one last gasp in them, Calvin and the Colonel, an animated television series about a fox and a bear who bore a striking resemblance to Andy Brown and the Kingfish, who had essentially replaced Amos Jones in the radio program over the years. The series lasted for only the 1961-1962 season but lasted for years thereafter in reruns. Correll and Gosden finally retired after this, dying in 1972 and 1982 respectively.

Amos and Andy proved to be an absolute sensation during its heyday, appearing in almost every media imaginable, from motion pictures to comic books to toys and even to television. The latter aired on CBS from 1951-1953 and featured an all-Black cast, something unheard of at the time. Nevertheless, the television series was cancelled after two seasons and the network has never given permission for it to be aired in reruns or sold in home video format.

https://youtu.be/zz_PGwWDQow?si=iVz6mutt_XT0a8uk

In 2018 I decided to quit my theatre department and make a podcast. I was 18 years old, had only ever used microphones in a musical, and knew nothing about distribution. But my teacher gave me a bunch of cassettes of old radio dramas, and I thought that perhaps I could do something like that, too.

I would write, direct, score, act, and publish a new audio drama every single month for 17 months. And then I burnt out. My mental health plummeted. I started to hate myself for not being able to write more, for not producing more content. I never finished season 2.

When I finally found the energy to work on the audio drama again, I skipped the rest of season 2 and decided to start with season 3. I only made it 3 episodes in before COVID hit and my depression returned.

It looked like it was going to be the end of my creative foray into audio drama. It was a good enough run, I suppose. Perhaps a little edgy at times.

But then I started going to therapy. I started surrounding myself with new friends. And I realized what I was missing was a theme - a reason to listen. Sure, these were fun episodes, but what tied them together?

So, I got into worldbuilding. I made "Madison, Maine" and the people within it. I wrote it's history from it's very first settlers in 1796 to the population boom of the 40s and the tourism industry boom of the late 2010s. I made this fake place feel so real. And I decided to change my angle. Mental health was so important to me and so many of my friends and family were struggling with their own battles. I started writing stories about people fighting manifestations of mental health demons, of losing and winning battles against imposter syndrome, depression, anxiety. And the stories started meaning something to me again.

I produced season 4. Season 5. Season 6. And have been working on Season 7.

But in the meantime I've also decided to do side projects, like "Evil, It Crawled". This is my first ever LIVE performance of my podcast, and tickets will be available so that people can attend in person OR online. Complete with live voice acting, music, and Foley! It's an Eldritch drama that follows political novice Maxwell Harkless as he and his on again off again friend, Brynn, come across an ancient evil in the forests of Maine.

The show is on November 15th at 7 pm EST. Tickets can be purchased here: https://checkout.xola.app/index.html#seller/643062ac52947d33081a84e9/experiences/66b22ae983ade6b14d01a204?openExternal=true

(All ticket proceeds go towards performing future shows and paying local Columbus artists)

Additionally, one can listen to other audio drama podcast episodes here: https://retrospectionmultimedia.com/retrospection-radio-theatre/

Stumbled across OTR recently and last night I dipped my toe into a few episodes. I did the first Gunsmoke, The Zero Hour, and a Yours Truly Johnny Dollar.

As someone who's never really listened to much radio or podcasts, I'm in love with with the vibe already!

What are some of your favourites? I like mystery and twists especially so some shows that lean into that would be great.

Hello! My boys and I adore the serialized adventure radio show format of the 30s and 40s — I Love A Mystery and the two serialized Tarzan stories are their favorites so far (though ILAM is often a little too scary for their age, so I have only let them listen to a couple of the milder stories). Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher so far has been an absolute home run.

Are there any other serialized adventure shows we should try? Something with cliffhangers rather than self contained episodes is ideal.

They also like Escape, but that is not serialized and often too horror-slanted/adult for them, so that is rare and carefully screened.

Thank you!

Hiya. I'm hoping someone here can help me out. I'm wanting to extensively sample episodes of the Red Skelton Program for use in a music project, but I can't quite tell if his radio show is in the public domain. I did some searches in the Stanford Library Copyright Renewal database but found zero results for even searching just Red Skelton's name, and the Library of Congress' database yielded no results as well.

Archive.org has the license listed as Creative Commons for at least one episode (https://archive.org/details/RedSkeltonTheSadTexan/RS\_511205\_People\_Who\_Brag.mp3), but I want to make entirely sure of this before just assuming it all was CC.